Grenfell. The Final Report. And?

Tomorrow, seven years, two months and three weeks after 72 lives were gruesomely - yet predictably and avoidably - lost, the state will pronounce on the Grenfell Tower fire via the final report of the Public Inquiry. Leaving aside comment on an as yet unseen document, for now three observations on the Inquiry and the likely import of its final Report.

First, whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the report, the outcome of how the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference were determined has always meant that it will necessarily remain partial in failing to address the fundamental conditions and issues within which the fire and who the Bereaved, Survivors and Residents were/are must be understood. Interrogating these contexts includes a focus on Government policies around housing as well as general social protections afforded by the state, but crucially demand an exploration of structural inequalities, not least structural racism. The fact that the majority of those who died in Grenfell Tower were black and brown, whilst almost a half of the residents of the tower had come to the UK from another country of birth, is not merely idiosyncratic – it is crucial to understanding why certain people and not others were in the Tower, that night, having had their fears ignored, a lack of respect or even basic recognition which ended in their death.

On the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, and contrary to assurances from Government, local residents were not consulted before the appointment of Judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick to lead the Public Inquiry, in the light of which Justice4Grenfell concluded that this “further compounds the survivors and residents sense of distrust in the official response to this disaster” – and had they been consulted they would likely have objected to the appointment. Following this was the protracted process in which the limited initial Terms of Reference of the Inquiry were challenged but then largely confirmed, itself followed by the Inquiry’s formal December 2017 opening, at which the lack of even indirect representation of residents was the key point of contention. Only on the virtual eve of its opening did Teresa May confirm that there would be a Phase 2 of the Inquiry to which two panel members would be appointed. Of this partial, last-minute concession, Deborah Coles of INQUEST stated, “at every stage, bereaved and traumatised families have had to fight to be at the centre of the inquiry”.

Crucially, at the outset of the Inquiry, Moore-Bick ruled out including the wider social, political and economic processes in the public inquiry – years of deregulation, under-funding of inspection regimes, and the privatisation and de-democratisation of public housing were excluded from the Inquiry. So too, and crucially, were matters of race and racism. By ensuring that the key issue was non-compliance with the law, rather than a combination of the failure to enforce the law and the “bonfire of regulations” policies followed by successive governments, a long line of Ministers will be let off the hook and the regulatory system will remain off-limits. More broadly, the structural inequalities and specifically structural racism - which allow an answer to the ‘why’ question, that is, why were certain people in the Tower on that might – were not broached.

Second. Whatever recommendations are made in Moore-Bick’s report, the key observation, obviously, is to ensure they are implemented. In this context it should be noted that the failure to ‘learn lessons’ from the avoidable deaths of the vulnerable seems to be a defining characteristic of the relationship between the powerful and the powerless where the harms experienced by the latter are produced by the former. Such inquiries, not to mention a plethora of other official reports on avoidable deaths, are routinely ignored by powerful state and corporate bodies. In this context, it is gruesome to note that had the coronial recommendations after the fire which killed six people at another tower block, Lakanal House, in South London, in 2009, been implemented by government, then Grenfell may never have happened. In the run-up to the 2024 General Election, key recommendations made in the 2019 Phase One Inquiry Report had still not been implemented by central Government. It is precisely for this this reason that the charity INQUEST is leading a campaign for a National Oversight Mechanism to provide better learning, prevention, transparency and accountability for bereaved families following these and similar deaths.

Third. What now remains to be seen is whether and how key organisations and individuals – many of whom have been long under-investigation by the Metropolitan Police – can be brought to account though the criminal law. In this respect, the words of Richard Millett KC in his closing argument at the Inquiry are key: emphasising how closing statements which had been given by various public and corporate bodies implicated in the disaster suggested that “nobody was to blame”, he then recalled his claim in his opening statement to the Second Phase of the Inquiry, referring to an endless referred to “a merry-go-round of buck-passing” among the organisations under scrutiny :

“Can that really be right? Is the answer that you are to give to the survivors, to the grieving families and to the wider public to be that the Grenfell Tower fire was just a terrible accident, just one of those unfortunate incidents that happen occasionally? … Or is it to be that there are so many to blame that no one individual or organisation shoulders very much blame? Is that the answer that these core participants taken collectively would urge upon you?”

In fact, in May 2024, the Met confirmed it was continuing to develop case files – but that these would not be passed to the CPS until 12-18 months after the publication of the final report of the Public Inquiry, so likely in 2027, ten years after the fire. ‘Operation Northleigh’, involving 180 full-time police officers, at a cost, to May 2024, of £107m has been gathering evidence, since 2017, for possible charges against 19 organisations and some 58 individuals, already interviewed under caution, charges which it was stated might include corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, health and safety offences, fraud, perverting the course of justice, and misconduct in public office. Organisations in the frame certainly included Arconic, the company that manufactured the flammable ACM cladding that surrounded the tower, Celotex (and the St Gobain group of which it is a part) and Kingspan, which manufactured the combustible insulation materials used on the Tower, Harley Facades (the cladding sub-contractor), the fire engineer Exova, the main contractor in the Tower’s refurbishment Rydon, Studio E (the architects), CS Stokes and Associates (the fire risk assessor), the London Fire Brigade, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, and Whirlpool Corporation (which sold the faulty fridge freezer which was the trigger for the fire, and was known to be a fire risk). The history of such charges being laid, let alone convictions being secured, hardly points to any such likelihood.

Whatever the Report concludes, recommends, and demands, whomever it chides and castigates, Justice for Grenfell will not be achieved through its publication. That struggle persists.

Steve Tombs, The Open University