The Grenfell Inquiry has now reported seven years after the fire, the causes of which it investigated.
With the greatest of respect to the judge who led it, and to all those who worked on it, the report that the inquiry produced stated almost exactly what we already knew, all of which was concluded in the media in the immediate aftermath of the fire.
Within days of that event it was obvious that there were massive problems with the cladding put on this building in 2014. It also seemed clear at that time that all the companies involved were aware of this fact. I talked to journalists about this at the time.
It was also known at that time that the materials in question had got regulatory clearance, even though this suggested that there must have been a massive failure within the largely privatised regulatory system that had given rise to their wholly inappropriate certification as safe.
It was also abundantly clear at that time that Tory ministers, from Prime Minister Theresa May downwards, were deeply embarrassed by this fire and wished to keep the greatest possible distance from it and its consequences. I cannot be the only person who can recall May's extraordinary confusion in its aftermath and reluctance to engage on the issue.
It can also be no news to anyone that political attitudes towards regulation, whether at ministerial, parliamentary, local authority or think-tank level, had massive consequences that contributed to the failings resulting in the Grenfell disaster.
In fairness, as I recall, the London Fire Brigade accepted that they had made mistakes with regard to the management of this fire very soon after the event. They were the exception: almost no one else did.
In that case, the question has to be asked as to why it took seven years and an enormous cost to confirm what we already knew. And, consequently, why was the process of bringing anyone to justice delayed by seven years as a result, meaning that up to a decade might elapse before anyone might come to trial if they ever do?
Could it be that this delay, along with that in the tainted blood scandal, the Post Office scandal, the Covid inquiry, and in the forthcoming Lucy Letby inquiry, which now looks as if it should be replaced by an investigation into what increasingly appears to be a gross miscarriage of justice, are all entirely deliberate?
Are all these inquiries simply delay mechanisms so that those who should at the time that these events took place have accepted full and unconditional responsibility could defer judgement on their actions to fulfil their hope that when conclusions were finally reached, the passage of time might be sufficient that their failings might be forgotten?
I am very strongly inclined to think that these enquiries only take place for that reason. As a consequence, I am losing faith in them. I cannot be alone.
Nor can I be alone in my anger about ministers who claim they cannot make appropriate decisions in the aftermath of any event of this sort when it is apparent that, as happened yesterday, an apology for the actions of the state will, inevitably, eventually be required in such cases.
I very strongly suspect that Theresa May did know this when she set up this inquiry, just as Boris Johnson did when he set up the Covid inquiry, which is another long-running fiasco of this sort. Both, however, chose to duck their responsibilities in reprehensible fashion.
If people seek political office, then I think that they should accept the consequences of doing so, which includes confessing to the mistakes they have made, those made by those who report to them, and their predecessors of whatever party they might be. Nothing less will do if we are to have democratic accountability. However, acceptance of this responsibility now appears to be vanishingly rare. As a consequence, I ask the question, yet again, which is, do we really now live in anything approximating to a democracy?
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It seems to me that most recent inquiries, Hillsborough, tainted blood, Post Office, and now Grenfell are related. Every time they say “It must never happen again”, and then it does. As discussed yesterday the connecting thread is neoliberalism and a failure of governance by the “elite” who seem to think that “little people” don’t matter.
Perhaps what we need is an inquiry into the common factors in recent inquires and what should be done about them.
Government regulation hasn’t worked so we need more government regulation.
The mantra of the left.
Neoliberal regulation has failed. People have died. And you don’t care. The mantra of the right.
@Candyman2,
It was the fact that regulations were binned, that allowed every conceivable corner to be cut.
Here’s what can happen; when the pursuit of the bottom line isn’t the only consideration:
https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2024/09/05/how-scotland-learned-to-avert-another-grenfell/
The link in John’s first reply has the technical information.
Whoosh …. Candyman
You are missing the point completely.
