People bereaved by the Grenfell Tower fire have accused ministers of “whitewashing” the disaster, drawing parallels between their long fight for justice and the wrongly jailed post office operators.
Shah Aghlani, whose mother and aunt were killed in the fire in west London, told a press conference “the problem the country faces, from the Post Office to Grenfell” is that people in charge when disasters happen “walk away without any consequences”.
Speaking alongside Vijay Parekh, a post office operator whose conviction was quashed in 2021 after he spent six months in jail, Aghlani added: “The whole system is designed to prevent any serious accountability.”
Grenfell survivors have observed the rapid turnaround in the post office operators’ campaign for justice as a result of the ITV docudrama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, last week told parliament hundreds of convictions would be quashed. Many survivors long for a similar acceleration of the wheels of justice, as the seventh anniversary of the fire approaches with the public inquiry yet to report back and no criminal charges brought.
“What I have noticed in the past years since Grenfell is that once the issue dies down, the government goes back to their old ways … and that has been highlighted with the postmasters,” said Farhad Neda, whose father was killed in the fire. “Over the past few years they have been so silent about it and now that it’s come back into the media, they are starting to take action.”
The bereaved were speaking at a press conference in London organised by the Grenfell Next of Kin group.
At hearings next week, people who survived and those who lost relatives and friends in the fire that killed 72 people will directly confront representatives of bodies accused of failures that led to the blaze – companies such as the insulation manufacturers Celotex and Kingspan and authorities including the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
The four-day Grenfell Testimony Week was agreed as part of the settlement of a civil claim brought by hundreds of people caught up in the disaster in which they secured £150m in compensation from defendants.
People giving testimony will include Hanan Wahabi, who lost five members of her family, and Behailu Kebede, in whose flat the fire started. Arconic, the US multinational that made the highly combustible cladding panels, has sparked anger by declining to attend.
The solidarity between the Grenfell and Post Office campaigners comes amid increasing frustration at delays to justice. The Grenfell Tower public inquiry report is not expected to be published until the summer – six years after proceedings opened.
The Metropolitan police will not send files to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider criminal charges until after that. It means any trials are unlikely to start until at least 2025.
Hisam Choucair, who lost six members of his family, said: “The sequencing was done intentionally to dampen the fight of the families in the justice of our loved ones … and it was a get out of jail card for the crooks to prepare their own cases, to claim immunity, to hide behind statutory law. It’s disgraceful.”
“It’s all whitewash. We should have gone straight into the police investigation,” said Hamid Ali Jafari, whose father was killed in the fire.
“It’s close to seven years and still we are fighting. So for me the inquiry is kind of a waste of time … if that was a celebrity, royal family, any rich person, any famous person [who] died in Grenfell would they be the same like us, six years still fighting for justice? I don’t think so. It would have been done so much quicker.”
Aghlani said: “This problem of unaccountability and incompetence among the elite is quite often dismissed or they turn a blind eye to it. They don’t address it.
“We can see time and time again that people who are in charge and on their watch, disasters happen and they walk away without any consequences.
“If we had a system in place to keep these corporations in check, just like they do in North America, they would not be able to turn a blind eye to systemic failure they preside over.
“The checks and balances of the system just aren’t there. They know they can get away with doing whatever they like and get away with minimal fines or repercussions. You can see it in the Post Office scandal.”
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has been contacted for comment.
