Poor safety management and insensitivity to residents’ concerns characterised landlord’s failings at Grenfell Tower, according to the Phase 2 report. Ron Alalouff continues his analysis of the inquiry.
The management of fire safety at Grenfell Tower was largely in the hands of two organisations: the local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC); and its arms-length tenant management organisation (TMO), which was responsible for the day-to-day running of the council’s housing.
The Phase 2 report states that RBKC’s oversight of the TMO’s performance was “weak” and fire safety was not subject to any key performance indicator. “The absence of any independent or rigorous scrutiny by RBKC of the TMO’s performance of its health and safety obligations, and in particular its management of fire safety, was a particular weakness,” says the report’s executive summary. The council took little or no account of an independent and highly critical review of fire safety carried out for the TMO in 2009. It did not even know about a further independent and highly critical report produced in 2013 because the TMO had failed to disclose it to RBKC.
The report goes on to say that although there was a satisfactory system for senior management to report to the board and to RBKC, it did not operate effectively because of “an entrenched reluctance on the part of the TMO’s chief executive, Robert Black, to inform the board and RBKC’s scrutiny committees of matters that affected fire safety”. That failure was all the more serious because there were “chronic and systemic” failings in the TMO’s management of fire safety, of which the board should have been made aware. “Robert Black consistently failed to tell either the board or RBKC of the London Fire Brigade’s concerns about the TMO’s compliance with the Fire Safety Order or the steps taken to enforce it.”
In 2009, an independent fire safety consultant recommended that a fire safety strategy should be prepared, but nothing was done until 2013, and a strategy had still not been finally approved by the time of the fire in 2017.
The TMO’s only fire assessor for its entire estate, Carl Stokes, was allowed to “drift into that role without any formal selection or procurement process”. The report’s executive summary says he had misrepresented his experience and qualifications, and was ill-qualified to carry out fire risk assessments on buildings of the size and complexity of Grenfell Tower.
The report found that although Mr Stokes’ methods for carrying out fire risk assessments generally reflected the Health and Safety Executive’s five steps for managing risks, the LGA Guide and PAS 79, they suffered from “serious shortcomings,” such as failing to check whether the TMO had taken action in response to risks he had identified in previous assessments. Despite the concerns expressed by the London Fire Brigade (LFB) about his competence, the TMO continued to rely uncritically on him.
The executive summary also highlights the lack of an adequate system for ensuring that issues identified in fire risk assessments were remedied effectively and in good time. In fact, the TMO developed a “huge backlog of remedial work that it never managed to clear”, which was aggravated by the failure of senior management to treat defects with the seriousness they deserved. The TMO viewed the demands of managing fire safety as “an inconvenience rather than an essential aspect of its duty to manage its property carefully”. New front doors installed in 2011 and 2012 were inadequate because the TMO had failed to specify the correct standard when ordering them. In addition, it did not institute an effective inspection and maintenance programme for self-closing devices on entrance doors, despite an enforcement notice issued by the LFB in late 2015 relating to ineffective door closers in another high-rise residential building it managed, and a deficiency notice issued in 2016 in relation to Grenfell Tower itself on the same grounds.
Finally, although it did take some steps to gather information about vulnerable occupants to enable Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (PEEPs) to be drawn up, the TMO’s failure to maintain proper records amounted to a “basic neglect of its obligations in relation to fire safety”.
In terms of its building control functions, the inquiry found that RBKC did not properly scrutinise the design of the refurbishment or the choice of materials, and failed to satisfy itself that the building would comply with the requirements of the Building Regulations. As such, it bears “considerable responsibility” for the dangerous condition of the building. In addition, the surveyor responsible for the refurbishment was “overworked, inadequately trained and had a very limited understanding of the risks associated with the use of ACM panels”.
The report is also scathing about the relationship between the TMO and the residents of Grenfell Tower, with relations “increasingly characterised by distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger”. But ultimately, responsibility for this lay with the TMO as a public body exercising control over the building which contained the residents’ homes. Instead, the TMO overlooked the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for safe and decent homes. “That dependence created an unequal relationship and a corresponding need for the TMO to ensure that, whatever the difficulties, the residents were treated with understanding and respect. We regret to say the TMO failed to recognise that need and therefore failed to take the steps necessary to ensure that it was met.”
FURTHER READING:
Click here to read Ron Alalouff’s first piece of analysis into the inquiry.
Click here to read a legal take on the Report by Annie Davies at Addleshaw Goddard.
