“Decades of failure” by the UK government and parts of the construction industry led directly to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, according to the damning final report of a public inquiry.
Seventy-two people died after the worst fire disaster in the UK since the second world war when flames tore up the external walls of the recently refurbished high-rise apartment block in west London.
The fire started in a fridge in a fourth-floor kitchen, before spreading through the external cladding up the building. Residents, who were initially told to stay behind fire doors in their rooms, became trapped on higher floors, and many were unconscious or dead because of inhaling poisonous fumes even before the flames reaches them.
The report published on Wednesday found that successive governments failed to hold building product manufacturers to reliable safety standards, or prevent them from actively misleading markets and regulators.
Inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick accused the housing department of repeatedly failing, over many years, to heed warnings about the serious risks to life posed by some cladding systems.
His report said the department, which it called “complacent”, “poorly run” and “defensive”, had presided over a woefully deficient and fragmented regulatory regime and under the former government of David Cameron had prioritised deregulation over safety.
“Even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded”, it said, and the government “determinedly resisted calls from across the fire sector to regulate fire risk assessors and to amend the fire safety order”.
It added that the housing department allowed “unscrupulous” manufacturers of products used on the outside of high-rise buildings to engage in “deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing process, misrepresent the data and mislead the market”.
The report named the US company Arconic, which supplied the main cladding used on Grenfell Tower, as well as UK-based Celotex and Ireland-based Kingspan, which provided insulation for the building.
The first phase of the inquiry, which ended in December 2018, addressed what happened in the early hours of June 14 2017, concluding that the “principal reason why the flames spread so rapidly” was exterior cladding made of aluminium with a polyethylene core. Insulation boards “contributed to the rate” at which the fire spread.
Wednesday’s report accused Arconic of pursuing “a deliberate strategy to continue selling [the cladding material] in the UK based on a statement about its fire performance that it knew to be false”.
Celotex, which manufactured a “combustible” foam insulation used at Grenfell, “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market” about the safety of its product, the report said.
The report also accused officials at the privatised Building Research Establishment responsible for fire testing of “complicity in the strategy”.
Irish company Kingspan also provided misleading information about the fire safety of its insulation products, according to the report, and “cynically exploited the industry’s lack of knowledge” about them, relying “on the fact that an unsuspecting market was very likely to rely on its own claims”.
Arconic said it had “acknowledged its role as one of the material suppliers involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower” and “made financial contributions to settlements for those affected, as well as to the restorative justice fund”.
Celotex said it had “reviewed and improved process controls” since the fire “to meet industry best practice” and that it was co-operating fully with all investigations.
Kingspan said it had “long acknowledged the wholly unacceptable historical failings . . . in part of our UK insulation business” but added that these were “not found to be causative of the tragedy”.
The British Board of Agrément, a commercial organisation that certifies compliance of products with legislative requirements, was also criticised. “The dishonest strategies of Arconic and Kingspan succeeded in large measure due to the incompetence of the BBA,” the report added.
The inquiry also laid blame for the disaster at a local level. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the council responsible for oversight of social housing building regulations, showed “persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people”.
The report said residents of Grenfell Tower regarded the Tenant Management Organisation, which managed the building, as an “uncaring and bullying overlord that belittled and marginalised them”.
The TMO’s then chief executive, Robert Black, showed an “entrenched reluctance” to inform the council about matters that affected fire safety.
London Fire Brigade also came in for detailed criticism. Shortcomings in its ability to fight fires in high-rise buildings were attributable to “a chronic lack of effective management and leadership”. Those failures were compounded by “an entrenched but unfounded assumption that the building regulations were sufficient to ensure that external wall fires of the kind that were known to have occurred in other countries would not occur in this country”.
The report said that in the immediate aftermath of the fire, former prime minister Theresa May’s government provided a “muddled, slow, indecisive and piecemeal” response.
It added that there was a “marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity and left many of those immediately affected feeling abandoned by authority and utterly helpless”.
Grenfell United, which speaks for some survivors of the fire and the bereaved, said that “justice has not been delivered”, calling on the government to bar Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex from public sector contracts.
Stuart Cundy, deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, said a criminal investigation would move “as swiftly as possible” but the report had to be examined alongside other evidence and this would take “at least 12 to 18 months”.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the report had identified “substantial and widespread failings” and pledged to “carefully consider” its recommendations. “I hope that those outside government will do the same,” he added in a statement.
Credit: Source link