London (AFP) – The Grenfell Tower disaster that killed 72 people was the “culmination of decades of failure” caused by incompetence, dishonesty, and greed, an inquiry into the UK’s worst peacetime residential fire ruled on Wednesday. Unveiling his 1,600-page report, inquiry chair Martin Moore-Bick said the deaths were “all avoidable” and slammed the building firms that provided the cladding and insulation materials that allowed the flames to spread so quickly. The retired judge stated that residents were “badly failed” by those who should have ensured the building was safe for them to live in.
“Not all of them bear the same degree of responsibility for the eventual disaster but… all contributed to it in one way or another, in most cases through incompetence, but in some cases through dishonesty and greed,” he said. The fire in the early hours of June 14, 2017, spread rapidly through the 24-storey block in west London due to highly combustible cladding fixed to the exterior. Starting in a faulty freezer on the fourth floor, the blaze took barely half an hour to climb to the building’s top floor with catastrophic consequences.
Following the publication, survivors called on the government to act urgently. “The government must now exert control over the sector to prevent further dismantling of public safety, which used to be their main job, not aiding and abetting crooks and killers,” said Grenfell United, which represents some of the survivors and victims. Stuart Cundy, deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, stated that the force was doing “everything that we can to secure justice for those who died.” However, he noted that due to the complexity and scale of the investigation, it would take up to another 18 months to finalize their inquiry.
A total of 19 companies and organizations are being investigated for potential criminal offenses, along with 58 individuals, he said. The Crown Prosecution Service indicated that decisions on potential criminal prosecutions were not expected for another two years. Prime Minister Keir Starmer offered a state apology to survivors and families of those who died, pledging to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. “The country failed to discharge its most fundamental duty: to protect you and your loved ones… And I am deeply sorry,” he stated in a message to parliament.
The London Fire Brigade (LFB) was heavily criticized, with senior officers described as “complacent.” The service failed to ensure that the danger posed by the increasing use of cladding “was shared with the wider organization and reflected in training,” the report said. It did not learn the lessons from a previous fire in 2009 which “should have alerted the LFB to the shortcomings in its ability to fight fires in high-rise buildings.” Terrified residents who phoned the emergency services were told to remain in their flats and await rescue for nearly two hours after the fire broke out. Men, women, and children — including whole family groups — were left trapped in their own homes and perished. That “stay-put” advice, now considered to have cost lives, has since been revised.
The report contains scathing criticism of successive governments and a range of other bodies, including the architects and contractor involved in a refurbishment that led to the cladding being installed. In particular, the report condemns firms involved in supplying the rainscreen cladding panels and insulation products used. Accusing them of “systematic dishonesty,” it stated they “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data, and mislead the market.” Arconic Architectural Products, which sold the rainscreen cladding panels, had been determined to exploit weak regulatory systems in countries including the UK to sell the product, it said.
This was despite the fact that the firm “itself recognized the danger they posed” and the knowledge gained from cladding fires in Dubai in 2012 and 2013. The report noted that Arconic did not consider withdrawing the product “in favor of the fire-resistant version then available,” adding that it continued to let UK customers buy the unmodified cladding material. Two other firms named — Celotex and Kingspan, which manufactured insulation products — also acted dishonestly, according to the report.
The disaster has left many people living in buildings covered in similar cladding fearful of a similar tragedy and unable to sell. In 2022, the previous Conservative government announced that developers would be required to contribute more to the cost of the removal, with residents in buildings over 11 meters (36 feet) high not having to pay at all. However, a fire east of London just over a week ago in a building still partially covered in cladding illustrated the ongoing risks. London fire commissioner Andy Roe stated that there were still around 1,300 buildings in London alone where urgent “remediation” work still needed to be done.
© 2024 AFP