The enquiries follow up a disaster either where regulation has failed, or where there was insufficient regulation to prevent the tragedy, if only that had been possible.
Human error, system failure, negligence or malign intent ?
The ‘divine’ right to make a profit or capital gain at any human, social or environmental cost is that of the econopath.
I would be very circumspect if my opinions identified me as having that kind of pathological condition. But at least you have hidden behind a nom de plume, so cowardly with it..
‘Never apologise, never explain, always find somebody else to blame’.
The mantra of the right.
‘Deregulation’ has meant more and more regulators – different bits of the buildiing industry selecting their own regulators.
It’s much more efficient to have just one set of standards properly supported by the evidence – abd enforced by one regulator as suggested by the Inquiry.
You couldnt make up a more stupid idea then ‘privatising’ the Building Research Establishment – just an invitation for cooption and corruption to put cost cutting and profit before safe standards.
Candyman, I assume that when your car breaks down, you don’t try to fix it, because obviously cars don’t work.
“Government regulation hasn’t worked so we need more government regulation.”
@Candyman2
Your statement is misleading and incorrect. The lack of enforcing government regulation is what has failed. If you have laws and codes “on the books” and the laws and codes are not enforced then, in reality, you have no government regulation.
Correct
No, regulation doesn’t work; for the reason I have explained several times. Regulation isn’t supposed to work, and is designed to fail. The mantra of the right.
But you display the courage of your convictions; witless comments hidden by anonymity. The mantra of the spineless. But then as I have also suggested; in Britain the problem is our culture; and you are clearly part of that problem. Thank you for providing me with a fine petri dish quality illustration of the problem species.
Two days after the Grenfell Inquiry report I actually heard another witless sample of the species, on Nicky Campbell (BBC Radio 5 – on obesity), complaining about the Nanny State. Grenfell; Blood Scandal; Post Office. There is no Nanny State. Grenfell was effectively a State sponsored, unconscious 21st century auto-da-fé in defence of No Nanny State and No Red Tape. The only legacy the right has managed to deliver in forty years of failure..
You have to go back to Lord Carrington resigning over The Falklands War to get any real sense of a politician taking responsibility for what happened on their watch
Thank you, Richard. I have been trying to belabour the same point. Theresa May’s crass, dithering exhibition of inadequacy in the immediate aftermath of Grenfell was telling. Public Inquiries are a form of self-administered anaesthetic to deaden awareness of the pain and guilt; of Government, typically (the Supergun affair is illustrative) and of the principal miscreants. Play the long game to allow most to engineer an escape from attention. But it also helps the foul nature of the British culture (typically ‘institutional’ failures that never have any purchase on anything substantive) we have created in Britain (this isn’t recent, it is conventional); to deflect attention on to a narrow focus of culprits or scapegoats for the fraudulent misrepresentation of how we act; and what we are. Britain is permeated and guided by a rank culture of abusers (of many different kinds), bullies and pirates. That is what we see if we hold a mirror up to revealec Britain’s real nature. Ou whole society is one great fraud, in which we even manage to defraud and deceive ourselves.
We are best at saying “Never Again”, until it happens again; and then ten years of Inquiry to decide “Never Again”. Until it happens, inevitably again. Then rinse out and repeat. This is Britain, as it really is. Don’t believe the advertisin, especially of Political Parties; they are “in this” scam, up to their eyeballs.
I’ve had enough of these ‘Pontious Pilate’ public enquiry events which I am sure are increasingly performative. Sitting there watching the news whilst soft sad music plays in the background to remind me that ‘this is really sad’ as people affected by Grenfell recount the horror………..no, not for me. I’m not into that sort of exploitation.
What I want is a dedicated investigation team going about their work out of the way of the cameras and nailing the people responsible and then I want to see those responsible in court under criminal law.
