Keir Starmer issued a state apology today to victims of the Grenfell tragedy who were “ignored” and left in a “death trap”, after a blistering concluding report into Britain’s deadliest fire since the Second World War was finally published.
The release of the 1,700-page document comes more than seven years after the fire took hold and spread through cladding on the 24-storey West London tower block, claiming the lives of 72 people and destroying 151 homes in the tower and surrounding areas.
Inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, has concluded that all deaths were avoidable. As for who is accountable for the lives lost, he has spread the blame widely.
Those living in the tower were badly failed, over decades, by successive governments who “ignored, delayed or disregarded” concerns about the risks of dangerous cladding, raised as early as 1991.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s tenant management organisation also bears responsibility for “manipulating” an appointment process for its favoured architect, which had no experience of installing cladding on high-rise buildings.
The Inquiry is critical too of the London fire brigade, whose frontline staff were not adequately trained due to “a chronic lack of effective leadership”.
While there are many parties to hold accountable for the tragedy, Moore-Bick was also clear that not all of those listed “bear the same degree of responsibility”. In most cases, victims were failed through “incompetence”, but, in some, they were “failed through calculated dishonesty and greed”.
By far the largest contributor to the fire was the dangerous cladding, manufactured by Arconic. The report found that the manufacturers had “deliberately concealed” the safety risks of the product and had engaged in “sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent data and mislead the market”.
Speaking today, Elizabeth Campbell, leader of Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, said: “It is crystal clear that profits were put before people, clear warning signs were ignored, and Grenfell was wholly avoidable, with failure at every single level”.
What now?
Joe Powell, the MP for Kensington and Bayswater MP where Grenfell Tower stands, has called for prosecutions. Though the Crown Prosecution Service has confirmed it is not likely to decide whether to charge anyone over Grenfell until the end of 2026.
Meanwhile, the report has made a host of recommendations, for instance, that a single regulator should be appointed to oversee all aspects of the construction industry, and that responsibility for fire safety should be brought under one government department.
Starmer has said he will look at implementing all 58 of the inquiry’s recommendations and respond in full within six months.
There is, however, no mechanism in place requiring him to implement any of them. Which brings us to a wider point, that applies not just to the Grenfell Inquiry but to all public inquiries in Britain: the difficulty in ensuring they result in effective change.
Public inquiries, aiming to establish how deaths occurred and recommend how to prevent them, often drag on for years. When they finally conclude, they make headlines for a day, leaders put out statements yet the government is under no obligation to act upon any of the inquiry’s final recommendations, nor even to specify which ones it will or won’t follow and why.
In recent months, a coalition of groups affected by some of Britain’s worst tragedies of the past decade – including bereaved families of Covid-19 victims, Grenfell victims and inflected blood scandal victims – have teamed up with the charity Inquest and called on Starmer to change this – and set up an independent body to monitor whether recommendations are acted upon.
Back in July, Deborah Coles, director of Inquest, stressed: “There is real frustration from families that there is no centralised system where you can go and actually look at what recommendations were made, and what progress there has been.”
She added: “What families tell us, time and time again, is that what actually gives meaning to these processes is the knowledge that other deaths may be prevented.”
Starmer said today that the Grenfell disaster should “never have happened”. Now, it’s time for him to show he is serious about ensuring history doesn’t repeat itself.
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