Every day of the Grenfell Inquiry brings new revelations of the depths of greed, corruption, incompetence and moral turpitude on all sides that condemned 72 people to death in the fire at Grenfell Tower, west London on 14 June 2017. From the lowliest plasterer, who meekly accepted his work around crucial window cavities was ‘cosmetic’ – rather than ensuring gaps were sealed so that fire could not spread – to Kensington and Chelsea council with overall responsibility for the 2012-2016 refurbishment, not one person, not one company, not one institution gave a damn about the lives of ordinary working class people. What has emerged is a picture of how the overriding drive to cut costs on the part of those commissioning the work – in particular the council and its housing management organisation, the KTCMO – and to increase profits on the part of the suppliers and the contractors combined to make the deadly blaze inevitable.
Council and KCTMO – corrupt, greedy and criminal
By 2013 Kensington and Chelsea council, having just splurged £26m on a shiny new academy school and leisure centre next door to Grenfell Tower, wanted to get the refurbishment of the housing estate accomplished for just £8.5m. When the firm that had completed the earlier work, Leadbitter, said it could not be completed on time and to an adequate standard for less than £10m, the council director of housing Laura Johnson insisted the project should still go ahead with ‘value for money now the priority’. The KCTMO sacked Leadbitter and put the work out to tender. Prior to accepting Rydon’s low bid of £9.2m, KCTMO’s ‘regeneration director’ Peter Maddison illegally met with the contractors to assure them the job was theirs for the taking if they could just shave £800,000 off their bid.
Weeks into the inquiry, Maddison revealed he had crucial documents relating to the Grenfell project – work books and diaries dating back to 2013, described by the inquiry as ‘material of utmost relevant’ – which had never been disclosed to police. While some of these have finally been handed over, it turns out other crucial documents were ‘binned’ by Claire Williamson, KCTMO’s project manager for Grenfell, when she left her job in 2018 – despite the inquiry already being set up. Williamson also failed to chase up risk assessments on the project for six months and never followed up warnings from consultants Exova Warringtonfire in 2013 that a further assessment of fire risk was required.
To compound the failures of Kensington and Chelsea, John Hoban, the council’s senior building control surveyor with final responsibility for signing off on the project, only read the first page of the specification for the cladding and insulation – later revealed to be the main cause of the speed and intensity with which the blaze ripped through the tower — before approving it. He admitted that he’d not read anything about a potentially flammable core and indeed had never heard of polyethylene – which burns like petrol when ignited. Nor did he notice that the infill panels between windows were made from highly combustible Styrofoam, or that cavity barriers around some windows were missing (one of the reasons a small domestic fire was able to spread so quickly). He said he thought the input from specialist fire consultants Exova meant that everything would be fire safety compliant. Exova had in fact left the project in 2014, after billing for just 15 hours on its fire safety assessment work.
Manufacturers’ lethal lies
The combination of the Reynobond aluminium composite (ACM) cladding used on Grenfell Tower and manufactured by US company Arconic, and the two kinds of insulation made by Celotex and Kingspan are known to be the main cause of the speed and intensity with which the fire spread. Every one of these companies knew its product was highly combustible and completely unsuitable for use on a high-rise tower – and marketed it anyway.
All three companies cheated on fire safety tests to get their products approved and lobbied industry regulators like the National House Building Council and the Building Control Alliance to get guidelines changed and their products certified or permitted.
In 2005 Arconic ACM panels passed a fire safety test when riveted flat to a building. However, when bent into a so-called cassette to be hung from railings (as they were at Grenfell) it turned out the panels burned fiercely –failing the test. Memos from 2006 show that Arconic was desperate to get UK certification for its products in order to secure a share of the lucrative public sector building market. So in 2008 it only submitted the results for the misleading flat test, using a fire retardant version of its highly flammable polyethelene core, to argue the material was fit to be used on high-rise buildings. The company’s senior team admitted that ‘PE [polyethylene] is dangerous on facades’. Yet Arconic remains completely unrepentant about the deaths at Grenfell, saying its product was ‘misused’ and the result ‘could not have been predicted’.
Celotex knew by 2013 that its RS5000 insulation should not be used behind cladding products because it could burn. But it was desperate to compete with Kingspan – and to win the Grenfell contract, its ‘number-one must-win bid’. So it too it faked its test using fire retardants and a range of other tricks, and lied about the results. It then wangled a certificate permitting use of its product ‘for a variety of systems’, including high rise towers.
Kingspan’s K15 Kooltherm panel did pass a safety test in 2005, but by 2006 the composition of the panel was changed. The new phenolic foam panel burned, when tested again the following year, created a ‘raging inferno’. Even after the heat was removed, it burned so fiercely for a full ten minutes that the test had to be ended early for fears the laboratory would be destroyed. Yet Kingspan continued to market this highly flammable product on the basis of the misleading 2005 test, and threatened to sue anyone who raised concerns about its suitability for high-rise buildings, including the National House Building Council. A senior Kingspan executive, Philip Heath, said of contractors who raised concerns about the K15 panel, ‘they can go fuck themselves’ and ‘they’re mistaking me for someone who gives a dam [sic]… imagine a fire racing up that tower!!!!!’ Kingspan lobbied successfully to get regulations changed in 2014 to allow the use of potentially combustible combinations of cladding materials to be used on high rise buildings without a test. Today dangerous K15 panels are present on hundreds of buildings across Britain. Meanwhile, two weeks before these damaging revelations were made public at the inquiry, two Kingspan directors sold off £5m worth of shares in the company, netting themselves a cool £3m. The share value in Kingspan has since dropped 10%.
These criminals are directly responsible for the murder at Grenfell Tower. They must be brought to justice.
Cat Wiener
