“Decades of failure” by the UK government and parts of the construction industry led directly to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, according to the damning final report of the public inquiry into the disaster.
Seventy-two people died as a result of the worst fire disaster in the UK since the second world war when flames tore up the external walls of the recently refurbished tower block in west London.
The report published on Wednesday found that successive governments failed to hold companies manufacturing building products to reliable safety standards, or prevent them from actively misleading markets and regulators.
The results of the inquiry are a devastating indictment of the UK government, which failed to ensure that the construction industry adhered to basic fire safety requirements and allowed it to prioritise profit over human life, the report said.
The report accused the government’s housing department of repeatedly failing, over many years, to heed warnings about the serious risks to life posed by some external cladding systems,
It said the department, which it called “complacent”, “poorly run” and “defensive”, presided over a woefully deficient and fragmented regulatory system.
It added that the department allowed “unscrupulous” manufacturers of products used on the outside of high-rise buildings to engage in “deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing process, misrepresent the data and mislead the market”.
The report named the US company Arconic, which supplied the main cladding used on Grenfell Tower, as well as Celotex and Kingspan, which provided insulation for the building.
“Even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded,” the report said.
“The fire at Grenfell Tower was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high-rise residential buildings,” it added.
The first phase of the inquiry, which ended in December 2018, addressed what happened in the early hours of June 14 2017, concluding that the “principal reason why the flames spread so rapidly” was exterior cladding made of aluminium with a polyethylene core. Insulation boards “contributed to the rate” at which the fire spread.
Wednesday’s report accused Arconic, the US company that manufactured the panels used in Grenfell Tower’s external walls, of deliberately concealing from the market the extent of dangers posed by their product.
This was not simply a failure of oversight, the report said, adding that “it reflected a deliberate strategy to continue selling [the cladding material] in the UK based on a statement about its fire performance that it knew to be false”.
Arconic said it had “acknowledged its role as one of the material suppliers involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower” and “made financial contributions to settlements for those affected, as well as to the restorative justice fund”.
The report said that Celotex, which manufactured a “combustible” foam insulation used at Grenfell, “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market” about the safety of its product.
It accused officials at the privatised Building Research Establishment responsible for fire testing of “complicity in the strategy”.
Irish company Kingspan also provided misleading information about the fire safety of its insulation products, according to the report, and “cynically exploited the industry’s lack of knowledge” about them, relying “on the fact that an unsuspecting market was very likely to rely on its own claims”.
Kingspan said it had “long acknowledged the wholly unacceptable historical failings . . . in part of our UK insulation business” but added that these were “not found to be causative of the tragedy”.
The British Board of Agrément, a commercial organisation that certifies compliance of products with legislative requirements, was also criticised.
The report said it had failed to manage the conflict between its commercial interests in attracting customers “and the need to exercise a high degree of rigour and independence in its investigations to satisfy those who might consider relying on its certificates”.
“The dishonest strategies of Arconic and Kingspan succeeded in large measure due to the incompetence of the BBA,” the report added, “[as well as] its failure to adhere robustly to the system of checks it had put in place and an ingrained willingness to accommodate customers instead of insisting on high standards.”
The inquiry also laid blame for the disaster at a local level. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the council responsible for oversight of social housing building regulations, showed “persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people”.
The report said residents of Grenfell Tower regarded the Tenant Management Organisation, which managed the building, as an “uncaring and bullying overlord that belittled and marginalised them”.
The TMO’s then chief executive, Robert Black, showed an “entrenched reluctance” to inform the council about matters that affected fire safety.
London Fire Brigade also comes in for detailed criticism. Shortcomings in its ability to fight fires in high-rise buildings were attributable to “a chronic lack of effective management and leadership”. Those failures were compounded by “an entrenched but unfounded assumption that the building regulations were sufficient to ensure that external wall fires of the kind that were known to have occurred in other countries would not occur in this country”.
The report said that in the immediate aftermath of the fire, former prime minister Theresa May’s government provided a “muddled, slow, indecisive and piecemeal” response.
It added that there was a “marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity and left many of those immediately affected feeling abandoned by authority and utterly helpless”.
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