And if Parliament is indeed the highest court in the land, then it is high time that it pursued and locked up some of it own members (current and past) for their failures under duty of care – tort. All the apparatus to do this is there. It’s just not used because that is ‘convenient’. Let the impact statements flow honestly for once from the legislature!
My God – you could convict most of these idiots from Hansard alone couldn’t you?
I would like to see an inquiry on how and why we left the EU and the impact.
And to take no more than a year.
I am an optimist.
@candyman2
To the contrary, the disaster demonstrates the failure, and immorality, of allowing regulation to be watered down so that it is in effect in the hands of the private sector it is supposed to regulate.
What we need is proper government regulation.
Some people/organisations were just as unaccountable in 1966.
From Wiki about the Aberfan disaster:
“Neither the National Coal Board (NCB) nor any of its employees were prosecuted and the organisation was not fined.
The Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund (ADMF) was established on the day of the disaster. It received nearly 88,000 contributions, totalling £1.75 million. The remaining tips were removed only after a lengthy fight by Aberfan residents against resistance from the NCB and the government on the grounds of cost. The site’s clearance was paid for by a government grant and a forced contribution of £150,000 taken from the memorial fund. In 1997 the British government paid back the £150,000 to the ADMF, and in 2007 the Welsh Government donated £1.5 million to the fund and £500,000 to the Aberfan Education Charity as recompense for the money wrongly taken. Many of the village’s residents developed medical problems as a result of the disaster, and half the survivors have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder at some time in their lives.”
That is just bloody shocking – a government taking money from the Memorial Fund and not giving it back for 30 years and having to be forced to remove the remains of the tip that killed 144, the majority of whom were young children! Nothing has changed amongst those who rule over us.
Slow and expensive. The most expensive in recent years was the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.
That ran from 1998 to 2010, and cost £192 million, of which neatly £100 of which was spent on legal representation.
As the Chair of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry said afterwards: “lawyers are expensive; very expensive”. Others will say ‘what price justice’.
One area which should be addressed is the relationship between Public Enquiries and criminal investigation by the police. The current situation seems to lead to justice postponed.
Who was/is one of the major contribuotrs to the Tory party? The UK construction industry. They lobbied for more relaxed regulations and there is zero doubt that quiet words were had with the tory gov of the day and the decision was to “kick the can down the road” by having a public enquiry. Suited both the politicos and their funders.
The Guardian article today rightly lays the disaster prime responsibility on the shoulders of the architectural practice which designed the re-modelling scheme. The government and the architecture profession consequently needs to examine how architect’s training can be improved and how it’s overall control over the building product can be beefed up. Under Thatcherite Neoliberalism this control was weakened. For example, the introduction of Partnering and allowing private building inspectors.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/05/professional-buck-passer-excoriating-grenfell-report-architects
It reminds me that we live in a really corruptible world.
I have worked with architects for years and safety has always been their concern.
It is oversight that is lacking for sure but you also have to consider the culture in the organisation that commissioned the works.
Emma Dent Coad goes into a lot of detail about a local authority who were more interested in holding events than sorting out an affordable housing block and had a huge surplus with which to spend money doing the right thing and did not.
How to address that?
I am reminded to be so grateful to be working where I am where these issues are given the attentiveness they deserve.
Yes Minister. Whenever Sir Humphrey was challenged over something that needed to be made public he uttered sentences about the need for a public enquiry with a broad frame of reference that would take a long time to report, thereby hoping to get the subject ignored.
This is what is happening now and has happened many times before.
“In England, mistakes are anonymous, because the man who accepts responsibility isn’t the man who made the mistake.”
T.S. Eliot
“In fairness, as I recall, the London Fire Brigade accepted that they had made mistakes with regard to the management of this fire very soon after the event.”
I tip my hat to the London Fire Brigade for steeping up to the plate.
