The end of the Grenfell Tower public inquiry after 400 days of evidence shifts the spotlight to Scotland Yard. Key protagonists – including former officials at the landlord body that oversaw the refurbishment – are under investigation for serious criminal offences as part of the Met police’s Operation Northleigh investigation into the fire, which involves 180 dedicated officers and detectives.
Criminal convictions and jail sentences are strongly desired by bereaved and survivors but any criminal trials may not start before 2025, more than seven years after the disaster, the Guardian understands.
The Metropolitan police will await publication of the full inquiry report before presenting evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to consider if charges will be brought. Potential crimes include corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, fraud and health and safety offences. The inquiry is not expected to publish its report until at least October 2023 and it could be early 2024. The timeline suggests trials may not start until 2025. If 12-year-old Jessica Urbano Ramirez had not died taking refuge in a neighbour’s top floor flat, she would be approaching her 21st birthday.
By this summer, 40 people had been interviewed under caution, with more than 100 more expected to face the same process, Stuart Cundy, a deputy assistant commissioner at the Met has said. Fraud, gross negligence manslaughter and health and safety offences by individuals can be punishable by imprisonment. Corporate manslaughter and health and safety offences by organisations my attract unlimited fines.
The inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, will meanwhile digest synopses of evidence produced by the inquiry’s lawyers before drafting findings identifying failings and determining accountability. It is a huge undertaking for the retired appeal court judge.
The inquiry has disclosed 320,000 documents and the 75-year-old is working alongside fellow panellists, Thouria Istephan, an architect, and Ali Akbor, a housing specialist. They will also produce recommendations for change that could include toughening fire safety rules and the treatment of social housing tenants.
A separate high court civil litigation process is under way involving more than 1,100 members of the Grenfell community, estates of the 72 people who died, and emergency responders and many of the organisations involved in the refurbishment ranging from the landlord, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council, to Arconic, the cladding manufacturer. Lord Neuberger, a former supreme court president, is acting as a mediator. The actions could result in multimillion-pound payouts, admissions of responsibility and other remedies.
Plans are advancing to turn the remains of Grenfell Tower, or perhaps more likely its site, into a permanent memorial to the disaster. A commission is considering whether to conserve parts of the building and is set to run a design competition. It has recently visited a memorial to the Manchester Arena bombing, which happened three months before the fire. The community is being consulted on who should own it and what it should feel like and be used for, for example as a space to gather, for memorial events, prayer, reflection, education activities and children’s activities.
Political turmoil has disrupted progress in two other key areas: reform of social housing and particularly tenants’ voices; and solving the nationwide building safety crisis which has left hundreds of thousands of leaseholders in high and medium-rise apartment blocks with unsellable homes.
The government is yet to deliver on pledges in its social housing white paper to empower residents and increase consumer standards. On Thursday, it told the Grenfell inquiry that “where further change is necessary, the department is committed to implementing it”. Michael Gove, who recently returned to his role as secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, is also under pressure to ensure developers who promised to fund and carry out remediation on affected private blocks do so and to speed up the rollout of a £4.5bn building safety fund. Many bereaved and survivors see action on these fronts as central to achieving justice.
