The Grenfell Inquiry report and London: findings and reflections

The work of Sir Martin More-Bick and his team has exposed many layers of failure and challenged a few myths too

Some of the material in this piece, which is also published at OnLondon.co.uk, has previously appeared in a slightly different form in my On London Extra newsletter for paid subscribers.

Eleven days have passed since the publication of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s Phase 2 Report, an exhaustive, 1,700-page dissection of exactly why the terrible fire of 14 June 2017 in the north of Kensington occurred and what should be done to prevent such a cruel and avoidable disaster happening again.

There was an immediate, appalled reaction to its array of devastating findings, in particular, the “systemic dishonesty” of those who made the cladding that burned so fast and the indifference, inertia and ineptitude of various bodies that were supposed to be responsible for fire safety, ranging from national governments to the local tenant management organisation.

Since then, it’s all gone rather quiet. That might be because the Phase 2 Report is so huge and detailed that deeper assessments of its contents are taking time to be completed. It might also be that its findings have been so comprehensively damning that they have pre-empted the pre-scripted denunciations of some of those who’ve had the most to say about the fire, and said it most loudly, in the past. In particular, the sorts of people who proclaimed at the time of his appointment that inquiry chairman Sir Martin More-Bick was too posh and insufficiently “human” to be trusted have been inconspicuous.

It wasn’t the job of the retired High Court judge to facilitate expressions of outrage. The task of he and his team was to gather and weigh evidence with painstaking dispassion, to set it out with all the immaculate care merited by a matter of such grave and distressing importance, and to do so with the goal of pointing the way to preventing a recurrence of such a catastrophe. That task has been accomplished. Dedicated and outstanding competence, it seems, has something to be said for it after all.

The inquiry’s two reports have implications nationwide. However, aspects of them relate specifically to London, where, of course, the fire took place. They have also prompted and replenished some personal reflections on particular reactions to the fire at and soon after the time it took place, and on claims that it illuminated certain truths about London as a whole.

MY FRIEND WAS RIGHT

A few days after the fire, once the first solid information about why it had spread so fast and how it had been tackled had emerged, a friend of mine confided two thoughts: one was that the response of the London Fire Brigade had not been great; the other was that blame for the fire could not be fairly or usefully laid at a few individuals’ doors, because a whole string of failings on the part of many people and organisations would have created the conditions for it to happen. The inquiry’s work has shown that he was absolutely right.

LONDON FIRE BRIGADE

The inquiry’s Phase 1 Report, published in October 2019, which documented what had happened on that fateful night, praised the “extraordinary courage and selfless devotion to duty” of London firefighters who attended the tower. But it found that “otherwise experienced incident commanders and senior officers attending the fire had received no training in the particular dangers associated with combustible cladding”. [paragraph 2:19]

This alarming weakness was despite some senior officers being aware of similar fires having happened in other countries and knowing that understanding of how materials being used for high-rise building facades would react in a fire was limited. The Phase 1 Report also concluded that brigade incident commanders had “received no training in how to recognise the need for an evacuation or how to organise one”, that there was no evacuation plan for Grenfell Tower itself, and that the brigade’s operational risk database entry for Grenfell Tower “contained almost no information of any use to an incident commander called to a fire”. [2.18]

On the ground, none of the “relatively junior” incident commanders seemed to the inquiry to have grasped the possibility that the “stay put” policy, based on the belief that fires in such blocks would not spread because of the buildings’ compartmentalisation, should be abandoned. Eventually, at 02:47am, three minutes after he took command, the then Assistant Commissioner Andy Roe revoked “stay put”. The inquiry team thought this should have happened at least an hour earlier and would have been “likely to have resulted in fewer fatalities”. [2.19]

There were failures of “command and control”, of communication and communications equipment and in the brigade control room, with staff who “undoubtedly saved lives” by their handling of 999 calls nonetheless doing so in the context of “shortcomings in practice, policy and training”. [2.20]

The inquiry recorded a specific failure by the London Fire Brigade (along with the government) to learn from the very similar fire that took place at Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009. This is addressed in the Phase 2 Report as follows:

“Although individuals undoubtedly had a role in the failings [with Grenfell] which have been examined here, it is important to stress that they were committed in the context of broader structural and cultural problems. It is clear that the LFB’s response to the Lakanal House fire placed undue reliance on process. Boards were established, plans were made and reviews were commissioned, but no effective steps were taken to ensure that recommendations had been effectively implemented…”. [83.8]

Lots of activity but not much effective action from the top brass of the London Fire Brigade. So much that went wrong at Grenfell might have been avoided had the service as a whole been better informed, better trained, better equipped, better led – and generally better at doing its job.