However, did not the London Fire Brigade tell people to “Remain in Place” due to the information they possessed believing that the “units” were self contained in the event of fire by fire walls (apartment flats and condos in Florida are built in this manner)? How was the London Fire Brigade to know the integrity of the fire walls hand been breached and compromised due to the installation of the cladding? The cladding installation should have been under the control of Building and Inspection departments to make sure of correct installation..
Also, why did Grenfell towers only have one stair case for a building that large and tall? The failure to include a second stair case in the original design can only be laid at the “Planning Commission” or whomever was responsible for plan review and did approve the plans.
The Grenfell Fire tragedy could have been prevented at many points in time in the buildings history.
Only thing to add to this excellent article is that the burnt structure of the Grenfell flats remained and remains intact, another sign that the cause was not linked to its original construction. I also suspect the government reaction would have been different if the council in question was not RBKC.
@Johnson –
Thanks for the update and correction to my post.
I was not aware the fire walls remained intact.
Ian Dunt has posted a powerful essay on this topic, and the failure that is neoliberalism, on Substack. Worth a read.
https://tinyurl.com/pw9jsa8f
Cover ups in the Single Transferable Party very much guaranteed! You will have expected the following in the latest reincarnation of this party:-
“Dent Coad, an architectural historian who has campaigned since 2017 for justice for Grenfell survivors, lost her seat in 2019 and was blocked from standing again for Labour in 2022. The former MP was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, the Jeremy Corbyn-loyal wing of the parliamentary Labour party.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/sep/06/eric-pickles-urged-to-quit-as-tory-peer-over-grenfell-inquiry-criticism
Perhaps we should be honest, supercharge the process and leave out the enquiries? The Americans do this most weeks with school shootings followed by “thoughts and prayers” followed by another school shooting, and so on. Here it’s disaster, oh dear, enquiry, bugger all happens.
As a retired consultant I know that the last thing you should do is write a report that will become shelf ware. Action Research offers a better model for intervention to create change. Unfortunately what is good practice in parts of the private sector doesn’t ever scale up to the sheer size and complexity of government – which is a key non-partisan reason for opposing deregulation, outsourcing, Almos, Agencies etc.
I totally agree that public enquiries are the wrong way to do things.
The problem with public enquires, are well know; they just take too long, there is no obligation to act and accountability sufferers as a result. There is much to be said about our political culture that masks accountability and hides uncomfortable information but this is also structural and organisational problem.
I think we should learn from the rapid development of Covid vaccines and apply parallelism to public enquiries.
Assigning teams of industry practitioners, civil servants and police to the enquires would allow them to do their work (change planning and evidence gathering for prosecutions) as the relevant issues are considered. They could all be ready to act, even to act before the full report is completed.
Making the implementation of recommendations mandatory would then become possible because the practicalities would have been considered as the enquiry proceeded. Add to this a provision for public participation using sortition and we could transform the public enquiry process into a learning process for the benefit of all.
There will always be a tension between no blame learning and accountability but fracturing things just makes this a whole lot worse. The entire ex-quango realm in which a lot of executive function takes place is one endless chain of opaque groups, rife with cronyism with contract and sub-contractors, there are infrequent ministerial reviews, simple patronage is used for the chairmanships, there are infrequent ministerial reviews – often only biannual.
The Fifth Risk by Micheal Lewis (although US) is an instructive (hair raising) read and highly relevant to this topic. Its title is inspired by the loss of internal project management capability by the state (the fifth risk of the title) which occurred with the Trump transition into power. We could do with a similar case by case factual round up of just how much damage the small state and outsourcing of everything has damaged our ability to do anything difficult over that last 30-40 years. Open Democracy, Democracy for Sale and The Good Law Project do a good job on the individual bits of it they tackle.
I do see a point in public inquiries, although one has to ask why they take so long and why witnesses should need legal costs paying which I don’t think is the case in other judicial proceedings.
