More than three years on from the June 2017 fire in Grenfell Tower, the inquiry into the blaze that killed 72 working class and mainly black residents of the housing block in west London has resumed. The Grenfell Inquiry’s array of criminals and liars are once again on show, providing detailed evidence of the cost-cutting, dishonesty and sheer incompetence that turned the tower into a death trap.
Few companies can have been more criminally negligent than the so-called fire safety consultants, Exova Warringtonfire. A shocking series of admissions from Exova engineers hired to advise on the Grenfell ‘refurbishment’ have revealed that:
- All three versions of a fire strategy produced by lead fire safety consultant Terry Ashton concluded that ‘the proposed changes will have no adverse effect on the building in relation to external fire spread’.
- Ashton had not bothered to open an email outlining the proposed cladding and insulation materials – both of which were highly flammable – nor the architect’s progress report.
- Ashton’s boss, Tony Pearson, who was supposed to check the final report for inaccuracies, told the inquiry he had been ‘completely ignorant of the fact that the works included cladding’. He spent just 33 minutes reviewing Ashton’s reports – which was in any case sent on to the architects, Studio E, without Pearson’s comments being taken into consideration.
- The senior fire engineer at Exova, Claire Barker, had previously signed off on the original fire assessment for the tower with a hasty ‘It’s fine’ as she rushed to leave work to go on holiday, despite the report containing a serious number of ‘omissions and assumptions and gaps’. The more junior engineer who prepared it had worked from microfiche drawings of a building she had never visited that were 40 years out of date (see FRFI 275) and concluded, fatally, that a ‘high degree of compartmentalisation’ existed, supporting a ‘stay-put’ strategy in case of fire.
- Exova also hoped Kensington and Chelsea council would not notice that evacuation arrangements for the building might not comply with current regulations, emailing a colleague: ‘Let’s hope [the building control officer] doesn’t pick it up’.
Counting the cost
A Studio E architect, Brian Sounes, told the inquiry that, working to a brief from the council that cladding for the tower should be governed primarily by aesthetic concerns – ‘nothing too plastic or Croydon’ – he had originally proposed zinc panelling. He was convinced to consider cheaper aluminium composite (ACM) after being approached by a company linked to Arconic, the manufacturers of the combustible ACM eventually used at Grenfell. The cladding specialists, Harley Facades, also pushed hard for ACM and the tenants’ management company, KCTMO, insisted it should be included as an option when the contract for refurbishment was put out to tender. The contract was won by Rydon, with an overall bid of £9.2m – about £600,000 lower than any other – that specified the use of ACM.
Rydon had its own reasons for wanting to keep costs down. It emerged that it had miscalculated its bid to the tune of some £212,000, due to an error by its financial team. An email was sent within the company saying they would ‘have to work a bit harder to find some [value engineering] savings. It was also under pressure from the KCTMO to find a further £800,000 in ‘value engineering’. Value engineering is the switching in of cheaper materials for those originally specified. Rydon also saved costs by dispensing with the services of fire safety specialists.
The elephant in the room
Every day of the inquiry brings more revelations, including how a highly flammable insulation material was agreed, illegally, for a high-rise building; of wrong information, or no information being shared in a project on which hundreds of working class lives depended, of corner-cutting and penny-pinching. Much more will emerge as Rydon, Harley Facades, Arconic, Celotex and others give evidence. What is so shocking is that this is simply the testimony of those whose criminal behaviour was forced into the open by the disaster at Grenfell. Around the country, there are hundreds of thousands of working class people living in buildings that could at any point become another Grenfell. Three years after the government promised change – terrified at the explosion of working class anger in north Kensington, as predominantly black residents poured onto the streets and took over the town hall – nearly 2,000 high rise buildings are still covered in flammable cladding. Thousands of homes still have, like Grenfell, non-compliant fire doors.
40% of those housed in high-rise buildings in Britain’s social rented sector are from black and minority ethnic communities, and are disproportionately concentrated on the highest floors. Events leading up to the fire at Grenfell expose the contempt in which black lives are held. Noureddine Aboudihaj, of the Grenfell Tower Trust, has said residents were condemned to live in a ‘death trap’ when concerns they raised regarding safety were ignored: ‘The fact residents were from immigrant or BAME backgrounds means they weren’t listened to and they were treated unfavourably’. It is no wonder that on many of the Black Lives Matter protests in London in June, placards remembering the Grenfell fire proliferated. As Leslie Thomas, a barrister for some of the survivors and bereaved, told the inquiry when it resumed in July: ‘The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum. A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour. Grenfell is inextricably linked with race. It is the elephant in the room.’
Cat Wiener