LONDON GOVERNMENT

The Phase 2 Report’s headline conclusion is that:

“The fire at Grenfell Tower was indeed the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high-rise residential buildings and to act on the information available to them.” [2.4]

Again, my friend was right. But how does London government emerge from the Phase 2 Report? Defects are found in the London-wide “resilience arrangements” which come into play when an emergency takes place somewhere in the capital that requires a co-ordinated London-wide response (they were to be called on again during the Covid-19 pandemic).

The London Risk Register, which assesses the likelihood of different sorts of calamity occurring and how best to deal with them did not, at the time of Grenfell, even include the possibility of a high-rise building fire. In this, it took its cue from the National Risk Register. But a senior figure in the London resilience hierarchy told the inquiry that its omission from London’s was “a serious failing” in view of Lakanal and also the subsequent Adair Tower fire of 2015.

The latter blaze, like Grenfell, took place in the north of Kensington. Yet, in the words of the Grenfell report, “there appears to have been little or no consideration of the inclusion of the risk of fire in a high-rise buildings” in the Royal Borough Kensington & Chelsea’s (RBKC) own Borough Risk Register of that time, issued in December 2016.

The absence of references to tower block fires in all of these registers, including those at London regional and the relevant borough level, meant that the best way to deal with such eventualities had been considered in less detail that it would otherwise have been. Again, it seems the implications of Lakanal and of Adair were not sufficiently recognised or acted on.

There is a long and distressing section detailing survivors’ experiences in the immediate aftermath of the fire, little of it reflecting well on RBKC, whose then chief executive, Nicholas Holgate, is found to have been incapable of grasping the magnitude of the situation or taking control of it, reluctant to accept advice and “unduly concerned for RBKC’s reputation” [All from Volume 7, Part 10].

The council is also criticised for weak oversight of the performance of its tenant management organisation (TMO), with which it was, in the Phase 2 Report’s words, “jointly responsible for the management of fire safety at Grenfell Tower” [2.58]. It adds of both: “The years between 2009 and 2017 were marked by a persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people”. It is astonishing to read the following:

“RBKC took little or no account of an independent and highly critical review of fire safety carried out for the TMO in 2009. It did not even know about a further independent and highly critical report produced in 2013 because the TMO had failed to disclose it to RBKC.” [2.59]

The TMO’s chief executive, Robert Black, is found to have been reluctant to inform RBKC’s scrutiny committees and even his own board about “matters that affected fire safety” [2.60]. Carl Stokes, the TMO’s only fire assessor for its entire estate, is described as having been “allowed to drift into that role without any formal selection or procurement process” having “misrepresented his experience and qualifications (some of which he had invented)” and as often failing to “check whether the TMO had taken action in response to risks he had identified.” [2.63].

These are just some of the points included in the executive summary alone. Volume 3 of the report contains gruelling elucidation.

POPULISTS, HERDS AND METAPHORS

 The aftermath of the fire inspired a variety of shrill pronouncements and glib accusations from politicians, polemicists and populists. A stand-out example was provided by Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party at the time, declaring in April 2018, without an ounce of proof, that Grenfell’s victims died “for the simple reason that they were poor”.

The Phase 2 Report does looks closely at the activities of Edward Daffarn, a resident of the tower who had been an outspoken public critic of the TMO and was elevated by some in the media to the status of a seer on the strength of a widely-cited blogpost, published on 20 November 2016, headlined “Playing with fire”.

