September 12, 2024The Grenfell Tower Inquiry reveals how a refusal to learn lessons and an obsession with deregulation on the part of central government contributed to a high-risk environment, as Ron Alalouff reports.
In the years between the Knowsley Heights fire in 1991 – a fire which spread through a gap between the exterior wall and the combustible polymer rainscreen cladding to all floors of an 11-storey tower block in Merseyside – and the fire at Grenfell Tower, there were many opportunities for the government to identify the risks of combustible cladding and insulation to high rise-rise buildings and to take action to address them, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 report says.
Credit: Blue Train Photography/Alamy Stock Photo
The government department with responsibility for building safety – the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) – also failed to sufficiently heed to the results of a 2001 large-scale fire test of aluminium panels with unmodified polyethylene cores which “burned violently”, and failed to ascertain the extent to which such panels were in use or to warn the construction industry about the risks they posed.
In addition, DCLG was made aware that national Class 0 was an inappropriate standard by which to determine the suitability of external wall panels, but allowed it to remain in statutory guidance until after the Grenfell Tower fire. “It could and should have been removed years earlier,” says the report.
Between 2012 and 2017, DCLG received numerous warnings about the risks involved in using such materials, and became aware of several major cladding fires abroad involving products of this kind. By 2013, it knew that Approved Document B was unclear and not properly understood by a significant proportion of the construction industry. “Despite what it knew, and the warnings it received from some quarters, the department failed to amend or clarify the guidance in Approved Document B on the construction of external walls.”
The department was poorly run, and the official with day-to-day responsibility for Building Regulations and the official guidance document, Approved Document B, was allowed “too much freedom of action” without adequate oversight. “He failed to bring to the attention of more senior officials the serious risks of which he had become aware, and they in turn failed to supervise him properly or to satisfy themselves that his response to matters affecting the safety of people’s lives was appropriate,” says the report. “It was a serious failure to allow such an important area of activity to remain in the hands of one relatively junior official.”
Aftermath of the Lakanal House fire. Credit: Tom Leighton/Alamy Stock Photo
The report goes on to say that the DCLG “displayed a complacent and at times defensive attitude to matters affecting fire safety”. The recommendation by the coroner investigating the deaths in the 2009 fire at Lakanal House in south London that Approved Document B be reviewed were not treated with any sense of urgency, and officials did not explain clearly to the Secretary of State what steps were required to comply with them. In addition, the concerns about cladding raised by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety were “repeatedly met with a defensive and dismissive attitude by officials and some ministers”.
The Grenfell report concludes that in the years following the Lakanal House fire the government’s deregulatory agenda, “enthusiastically supported by some junior ministers and the Secretary of State,” dominated the department’s thinking to such an extent that “even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded”. The deregulation agenda – dubbed the ‘bonfire of red tape’ – included the much-touted ‘one in, one out’ policy, which meant that for every new regulation introduced, another had to be discarded. The policy was later extended to ‘one in, two out,’ and then “one in, three out”. The ‘Red Tape Challenge,’ introduced in 2011, sought to obtain the views of business and the public on whether existing regulations should be improved, kept, or discarded.
During the same period, according to the report, the government “determinedly resisted” calls to regulate fire risk assessors, and to amend the Fire Safety Order to clarify that it applied to the exterior walls of buildings containing more than one set of domestic premises.
“The report summarises the role of central government by saying: “The fire at Grenfell Tower was the culmination of decades of failure by central government…to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high-rise residential buildings, and to act on the information available…”
FURTHER READING:
Click here to read Ron Alalouff’s first piece of analysis into the inquiry
Click here to read Ron’s second piece of analysis on the role of the local authority in the tragedy
Click here to read a legal take on the Report by Annie Davies at Addleshaw Goddard
