Atask that only the government can undertake.” A short, seemingly unremarkable sentence, tucked away on the 225th page of the second volume of Martin Moore-Bick’s 1,700-page Grenfell Tower inquiry report. But it encapsulates in a nutshell the broken political philosophy the preceding pages so graphically outline: a state which stepped back and allowed a ruthless, dishonest industry to regulate itself.
At its heart, Grenfell is a story about human suffering. It is about the 72 victims – 18 of them children – needlessly lost in a tower block fire that could so easily have been avoided. It is about their lost futures, the family members left behind and all the grief and pain and suffering the years of delay in delivering justice and change have piled on to them. But today’s report is also a story about politics, economics and power. It is about the sort of society we have built for ourselves in 21st-century Britain.
The report opens by tracking the actions of the British government, from the aftermath of a cladding fire at a building in Knowsley, Merseyside, in 1991 through to the days immediately preceding the Grenfell fire. Here we witness a state operation fail again and again and again to amend its official guidance to restrict the use of highly dangerous combustible cladding products.
And this happens despite multiple fires, increasingly urgent warnings of a looming catastrophe and even tests – paid for with public money – which confirm there is a major, life safety risk from commonly used cladding materials.
But at every stage government advisers and officials – those who should be acting in the interests of the citizens they represent – hum and haw and do nothing. For years, bereaved and survivors have thrown a two-word accusation at those they see as responsible: they knew. This report confirms that.
It sets out how at points, officials appeared to cover up the extent of the problem. A report in 1999 was edited to remove references to flaws in official guidance. A devastating test failure on the cladding later used on Grenfell in 2001 was “shelved” and “forgotten”. The official investigation into the 2009 Lakanal House fire, in Camberwell, south London, which killed six people was halted after less than a month with many key questions left unanswered.
Why? That’s a key question for survivors and campaigners. The report seems to brand the officials responsible worn out and incompetent more than actively corrupt. They are described as “complacent and shortsighted”, their actions as “surprising” or “difficult to understand”. But the sense of a creaking operation left to rot in a dusty corner of a neglected government department comes through.
Memorial wall in front of the Grenfell Tower site.
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By the mid-2010s, the building control division within the government department now called the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, had seen its team cut from 14 staff to six and given no budget to hire additional support. They were “demoralised and demotivated”, management by more senior officials was “sporadic” or “nonexistent” and the department had neither the “ability nor capacity to issue practical guidance to industry because its systems … had become obsolete”.
But culpability goes higher. Look to government; look to ministers who no longer saw regulating industry as a priority. Ministers, in fact, who were intensely pushing the opposite agenda: they wanted economic growth and they wanted the state to get out of the way of industry’s capacity to deliver it. Regulation was red tape and needed to be removed not imposed.
Eric Pickles, secretary of state during the key period in the early 2010s, angrily insisted when questioned back in 2022 that building regulations relating to fire safety were exempt from this push and that he would never have allowed a deregulatory agenda to compromise life safety.
But today’s report rejects this evidence, saying it was “flatly contradicted by that of his officials and the contemporaneous documents” which made it clear that the government believed the construction sector should be left out of the bothersome reach of meddling bureaucrats.
Trapped in this climate, officials did not recommend tougher regulations, even when they knew them to be necessary, because they knew it was not what ministers wanted to hear. This abdication of responsibility by the state is ghoulishly encapsulated by the government paying scientists at a private laboratory to monitor the risk from real world fires, but barring them from making policy recommendations which would have resulted in tougher regulation, a state of affairs the inquiry said “epitomised what had gone wrong”.
In what should probably be read as a repudiation of one of the central economic tenets of David Cameron’s government, the report concluded that it “was not in the public interest to allow policy on deregulation to impede the ability of officials to promote changes … that would improve public safety”, calling this “a serious failure of leadership”.
The site of the Grenfell Tower tragedy with a sign saying: Grenfell – Forever in Our Hearts
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That was government. It should have protected the public. It didn’t. Instead, it offered the industry regulatory freedom. After recounting these failures in central government the report examined what corporations did with that freedom. Here the report’s language hardens further. It is clear, grieving families will learn, that “systematic dishonesty” by the manufacturers of these products was a “very significant reason” why the products ended up on Grenfell Tower.
Arconic, which made the violently combustible polyethylene-cored cladding panels, was found to have “deliberately concealed from the market the true extent” of the danger of using its panels on high rises, and instead “sought to exploit what it perceived to be a weak regulatory regime in the UK” to make sales.
Then there are the insulation manufacturers. While the report may have found the products made by these two firms contributed to the spread of the blaze, their behaviour has still been savagely criticised.
Celotex, which made most of the combustible insulation which sat behind the cladding panels, “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market”, while Kingspan, the market leader which provided a small amount of material for Grenfell, was said to have indulged in “deeply entrenched and persistent dishonesty … in pursuit of commercial gain”.
This was the market at its ugliest; given full reign. These companies were all supported by private (or privatised) companies which had effectively taken on the regulatory roles the state no longer wanted: certifying products as safe, testing materials against the official criteria and even writing the guidance documents that set the rules on what could and couldn’t be used.
These firms came in for severe criticism in the report. The British Board of Agrément (BBA), an organisation which provides certificates apparently confirming the performance of construction products, was said to have displayed “incompetence” and an “ingrained willingness to accommodate customers instead of insisting on high standards”.
The Building Research Establishment (BRE), our former national research facility, which was privatised in 1997, was “marred by unprofessional conduct, inadequate practices [and] a lack of effective oversight” and had “sacrificed rigorous application of principle to its commercial interests”.
These bodies and others failed to do the job of regulating the industry – one the government had abdicated from. The scandal of Grenfell encompasses the betrayal by those who committed bad acts and those who did nothing to stop them.
So we come back to the conclusion quoted at the start of this piece: the housing and construction sector is huge, it is powerful: regulating the industry is a task only the government can undertake.
But our government stopped doing this. This story is complex, but also simple. Failure of governance allowed our buildings to be covered in combustible building products and disaster became all but inevitable. On 14 June 2017, this disaster manifested and the 72 people at Grenfell Tower paid with their lives.
There are many other things grieving families will read in this report, which confirm the allegations they have made since the day of the fire: of the “toxic” and “bullying” culture at the social housing provider in west London; the “cavalier attitude” to safety of the construction firms involved in the refurbishment; the catastrophic failure of the state to provide a humanitarian response in the aftermath or the abdication of responsibility by the London fire brigade to prepare for a foreseeable disaster in the years before the fire.
But I believe the dark heart of this catastrophe lies in this simple, depressing narrative: the state stepped back, corporate greed stepped in and innocent people died.
Now this story of inquiry must turn to justice. Moore-Bick’s report sets out in forensic detail the failures of the corporations and individuals who allowed this disaster to happen. The evidence is all there, in thousands of footnotes and publicly available documents it cites.
The state may have stepped back from regulation, but it still provides a criminal justice system. That must now do its job. Grenfell was an utterly avoidable disaster. Those who brought it to pass must be held to full account.
The Guardian