Over the past two weeks, more than four years after its first hearing, the Grenfell Tower inquiry finally heard from senior government figures responsible for housing and building regulations in the years before the disaster.
Eric Pickles, the secretary of state for housing under David Cameron from 2010 to 2015, made the headlines for telling the inquiry to use its time “wisely” as he had an “extremely busy day”. He also managed to offend survivors and the bereaved by getting the number of victims wrong during his closing statement, in which he also concluded that changing his actions as minister “wouldn’t have made any difference whatsoever”.
Stephen Williams, a Liberal Democrat junior minister with responsibility for building regulations from October 2013, said there was not “anything I could have done to materially make a difference to what happened in July 2017”. The fire took place in June.
It seems that a moment of self-reflection – or even an accurate account of the tragedy – was too much to ask for from our most senior elected representatives. They insist they are not responsible for decisions leading up to the fire. However, over its investigation, the inquiry has consistently painted a damning picture of the deregulation drive that was a key focus during Cameron’s time as prime minister. The obsession with abolishing red tape saw ministers at that time ignoring warning signs about a growing building safety crisis, and civil servants too disaffected to speak up.
The state failure to prepare for tower block fires goes back decades. Fires in Merseyside and Scotland in the 1990s provided stark warnings, and unpublished tests commissioned under New Labour showed how poorly the cladding used on Grenfell performed in a fire.
However, perhaps the most crucial moment in the narrative being pieced together by the inquiry is the Lakanal House fire in 2009, in Camberwell, south London, which killed six people. This should have been a turning point for setting out clear and comprehensive regulations. In 2013, the coroner investigating the fire made a number of recommendations to the government. Ministers were advised to review a document called Approved Document B, which provides guidance on the fire safety part of the building regulations.
Pickles, the housing secretary at the time, agreed to a review, but set a deadline of 2016-17. In reality, the review had barely started by the date of the Grenfell fire in 2017.
This delay proved fateful. Since Grenfell, ministers have insisted that the building regulations did not allow for combustible cladding to be installed on high-rise buildings, shifting the blame to industry. However, confusion over Approved Document B led many in industry to believe this type of cladding was permitted. More than 480 high rises in England have now been found to contain the same type of cladding as Grenfell Tower, while many more contain other dangerous claddings.
One stark example includes an email sent from a cladding manufacturer to the civil servant responsible for Approved Document B, that warned “confusion and misunderstanding” over the building regulations was leading to a situation of “grave concern” and called for clearer guidance to be issued. Meanwhile, successive ministers between 2014 and 2017 were sent more than 21 letters from a group of MPs, led by the late David Amess, that warned a review of the guidance must be carried out urgently before another deadly fire occurs.
Given these warnings, the government still dragged its feet on reviewing Approved Document B. The civil servants with responsibility for the building regulations certainly have a lot to answer for. Much more should have been done to raise the alarm.
However, the failures of officials must be understood within the context of the deregulation agenda of the time. In January 2012, Cameron announced that his “new year resolution” was to “kill off the health and safety culture for good”. “We need to realise, collectively, that we cannot eliminate risk and that some accidents are inevitable,” he wrote in the Evening Standard in April of that year.
He tasked the civil service with a “one in, one out” rule for departments wishing to introduce new regulations. This was toughened to “one in, two out” in January 2013 and “one in, three out” in 2016.
Multiple officials told the inquiry last month that this policy made their job extremely difficult. One senior civil servant related the “anxiety and frustration of not being able to actually move things forward”, and noted that ministers made it “very clear” that items like the Approved Document B fire guidance were part of the desired cuts.
The politicians interviewed over the past two weeks have disputed these claims. Ministers have insisted that fire safety rules were exempt from the deregulation drive, with Pickles saying the idea that Approved Document B was included in the “one in, one out” policy was “ludicrous”.
Any mistakes made in the years leading up to Grenfell were blamed mainly on the civil service. In his witness statement to the inquiry, James Wharton, the junior minister who was responsible for building regulations between May 2015 and July 2016, said: “Everything happens slowly in the civil service.” Pickles raised concerns about the “line management” of the junior civil servants who received the warnings about the building regulations.
The lead counsel for the inquiry, Richard Millett QC, likes to ask if there is anything witnesses wish they had done differently. In the past, this question has provoked tears and outpourings of regret from the architects, contractors, officials and firefighters who have been called to give evidence.
But there was no such reflection by these ministers. They don’t appear interested in examining whether their overwhelming drive for deregulation contributed to an environment where important reviews into matters affecting life safety were kicked into the long grass.
Not even the death of 72 people was enough to make these politicians realise that, by minimising the state’s role in regulating businesses, their government failed in its most basic of tasks: keeping people safe.
Lucie Heath is the deputy news editor of Inside Housing
