More than seven years after 72 people were killed and dozens more injured when a devastating fire tore through Grenfell Tower, an official inquiry on Wednesday blamed “decades of failures” by the government, dishonesty by companies and a flawed response from London’s fire service.
For survivors of the fire and the families of the victims, it has been a painful, yearslong wait for answers about the root causes of the fire, and why a form of cladding that was illegal in numerous countries had been wrapped around Grenfell Tower. The report found that the “path to disaster” stretched back decades, and the tragedy was preventable.
“The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable,” Martin Moore-Bick, the chairman of the inquiry, said in a briefing on Wednesday, “and those that lived in the tower were badly failed.”
Still, while the report lays out those failures in stark detail, no one has been held criminally responsible, and London’s Metropolitan Police said that while charges were expected, none would be filed before 2026.
Here is what to know about Wednesday’s report.
Cost-cutting during Grenfell’s refurbishment disregarded safety.
Throughout the inquiry, there was an enduring theme: the drive to cut costs during a refurbishment of Grenfell Tower that began in 2015 was placed time and time again above the safety of the people living in the 24-story tower, which mostly contained public housing units.
Combustible cladding material and insulation that was used to cover the building was the major cause of the rapid spread of the blaze. Despite the materials being banned elsewhere in the world, a push by building management and the local authority to keep costs down, and the incompetence of various decision makers, led to the material being chosen.
A number of businesses were involved in the design and in supplying the material for the cladding, but there was a fatal lack of accountability. “Everyone involved in the choice of the materials to be used in the external wall thought that responsibility for their suitability and safety lay with someone else” the report noted.
“Systematic dishonesty” by companies concealed the danger of the flammable materials.
The report found that a major reason the tower’s exterior was covered with such dangerously combustible material was because of “systematic dishonesty” on the part of the companies that made and sold the cladding panels and insulation.
The Building Research Establishment — a government body at the time, which was privatized under a Conservative government in 1997 — was also complicit, the report noted, and other oversight bodies also failed to ensure product safety.
The aluminum composite panels on the exterior of Grenfell were manufactured by Arconic, an American company previously known as Alcoa, which had test data from as early as 2005 that showed the product did not meet safety standards. Arconic “was determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries (including the U.K.),” the report said.
Celotex, which made foam insulation used at Grenfell also “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead customers” and portrayed it as suitable and safe for the tower. Kingspan, an Irish company, “knowingly created a false market” for another insulation used on the facade.
The government was warned about materials used at Grenfell for decades. It failed to regulate.
As far back as 1992, the British government was aware of the risks of the type of combustible materials that were later used in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, the report found, but failed to heed warnings.
After a fire at an 11-story apartment building in northern England in 1991, the government had “many opportunities to identify the risks posed by combustible cladding panels and insulation.”
The department responsible, the Department for Communities and Local Government, failed to investigate or act, the report said. After another high-rise fire in 2009, the government’s “deregulatory agenda” meant it further weakened building standards to the extent “that even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded,” the inquiry found.
The report recommended the creation of a centralized construction regulator, and changes to the way materials are tested for fire safety as part of their conclusions. The London Fire Brigade also came in for criticism for not being adequately prepared to respond to a fast-spreading fire in a high-rise residential building.
Speaking in Parliament, Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued an apology on behalf of the British state to the survivors and families of victims, and vowed to make building safety a priority of his administration.
The management organization responsible for Grenfell tenants failed in its basic responsibilities.
The Tenant Management Organization, which was responsible for managing Grenfell Tower on behalf of the local authority, the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, “must also bear a share of the blame” for the fire, the report found.
The organization’s contentious relationship with tenants deteriorated to such an extent that it failed in its core responsibilities to them, and it also disregarded fire safety warnings, among other issues that “amounted to a basic neglect of its obligations.”
The only fire safety assessor who worked for the organization misrepresented his experience and qualifications, the report noted, and “was ill qualified to carry out fire risk assessments on buildings of the size and complexity of Grenfell Tower.”
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