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Grenfell ‘culmination of decades of failure’ by government and construction

Grenfell failure — The Inquiry concluded the Grenfell fire was the “culmination of decades of failure” (Image: CM)

Seven years after the fire that killed 72 people, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has concluded that the disaster “was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry”.

The Inquiry published today (4 September) its second and final report into the circumstances that led to the events of 14 June 2017. The 1,700-page report criticises the severe failings of government, the construction industry, product manufacturers and the London Fire Brigade that contributed to the avoidable deaths.

“Safety of people in the built environment depends principally on a combination of three primary elements: good design, the choice of suitable materials, and sound methods of construction, each of which depends in turn in a large measure on a fourth, the skill, knowledge and experience of those engaged in the construction industry,” wrote the authors of the report.

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“Unfortunately, as our investigations have shown, at the time of the Grenfell Tower fire there were serious deficiencies in all four of those areas.”

Failure to learn and act from previous fires

The report says that central government and the industry failed “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 to them”.

It also denounces the government’s failure to learn from previous disasters and act on recommendations. Although the Department for Communities and Local Government was aware of the risks to life involved with using combustible materials in the envelope of higher-risk buildings, it failed to act.

“In the years between the fire at Knowsley Heights in 1991 and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017 there were many opportunities for the government to identify the risks posed by the use of combustible cladding panels and insulation, particularly to high-rise buildings, and to take action in relation to them,” says the report.

“In particular, it failed to heed the warning of the Environment and Transport Select Committee in December 1999 that it should not take a serious fire in which people were killed before steps were taken to minimise the risks posed by some external cladding systems.”

It continued: “On many subsequent occasions the department 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 as part of the statutory guidance until after the Grenfell Tower fire. It could and should have been removed years earlier.”