Having pointed out many times that the prescience assigned to the blogpost by a large number of journalists with large media organisations was unjustified by its content, it is – full disclosure – gratifying that the report confirms that the post did “not in fact predict the fire at Grenfell Tower, much less what turned out to be its cause”. [42.42]

The report also documents how TMO staff found Daffarn’s attitude and behaviour disagreeable and had a “grave mistrust” of him, making them reluctant to recognise his Grenfell Action Group (essentially four people) as a valid tenants’ organisation. [33:36]

And it tells us that December 2013 the TMO decided to hold no more public consultations with residents about the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, of which the addition of the deadly cladding was a part. The report says that according to Labour councillor Judith Blakeman, who represented the Grenfell ward and was sympathetic to concerns the action group had raised, that was because Daffarn “had become too disruptive”. [33:48]

The report observes:

Edward Daffarn is an intelligent, articulate and motivated individual, who was an impressive witness. Whether he ever spoke for the wider community is debatable and his language and approach in his dealings with the TMO caused resentment among its staff.

But it adds:

One thing is clear, however: those in the TMO who were responsible for managing the refurbishment were nervous of him and allowed him to become a barrier to proper communication with the rest of the community. [33:37]

Lessons there for all parties to the difficult art of community engagement – including that people are more likely to be listened to if they aren’t shouting abuse – and for the dangers of journalists reducing hugely complex stories to simple tales of truth-telling heroes versus mean, obfuscating villains.

Media quests for heads suitable for impaling on sticks involved a focus on Rock Feilding-Mellen, cabinet member for housing property and regeneration, whose responsibilities included oversight of fire safety. With his upper-class background and name, Feilding-Mellen seemed almost typecast for the role of heartless toff.

Yet his appearances in the report are limited and quite innocuous. The TMO and contractor Rydon, not him, are identified as the forces behind an effort to use cheaper materials for part of the work, and these proved unsuccessful as a council committee insisted on a more expensive option. [53.47]

As well as being appropriated for populist political narratives, Grenfell has been recruited as a metaphor for London as a “neoliberal” Bad City. Much has been made of the sharp contrast between the generally low incomes of residents of the tower and the Lancaster West estate in which it stood and the hugely expensive private properties adjacent to it.

This difference, it has been argued, is an indictment of London’s inequalities and an exposure as false London’s reputation for exemplifying virtuously mixed-income neighbourhoods. North Kensington’s proximity of wealth and poverty was depicted, not as exemplifying the antithesis of Paris, with its affluent core and deprived banlieues, but as a stark case of “segregation” which somehow of itself explained why the fire took place.

Such theses look thin and abstract and alongside the inquiry reports’ monumental accumulations of testimony and fact. Can Grenfell really be attributed to something peculiar to London’s social geography and intricate juxtapositions of different levels of household prosperity and wealth? How solid is the case that it wouldn’t have happened to a London block with affluent residents when similar blazes have taken place in diverse other places and combustible cladding has been used on private blocks as well?

If we’re looking for remedies to the staggering array of ineptness, dishonesty, buck-passing and neglect that contributed to what happened in the UK capital on 14 June 2017, we might be better off sticking with the diagnoses and prescriptions of Sir Martin More-Bick.

WHAT NEXT?

One of the many astounding things about the Phase 2 Report is its exposure of the failure of successive governments to get to grips with the issue of the fire safety of external cladding systems, despite it emerging as far back as 1991, when fire spread through a gap between the wall of the 11-storey Knowsley Heights housing block on Merseyside and its newly-installed cladding.

A 1999 environment and transport House of Commons select committee report had warned of the risks posed by some external cladding systems. Throughout the current century there were “numerous warnings” about the dangers, including “the striking results” of a large-scale test in 2001. Yet despite all this regulations were not tightened [2.5-2.9].

It now falls to a brand new national government, its collective feet still barely under their desks, to ensure that a system known to have been inadequate for more than a quarter of a century is fully corrected and overhauled.

Criminal investigations – which the Metropolitan Police is now in a position to pursue – resulting in prosecutions should concentrate minds in the industry, local government and elsewhere. But it is Sir Keir Starmer’s national administration, in particular in the person Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to which the main responsibility now falls.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme after the Phase 2 Report came out, Rayner rightly resisted interviewer pressure to make commitments and demands she could not responsibly have made. An implied criticism seemed to be that the quality of her emoting was lacking.

But if that were the only test to be passed, justice for Grenfell would have been served long ago. The survivors, the bereaved, all others scarred by the fire’s horrors, and everyone in the country need something else too – a strong programme of action, steadfastly pursued, complete with changes in rules and laws and, in tandem with those, fundamental changes in attitudes to housing in Britain as a whole.