The report from Phase 1 of the public inquiry into the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in west London was published on 30 October. The result of a process that has dragged on for more than two years and cost over £40m so far, it is essentially an exercise in scapegoating. By focusing only on the night of the fire, it has served to cast the London Fire Brigade (LFB) as the main villain in a disaster that killed 72 people. Once again the real criminals are let off the hook. CAT WIENER reports.
The public inquiry was hastily set up in the weeks following the catastrophic blaze in order to deflect the anger of Grenfell survivors, bereaved relatives and local residents at those who had failed them. We warned at the time that its role would be to protect the guilty, including the local RBKC council, its management organisation, KCTMO, the contractor Rydon who carried out the shoddy 2016 refurbishment that turned the building into a firetrap and the suppliers of combustible cladding and insulation. In July 2017 we wrote: ‘already Martin Moore-Bick [the inquiry chair]… has defined his terms of reference so narrowly as to ensure the guilty are exonerated. It is, as with all such inquiries, an exercise designed to drag out over years, exhaust the participants, and kick the whole issue of a failed and criminal housing policy into the long grass.’
The report accuses the fire brigade of ‘systemic failures’, especially over not revising its ‘stay put’ advice to residents sooner, stating that had the tower been evacuated earlier, ‘more lives could have been saved’. Moore-Bick recommends the government speed up the replacement of dangerous cladding on high-rise buildings, legislate for evacuation plans and improve the inspection of fire safety measures. He specifically rules out, against fire brigade advice, legislation to enforce the retro-fitting of sprinklers in high-rise social housing. Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union accepted many of the proposals but stressed that the focus on the firefighters who risked their lives on the night of 14 June 2017 was all wrong: ‘The true culprits of the fire are those who wrapped the building in flammable cladding, who gutted the UK’s fire safety regime, who ignored the warnings from previous fires, and who did not hear the pleas of a community worried for their safety.’
Prime Minister Boris Johnson accepted the report’s findings ‘in principle’ and said that the government would implement the recommendations. Having paid lip service to the report, it can now be safely ignored. The ruling class has no interest in enforcing measures to protect the safety of the working class.
Fire safety sacrificed
Similar recommendations were made in 2013 by the coroner at the inquest into the 2009 Lakanal House fire in south London, in which six people died. She found that ‘stay put’ advice, which depends on the compartmentation of a domestic fire within a single unit, was fatally flawed. At Lakanal House, as at Grenfell and hundreds of other high-rise council homes across the country, compartmentation had been compromised by shoddy modernisation works, allowing a fire to spread through the building. She urged an immediate review of evacuation policies, as well as the retro-fitting of sprinklers in council tower blocks. Her recommendations were ignored by seven consecutive Conservative housing ministers. In 2012 the government had repealed 23 laws relating to high-rise council blocks, deciding that £357,000 per building could be saved by not installing or maintaining sprinklers to ‘reduce the financial burdens on the construction industry’. It also repealed legislation requiring the exterior of buildings to be fireproof, and allowed for less rigorous fire safety checks on tall buildings – all in the name of ‘cutting red tape’. In May 2017, with concern growing about the risks of flammable cladding, LFB wrote to every London council urging them to review the risks of external fire spread in tall buildings. None did so. The last year fire safety regulations in England were updated was 2006.
The real criminals
Moore-Bick accepts that the flammable aluminium composite (ACM) and insulation used on the building were key to the intensity and spread of the fire. He finds that ‘the ACM rainscreen panels with polyethylene cores… acted as a source of fuel. As melting polyethylene dripped down the building, it ignited fires further down the building – flames then leapt up again, travelling diagonally across each face of the tower.’
Experts told the inquiry that igniting the Arconic cladding was like torching 32,000 litres of petrol. The US-based company – which is still permitted to trade in Britain – originally attempted to withhold documentation from the inquiry and is refusing to submit papers for a separate legal case relating to the Grenfell fire filed in the US by relatives of those killed. It has spent £30m so far on lawyers. The insulation made by Celotex, a subsidiary of the French multinational Saint-Gobain, was known to be unsafe for high-rise buildings. However, Saint-Gobain feels it has ‘received vindication [from the Phase 1 report] in its attempted deflection of liability for alleged harm done by flammable insulation products… with the revelation of systemic failures in the fire brigade’s response to the Grenfell disaster’ (Global Insulation, 1 November 2019).
The contractor Rydon was appointed by RBKC to carry out the 2016 refurbishment on the cheap, having bid £2.6m less than its nearest rival. When it was revealed that Rydon had been listed as an approved government contractor public outrage forced the government to backtrack. In October it emerged that – despite Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan pledging that Rydon would not be employed by any London council – the contractor had been awarded a £100m contract by Ealing Labour council to redevelop a council housing estate.
RBKC, Britain’s richest council, chose in 2016 to save £293,368 on a regeneration scheme costing £8.6m by opting for the cheapest cladding possible for Grenfell Tower. At least nine households made homeless are still being housed in temporary accommodation and B&Bs. Yet it has managed to stash aside £6m for legal fees ahead of Phase 2 of the inquiry and is shelling out £500,000 a year to sustain the criminal and now defunct KCTMO as a legal entity for the duration of the inquiry. KCTMO had direct responsibility for the safety of the tenants in Grenfell Tower and oversaw the 2016 refurbishment. The inquiry revealed it couldn’t even be bothered to keep its emergency information for the tower up-to-date.
Why have none of these criminals been prosecuted? The report apportions no blame to any of them, saying merely that their role will be considered in Phase 2 of the inquiry next year. Meanwhile the police, who are investigating more than 460 businesses and entities for offences including manslaughter, corporate manslaughter and individual gross negligence say they cannot proceed with charges until after the inquiry finishes – not before 2021 at the earliest. This is justice kicked a long way down the road.
More people will die
In 2018, the government promised to fund the removal of ACM cladding from all social housing blocks over 18 metres tall; yet it is still covering hundreds of such blocks, containing more than 8,400 working class homes. Hundreds more are equally unsafe, as the 15 November fire that ripped through student accommodation in Bolton showed. The building was covered with a highly-combustible type of cladding made of high-pressure laminate (HPL). Recent research shows that HPL, which is widely used, failed fire tests 80% of the time (Financial Times, 21 November 2019). In addition, the majority of HPL panels are applied in ‘rainscreen’ form, leaving a cavity that increases the spread of fire. Lakanal House had HPL rainscreen cladding.
Both before and after the fire, the working class residents of Grenfell were treated with contempt and indifference by those responsible for their safety. Recent comments made on LBC radio by the Tory MP Jacob Rees Mogg – net worth £55m plus – epitomise that attitude. He and others ‘like him’, Rees-Mogg suggested, would have had the ‘common sense’ to get out of the burning building whatever the advice of the fire service. This, Tory MP Andrew Bridgen went on to clarify, was because Rees-Mogg was simply cleverer than those who stayed, waited, and died. As the rapper Stormzy put it: ‘Bare [so many] of you politicians are evil and wicked and this is why we hate you. 72 people died in a tragedy that you are to blame for…This ain’t about politics, it’s about the people who govern us lacking the most basic humanity or empathy.’
Rees-Mogg is a particularly crass individual example of a ruling class as a whole that has no interest in how the working class is housed, or indeed whether it lives or dies – so long as there are no political consequences for it. The function of the Grenfell inquiry so far has been to ensure that there are not.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 273 December 2019/January 2020
