Police are under pressure to accelerate the criminal investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire after an excoriating report found that companies operated with “systematic dishonesty” and that all 72 deaths were avoidable.
A seven-year public inquiry culminated on Wednesday in a report that laid bare “decades of failure” by central government and egregious behaviour by a string of multimillion-dollar firms involved in the tower’s disastrous refurbishment.
Sir Martin Moore-Bick, who led the inquiry, found that firms which made the combustible materials used on the tower – Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan – “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to … mislead the market”.
He identified incompetence, “cavalier” attitudes and “concealment” of wrongdoing, while Grenfell residents’ safety concerns were dismissed by their local authority and the landlord of the west London building they called home.
After the publication of the long-awaited findings, Natasha Elcock, chair of the families’ group Grenfell United, sent a message to the Metropolitan police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), saying: “It is now on to you to deliver justice.”
Speaking in the Commons, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, issued “an apology on behalf of the British state” and said the report prompted “a renewed determination to ensure that justice is delivered”. He pledged to “give all support and resource that’s necessary”.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said “those responsible must now be immediately held to account”, while the local MP, Joe Powell, said with “no charges and no arrests … the government and the police must now do everything in their power to bring those responsible to justice using the full force of the law”.
But the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Stuart Cundy, immediately pleaded for patience, saying it would take a further 12 to 18 months to examine the inquiry report “line by line” before files could be sent to the CPS to weigh possible charges.
More than 180 police officers are investigating 58 suspected individuals and 19 companies, with potential charges including corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, fraud and misconduct in public office.
There was a reminder of the severe human cost of the disaster as Moore-Bick, a former judge who opened the inquiry after the blaze in 2017, addressed bereaved and survivors gathered at the west London inquiry room before reading out the names of the 72 people who died, including six members of the Choucair family and five from the El-Wahabi family.
The clarity of the inquiry’s conclusions reignited frustration among some bereaved and survivors that the police chose to await the conclusions of the inquiry before considering charges.
Hisam Choucair, who lost his mother, his sister, her husband and their three daughters, told a press conference the inquiry had prevented prosecutions from being brought and “it has delayed the justice my family deserves”.
In 2019, the Met said it would submit prosecution files by “the latter part of 2021”. Now that looks unlikely to happen until 2026, and no trials are expected before 2027 – a decade after the fire.
In the short term, Starmer said the government would “write to all companies found by the inquiry to be part of these horrific failings as the first step to stopping them being awarded government contracts”.
Earlier this week, the Guardian revealed that about £250m in public contracts in the past five years had been awarded to corporations involved in the high-rise’s refurbishment. One member of Grenfell United demanded that this was brought to an end.
On Wednesday the group said the inquiry had proven their claim that many firms involved were “little better than crooks and killers”.
The 1,700-page report also criticised failures by successive governments to halt the spread of combustible cladding and found that David Cameron’s “bonfire of red tape” deregulation drive meant matters affecting fire safety and risk to life “were ignored, delayed or disregarded” in the years before the fire.
The Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation consistently ignored residents’ views and “treated the demands of managing fire safety as an inconvenience” in “a betrayal of its statutory obligations to its tenants”, it said.
The inquiry also found that:
-
Arconic, the US aluminium giant that supplied the plastic-filled cladding panels that were the main cause of the fire spreading, “deliberately concealed from the market the true extent of the danger of Reynobond 55 PE in cassette form [the panels used on Grenfell], particularly on high-rise buildings”. It sold this product despite knowing that the danger to occupants was “significant”.
-
Celotex, which made most of the combustible foam insulation, “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market”.
-
Kingspan, which made a small amount of the insulation, “knowingly created a false market in insulation for use on buildings over 18 metres in height” by knowingly making a false claim about test results.
Moore-Bick concluded: “One very significant reason why Grenfell Tower came to be clad in combustible materials was systematic dishonesty on the part of those who made and sold the rainscreen cladding panels and insulation products. They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market.”
Kingspan claimed that the report showed “clearly and unambiguously that the type of insulation (whether combustible or non-combustible) was immaterial, and that the principal reason for the fire spread was the PE ACM cladding, which was not made by Kingspan”. It said its “historical failings … were not found to be causative of the tragedy”.
Celotex, which is owned by the conglomerate Saint Gobain, said: “Decisions about design, construction and the selection of materials for the Tower were made by construction industry professionals.”
Arconic rejected any claim that it sold an unsafe product and said it “did not conceal information from or mislead any certification body, customer, or the public”.
The inquiry panel of Moore-Bick, the architect Thouria Istephan and the housing expert Ali Akbor also recommended widespread reforms including a new construction regulator reporting to a cabinet minister and an urgent review of building regulation guidance on fire safety. They suggested that town halls could even be stripped of building control functions, and a national authority created instead.
The inquiry found that Rydon, the main contractor for the Grenfell refurbishment, displayed a “casual attitude to fire safety” and “bears considerable responsibility for the fire”, while Harley Facades, which installed the lethal cladding system, “bears a significant degree of responsibility for the fire” because it assumed others would check it was safe.
The architect Studio E demonstrated “a cavalier attitude to the regulations affecting fire safety” and “bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster”.
There was also criticism of local authority leaders, and the inquiry concluded that financial considerations drove a decision by Laura Johnson, the director of housing, to slow down installation of self-closing mechanisms on fire doors despite warnings from the London fire brigade that their absence compromised fire escape routes. She also opposed a new inspection regime.
She did so “without having taken any advice about the consequences for the safety of residents”, the inquiry found. Smoke spread into escape routes on the night of the fire through open doors with missing or defective closers.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s response demonstrated a “marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity”. Its chief executive, Nicholas Holgate, was “unduly concerned” for the council’s reputation and “was not capable of taking effective control”.
Many Muslim residents were observing Ramadan, but the council had “no regard for their cultural or religious needs” and people suffered “a significant degree of discrimination in ways that could and would have been prevented if the guidance had been properly followed”, the report found.
Elizabeth Campbell, leader of the council, who was in the inquiry room in Paddington on Wednesday, said she fully accepted the inquiry’ team’s “withering critique of a system broken from top to bottom”.
“It shows beyond doubt that this council failed the residents of Grenfell Tower and the 72 people, including 18 children, who died,” she said. “We failed to keep people safe before and during the refurbishment and we failed to treat people with humanity and care in the aftermath. We will learn from every single criticism in the report.”