It gives an opportunity for the (surviving) victims and relatives to make their point to a serious listening audience. That must be emotionally massively helpful to them, they would otherwise be ignored. And they must also be encouraged by the fact an inquiry has the power to force others to testify when they would decline if they could. I was certainly cheered today to learn that the Covid inquiry hasn’t restricted itself to epidemiological matters but is calling Gavin Williamson to account for whether the impact on school children was justified.
The big problem is that an inquiry delays any decision about criminal prosecution.
I understand that Inquiries can actually make prosecution more difficult; since critical elements of the Inquiry report may not be used in court. Thus, it seems to me, that it sterilises and creates a cordon sanitaire around key information and makes it inaccessible and unusable for prosecutors; which, it seems to me, may make the process of prosecution practically far more difficult.
Perhaps someone may wish to disprove my hypothesis; I hope so, because the alternative is to be even more cyncial about Inquiries. I leave that thought with readers.
I totally agree. The whole pantomime of the public enquiry has become entirely farcical.
For ‘lets have a Public Inquiry” read: let’s kick this into the long grass and let the next government pick it up if they are foolish enough to let the verdict be published. By then who will care? (Apart from the victims)
I am reminded by the quote from John Gray’s ‘The New Leviathans’ (2023) p.16:
‘The New Leviathans offer meaning in material progress, the security of belonging to imaginary communities and the pleasures of persecution’.
This Grenfell business has been turned into a performance where so often the victims have been blamed for being dependent on someone doing their job properly.
Apparently these days, we are all so individualised and independent, that is not allowed.
Hyper-liberalism has destroyed a lot of the inter-dependence of our society and Grenfell is an awful symptom of that.
Much to agree with
> What is the point of Inquiries?
> We spend hundreds of millions on Inquiries but largely fail to implement their recommendations. So what’s the point? And what could be done?
Christina Pagel in the excellent “Diving into Data & Decision Making” blog
https://substack.com/@chrischirp/p-148233150
Enquiries are vital for confirming we understand the real root cause of complex events. The risks from anxiety easing knee jerk reactions needs no explanation.
What enquiries must never be permitted to do is to ‘inflate away’ the legal consequences for guilty parties. In support of that it simply cannot be acceptable to permit enquiries to take the lengths of time that we have experienced.
The delays to conclusion is very strong evidence to any claim that enquiries are launched in the hope that the grass just keeps growing longer.
When an Inquiry takes seven years or longer to produce, the root cause may be long gone; or circumstances changed so much, the root cause no longer exists. And the culprits have seven years to bury everything. Note that the root cause may have disappeared; but that does not mean anything has been fixed. In short, Mr Power I have no idea what, practically, you are proposing; but it looks to me a little like proposing an Inquiry about Inquiries……….
That’ll work …………. for the lawyers.
There is nothing wrong with Inquiry(s).
The problems seems to be with the way Inquiries are conducted, managed and then results handled in the UK.
Criminal investigation(s) and trial(s) take just as long or longer as a Formal Inquiry.
I do not argue about the abstract argument for Inquiries; but it misses the point. Inquiries are no called, typically to fix a problem in timely manner. It has other, and often deeply cynical purposes.
Grenfell was an excellent Inquiry, in the abstract. But it took seven years. It complicates prosecution of miscreants, as much as helps; as I understand the legal implications. And in the case of Grenfell, there are absolutely no outcomes that were not generally understood within a few months. The organisation of response by police, legal prosecution services, building regulator and Parliament should be able to have managed that disaster, without creating a ‘cordon sanitaire’ round the whole thing for seven years. This is absurd. It is obviously absurd. It is an atrocious failure of Government. First and last. We need to stop looking in the wrong place for answers.
A friend of mine, whilst head of research at Celotex, designed the insulation. She had left Celotex long before the disaster. I understand that her specifications about limitation of usage were ignored. Here is a Youtube of her talking on this subject at an international conference about three or four years ago. Unfortunately the sound quality is very very poor and you have to strain to hear what she is saying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoGbRp6zCgU&t=457s
Thanks