SIX years ago today, London awoke to the almost unimaginable news that a fire in a north Kensington tower block had taken a terrible toll in human life. The horror of the news — that people in a tall building had been trapped in their own homes to die in the fire — gave rise first to shock, then to anger, as it became clear that what killed them was, above all, the cladding used on the block which ensured that the fire spread with horrible speed. Many people in London live in high-rise buildings; few of them did not think, “what if it happened to me?”
Seventy two months on, the inquiry into the deaths of those 72 people under the chairmanship of Sir Martin Moore-Bick still has not produced a final report and may not do so before next year. This is astonishing. Without a report, without individuals being brought to account for their negligence, misjudgment and wrongdoing, there can be no real closure for the victims’ families. Furthermore, police and the CPS will not prosecute individuals while the inquiry is still underway, although they have interviewed no fewer than 40 people under caution.
One moral, then, is that public inquiries such as these must have a time limit for their work. We expect the Covid inquiry to finish its hearings in three years and to provide interim findings next year on a crisis that cost so many lives: the Grenfell inquiry, dealing with 72 deaths, is almost six years old and counting.
The failures that the tragedy exposed go far beyond the individuals who were directly concerned with the fatal cladding. The unquestioning faith that many of us had in the fire service has not survived the revelation that the fire brigade in this crisis was not only astonishingly late in tackling the blaze but gave the terrified Grenfell residents the wrong advice about what to do. They advised them to stay where they were; that was fatally wrong.
Although we still do not have a final report, we do have a dozen recommendations from Sir Martin’s first report in 2019. As the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, points out on this page, a third of them have yet to be implemented. That is inexcusable, especially given that one of them is to do with the necessity of providing disabled residents with a personal evacuation plan in the event of an emergency.
Valuable lesson
The most valuable lesson of the Grenfell tragedy is that Grenfell was not unique. Buildings all over London and the country had identical or similar cladding to the kind which had such horrifying results in the fire. As David Lammy observes on this page, developers are obliged to fund the work to remove aluminium composite cladding on high-rise buildings over 18 metres but that obligation does not cover the majority of medium-rise buildings. Six years on, 200 high-rise buildings in London still have flammable cladding; meanwhile, many homeowners face high bills in unsellable flats.
Six years on, we remember in thoughts and prayers the 72 people who died, whose terrible deaths could have been avoided. Their lives were precious. Their legacy must be that the same thing cannot happen to others.
