Public inquiries are a valuable tool for democracies to address major catastrophes and failures, a transparent process that enables facts to be established, blame to be apportioned and lessons to be learned. Is there a limit to the amount of bad news that a country can absorb about its system, though? The UK’s final report into the Grenfell Tower fire might be viewed as a test case.
A series of reports and hearings have already called into question the competence and honesty of Britain’s business, social and political institutions this year. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, which is ongoing, has been examining how hundreds of sub-postmasters were prosecuted and some imprisoned, because glitches in a new computer system suggested wrongly that money was missing from their branch accounts.
The Infected Blood Inquiry in May released its report into how more than 30,000 people in the UK were given HIV and hepatitis C after receiving contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, public hearings into Britain’s handling of COVID-19 have portrayed chaos, infighting and negligence at the heart of then-British prime minister Boris Johnson’s government.
What sets apart the Grenfell inquiry is the all-encompassing nature of the failings. Grenfell was a 24-story tower block occupied largely by low-income social housing tenants from ethnic minorities in North Kensington, a pocket of deprivation inside the richest borough in London. On the night of June 14, 2017, a fire that started in a fourth-floor kitchen swept through the building after igniting cladding that had been added to the exterior during refurbishment over the previous one to five years.
The cladding was made of aluminum composite material panels with polyethylene cores, which “burned violently,” in the words of the 1,700-page second-phase report published last week, after an inquiry that lasted six years.
The fire caused the deaths of 72 people.
Few connected with the tragedy are left unscathed by the report’s conclusions. There was “systematic dishonesty” among the companies that sold the cladding panels and insulation products. Bodies responsible for certifying the products did not fulfill their functions. For years, there was a “complete failure” by the Local Authority Building Control to ensure that the certificates it issued were technically accurate. The British Board of Agrement failed to exercise rigor and independence. The Building Research Establishment’s work in testing the fire safety of external walls had been marred by unprofessional conduct and inadequate practices for decades. The National House Building Council was compromised by commercial pressures, unwilling to upset customers and the construction industry by revealing the scale of the use of combustible insulation in the external walls of high-rise buildings.
The list goes on. The architect, contractor and subcontractor all took a “casual approach” to contractual relations and either did not properly understand their obligations or paid scant attention to them.
Everyone involved in the choice of cladding materials thought that responsibility for their suitability and safety “lay with someone else.” The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which had a fractious relationship with the Grenfell Tower residents, did not observe its basic responsibilities. Oversight of the body by the local authority was weak, with fire safety a particular deficiency. Meanwhile, the London Fire Brigade failed to learn lessons from a 2009 fire in a high-rise in south London, in which six people died, because of a “chronic lack of effective management and leadership.”
A culture of evading responsibility reaches to the top. The government’s deregulatory agenda dominated the thinking of the Department for Communities and Local Government to such an extent that “even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded,” the inquiry panel wrote, contradicting the evidence of then-British secretary of state Eric Pickles that fire safety had been excluded from the drive to cut red tape.
Then-British prime minister Theresa May, who oversaw the campaign to reduce regulations, repeated that assertion in a post on X following the report’s release, drawing an angry, expletive-laden response from Grenfell campaigners.
Catharsis is part of the purpose of public inquiries. Having trauma and injustice acknowledged and treated seriously helps in the process of resolution and reconciliation. A key part of that is identifying what went wrong and how to prevent a repeat. The challenge with the Grenfell inquiry is that the lapses go beyond deficiencies in rules, structures or organizations (although the report has plenty of practical recommendations that will help, such as creation of a formal title and qualification for the role of fire engineer). This is not just a matter of plugging a few regulatory holes. The regulations existed; they just were not observed. The failures were so pervasive, and across such a range of jobs and professions, that they point more to a cultural rot than a defective system. That is far less easily fixed.
There is one honorable exception to the Grenfell inquiry’s roll call of condemnation: the local community. In the hours and days after the disaster, when the authorities were “conspicuous by their absence,” faith groups, churches and voluntary organizations moved into the vacuum. They provided shelter, food, money and medical assistance to hundreds of vulnerable, traumatized people who had been rendered homeless and, in many cases, destitute. Those looking for reasons for optimism on the health of British society will find it here, at grassroots level, rather than higher up.
Matthew Brooker is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business and infrastructure. Formerly, he was an editor for Bloomberg News and the South China Morning Post.
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