On June 14th 2017 a fire in Grenfell Tower, owned by Kensington and Chelsea Council (the richest local authority in the UK) and managed by the misnamed ‘Tenant Management Organisation’ (TMO) killed 72 working class people, deaths that were all avoidable.

After seven long years, the public inquiry chaired by a former judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, has issued its report. The finding is that almost everyone involved in the management and refurbishment of the Tower are to blame for the deaths.

The cause of the fire rapidly spreading was the cladding materials and insulation in the walls of the tower, which were highly flammable. The key companies involved – Arconic, Celotex, and Kingspan –engaged in “deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market”.

Senior executives of Arconic, a multibillion-dollar US company that made the combustible cladding panels knew that the cladding could be highly flammable and did not meet safety standards. Arconic was “determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries including the UK”. Kingspan, which makes some of the combustible foam insulation, knowingly made false claims about its ability to withstand fire. There were “long-running internal discussions about what it could get away with”. When questions were raised about safety, a senior manager said that critics could “go fuck themselves”. The rest of the insolation was made by Celotex, which presented its insulation as safe “although it knew that was not the case”.

In short, the pursuit of profit came way above the need for safety.

In 1991 there was a cladding fire in Liverpool and this provided the necessity to make regulatory reforms, but the then Tory government did not act. On 3 July 2009 a fire in Lakanal House, a tower block in Camberwell, London, killed Six people and injured at least 20. The inquest found that the rapid spread of the fire had trapped people in their homes when the exterior cladding panels had burned through in less than five minutes. The then Tory-Lib Dem coalition government did not act on the coroners’ recommendations. Instead, the government embarked upon a deregulation drive presented as a “bonfire of red tape” which saw crucial safety matters “ignored, delayed or disregarded”. Eric Pickles, the Housing Secretary at the time, said on oath that the attempt to cut red tape had not been applied to building regulations. The report concludes that this evidence was “flatly contradicted by that of his officials and by the contemporaneous documents”.

The regulators were all private (or privatised) companies with a vested interest in not regulating the industry. The British Board of Agrément, which certificates construction products as safe, was “incompetent” and guilty of “an inappropriate desire to please its customers”. The National House Building Council, “was also unwilling to upset its own customers and the wider construction industry by revealing the extent of the problems”. And the Building Research Establishment “sacrificed rigorous application of principle to its commercial interests”.

About 40% of the building’s vulnerable and disabled residents died. The report finds that both Kensington and Chelsea Council and the TMO showed a “persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people”. How many people can truthfully say that their landlord is any different?

Residents, quite rightly, “regarded the TMO as an uncaring and bullying overlord that belittled and marginalised them”. The TMO regarded some of the residents as militant troublemakers led on by a handful of vocal activists, principally Edward Daffarn, whose style they found offensive. This, of course, is the all too familiar response to anyone who campaigns for change or challenges the status quo.

With criminal prosecutions delayed until the conclusion of the inquiry, the police have now said that it will take 12 to 18 months for evidence to be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service. Michael Mansfield KC, who represented some of the Grenfell families, has argued that the criminal investigation into the Grenfell Tower should have been run in parallel with the public inquiry.

The report makes several recommendations, but it remains to be seen whether these will be acted upon. End Our Cladding Scandal campaign coalition believes as many as 11,000 buildings taller than 11m may be at risk as a result of cladding, with the government putting the number at 4,630, but seven years after Grenfell work has only finished on 1,350. The fire at the Spectrum Building in Dagenham on 26 August 2024 is an example of a recent near miss.

So whilst the inquiry has accurately pinpointed the blame for Grenfell, and whilst recommendations have been made, criminal prosecutions may eventually follow and politicians have made their ritual apologies, the underlying causes remain as present as ever. There are no proposals for a reset of the relationship between landlord and tenant, no method of addressing the stark power imbalance, and certainly nothing that would seriously impact upon the pursuit of profit.

~ Tony

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