The final stage of the inquiry into the Grenfell fire, which began on 6 December 2021, will now address the role played by the British state in the catastrophe that killed 72 people in 2017 – described by Stephanie Barwise, on behalf of the Grenfell families, as ‘one of the greatest scandals of our times’. On the second day, we witnessed the sorry spectacle of the government’s barrister, Jason Beer, offering a mealy-mouthed apology before going on to deny any government culpability. Rather, its trust in the construction industry had been ‘misplaced and abused’. This would be laughable if the consequences had not been so catastrophic. For while, as Adrian Williamson QC put it, manufacturers such as Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan were ‘crooks and killers, fraudulent in their marketing, recklessly unconcerned with public safety, and focused on the bottom line by fair means or foul’, they were also players in a system that exists only to make profits, and had been deliberately allowed by successive governments to write their own rules.
For more than 30 years, as Barwise pointed out, British governments have acted to protect the profits of the construction and development industry while suppressing evidence of its crimes. No wonder this grateful sector continues to be the largest donor to the Conservative Party, providing a quarter of all its funding – £18m – over the past two years (Financial Times, 29 July 2021).
A bonfire of regulations
There were concerns about the use of combustible external cladding on high-rise residential blocks as far back as the early 1990s. However, a series of reports into fires in this period, including the Knowsley Heights fire of 1991, were suppressed, as was a 1994 report into the ineffectiveness of cavity barriers to prevent fire spread. By the early 2000s the government responded to pressure from the construction industry not to outlaw certain types of cladding, despite its own results in 2002 showing that aluminium composite cladding (ACM) failed within five minutes of being set alight. ACM would go on being used on homes, including at Grenfell, with lethal results. In 2003, Kingspan wrote gleefully that the government had agreed not to adopt tougher European standards on cladding ‘until the industry is ready to adopt it’. It was only in January this year that its most flammable K15 insulation – the type used at Grenfell was ‘temporarily’ banned for use on residential properties in Britain.
The process reached its apotheosis with the so-called ‘bonfire of regulations’ pursued by the Coalition government of 2010. In 2011, a new rule effectively stymied any attempt to introduce new regulations on the building industry. Michael Gove, the Minister for Levelling Up, has since admitted this ‘probably’ put the government in breach of its duty to protect the right to life.
In January 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron announced his government’s New Year resolution was to ‘kill off the health and safety culture for good’, describing it as ‘an albatross around the neck of British business’. The result was that Britain had the weakest fire safety regulations in the European Union, acting as a magnet for unscrupulous manufacturers like Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan to sell their combustible wares.
Regulatory bodies collaborated. The former government testing house British Research Establishment was privatised, becoming, in Barwise’s words, ‘a wholly flawed organisation which has effectively sponsored Kingspan’s activities for over a decade without raising the alarm, and has presided over a series of inadequate and dangerously misleading fire investigations.’ The privatised building control body National House Building Council was ‘at best gullible and at worst collusive when dealing with the manufacturers.’ The Local Authority Building Council sold certificates for Kingspan and Celotex despite them failing and rigging fire tests on their products.
Lies and cover-ups
Ministers deliberately suppressed evidence that the cladding panels at Lakanal House in south London – where a fire in 2009 killed six people, including three children – were substandard, writing in a note that it was essential to ‘avoid giving the impression that we believe all buildings of this construction are inherently unsafe’. Not one of the fire safety recommendations that came out of the 2013 coroner’s inquiry into the Lakanal fire was acted upon. Instead, the Minister for the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Eric Pickles, rejected the instruction to make sprinklers mandatory in all new homes, arguing that such a measure would ‘hit the housing market with extra red tape, adding £13,000 to the cost of building a new homes’. A government briefing note from the time reveals the true cost would have been nearer £3,000.
In 2014 – just three years before the Grenfell fire – concerns about combustible cladding had been flagged up to Brian Martin, the senior civil servant responsible for building fire safety at the DCLG. In 2016, after a video of a massive cladding fire in Dubai was shown at an industry conference, a senior technician from one company warned ‘you could have an exact repeat of Dubai in any number of buildings that we supply product to in London’. These warnings were also passed on to Brian Martin. His response was nonchalant – companies could test cladding if they wished, but it was really up to them. Proposals to fix potentially dangerous cladding were rejected.
Jason Beer QC accuses the construction industry of ‘abusing the system by putting profit ahead of safety.’ The reality is that the British capitalist state, through successive governments, has lied, cheated and legislated at every turn to protect the profits of private companies, with absolute indifference to the human cost. The paltry attempts announced by Gove now to get property builders and developers to pay for the removal of combustible cladding from residential buildings is too little, too late. Like the Hillsborough inquiry, the Grenfell fire inquiry reveals, on a daily basis, the criminal culpability and negligence by the establishment that led to the completely avoidable deaths of dozens of working class people – but who will be made to pay? The police say they cannot act until the inquiry report is completed – this year, next year, sometime, never. The families of those killed at Grenfell and survivors say enough evidence has now emerged from the hearings and are demanding criminal charges now. We support that demand. Capitalism kills – and will carry on doing so unless we fight to stop it.
Cat Wiener
