The Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report will not be published before April 2024, the Inquiry has said in an update.
However, the panel “hopes” to share it with the prime minister before the fire’s seventh anniversary on 14 June.
The Inquiry said that complying with one of its rules was “proving time-consuming”. Under rule 13, the Inquiry is required to write to those who may be subject to criticism. “Not only do we have to allow recipients a reasonable time to respond to potential criticisms, but we also have to analyse their responses in order to decide whether we need to modify our provisional conclusions or the way in which we have expressed them,” it said.
In addition, the huge amount of evidence collected “makes the drafting of a report a very time-consuming task”.
Although chapters relating to manufacturers of products and certification bodies and aspects of the tenant management organisation’s conduct are almost complete, sections relating to experimental work conducted by some of the Inquiry’s expert witnesses are less advanced.
Earlier this year, the Inquiry announced the report would not be published before the end of this year as previously expected.
The Inquiry began on 21 May 2018 with hearings for Phase 1, which focused on the causes of the events that led to the fire. That phase finished on 12 December 2018 and it was nearly a year before chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick published his four-volume phase 1 report, on 30 October 2019.
Phase 2, which examines the causes of the events of the night of the Grenfell Tower disaster, began hearings in 2020. They continued throughout 2020 and 2021, despite disruptions caused by Covid-19.
As of 21 November 2023, the Inquiry has disclosed 20,784 documents in Phase 1 and 299,647 documents in Phase 2, making a total of 320,431.
