Andrew Tickell: Grenfell Tower inquiry did not blame firefighters

Some have made a real difference, holding up a mirror to public institutions, identifying the responsible and holding them to account. Lady Smith’s ongoing Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry is a case in point. Already, the judge has found generations of cruelty, malice and indifference at Scotland’s supposedly “caring” institutions. Physical, emotional, sexual: what these kids experienced is beyond the count of grief. Trying to reckon with this dark part of this country’s life is painful, but necessary, work.

But often, public inquiries can seem like the longest of the long grass – drawn out, legalistic and ruinously expensive, the last resort of a cabinet minister under pressure, keen to be seen to be doing something about The Scandal of the Day. And let’s be honest with ourselves: public inquiries can be a place where real controversies are sent to die quietly, as officialdom or state-minded judges temporise, rationalise and excuse wrongdoing in the sleekest of Whitehall prose, until the public loses interest and the political agenda moves on.

It was inevitable, therefore, that Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s investigation into the causes of the Grenfell Tower fire were going to be closely scrutinised and the subject of sceptical analysis. You can understand why. Before the fire, residents in the block felt the managers of the property were ignoring their concerns about fire safety. And on the face of it, Sir Martin stepped right out of British Establishment central casting. A retired, Cambridge-educated Court of Appeal judge – who has lived a life at considerable social distance from the tenants who called Grenfell Tower home, and who burned with it – might strike you as an unlikely critic of the status quo.

On Monday, the Telegraph newspaper ran with a front page “Fire brigade condemned for failings at Grenfell”. They did so as relatives of the lost and killed were privately digesting the inquiry’s findings, having been granted early access to the first tranche of findings on the basis of an agreement not to disclose the report’s contents in advance of its official publication. The response was rapid and emotional. For many, this immediately confirmed their worst fears about the inquiry’s work.

“Another whitewash!” “Well, what do you expect? The Establishment always protects its own.” “Blaming the firefighters? What about the cladding?” “Another Hutton.” If you only followed this reaction, you might think the judge had ignored the role played by Kensington and Chelsea Council – the landlord of the property – and exonerated suppliers and contractors who installed the fatal cladding around its 1960s concrete core. If you took your cue from the Telegraph, you might imagine the judge had put his polished black brogues into the ordinary firemen who braved the inferno again and again that night to rescue residents from the smoke and flame.

In fact, he did nothing of the kind. Far from effacing the blame attaching to the local council and its contractors, Moore-Bick’s first report directly implicates the local authority and their contractors in the deaths and injuries which this horrible fire caused. And remarkably, this fake outrage seems to have drowned out this damning conclusion.

While he was critical of the training, planning and decision-making of London’s fire commanders, he rightly praised the firefighters who attended the tower for “displaying extraordinary courage and selfless devotion to duty” and the “unstinting efforts of the call room staff, who were faced with an unprecedented volume of often harrowing calls as Grenfell burned.

Martin Moore-Bick’s first report into the Grenfell disaster begins in medias res, on the night of the fire which burned out the 24-storey housing block in London on the June 14, 2017, killing 72 residents and injuring many more. It reads a night from hell. At 12.54am, the fire service received its first phone call. The first firefighters were on the scene within five minutes. By 1.09am, the fire was already climbing the building’s east facade. It wasn’t until 7.08am the following morning that the final resident – Elpidio Bonifacio – was liberated from the blackened ruins of his home.

It began as a result of an electrical fault in a fridge freezer in Flat 16. A concrete block, the flats had been refurbished by Kensington and Chelsea council in 2016, and aluminium composite rain screen panels with a polyethylene core had been mounted around the building, surrounded by combustible insulation.

The report found that “once the fire had escaped from Flat 16, it spread rapidly up the east face of the tower. It then spread around the top of the building in both directions and down the sides until the advancing flame fronts converged on the west face near the south-west corner, enveloping the entire building in under three hours.”

Instead of containing the fire, when they burned, the newly installed cladding sent molten polyethylene cascading down the building, igniting lower floors. Instead of dampening the blaze, the inquiry found these panels “acted as a source of fuel”. In the intense heat this generated, the glass in the tower’s windows failed and the flames spread to flat after flat, creeping through extractor fans and open fire doors.

But in terms of the “primary cause” of this rapidly spreading fire, there’s no doubt who Moore-Bick holds responsible. And it wasn’t the firefighters.

It’s a matter of law. Schedule 1 of the Building Regulations requires the external walls of a building “to adequately resist the spread of fire over the walls”. In the teeth of arguments by the cladding and insulating contractors that their products couldn’t be blamed for causing the racing flames which consumed Grenfell, the judge described it as “an affront to common sense” to say Kensington and Chelsea and their suppliers and contractors had adequately protected the social tenants who called Grenfell home from the risk of climbing fire when they reclad the building.

Moore-Bick’s judgment on this was categorical. “Following the refurbishment, the external walls of the building did not comply with the building regulations, because they did not adequately resist the spread of fire over them. On the contrary, they promoted it.” The old concrete exterior of Grenfell wouldn’t burn. “That changed fundamentally when the cladding system was added during the main refurbishment.”

The principal focus of the next phrase of the inquiry’s work “will be on the decisions which led to the installation of a highly combustible cladding system on a high-rise residential building and the wider background against which they were taken”.

We should give Martin Moore-Bick the space to do this work. We shouldn’t leap to conclusions. There’s a dreadful irony to the immediate reaction to the Telegraph story. The people crying “whitewash” within hours of Moore-Bick’s report being published weren’t judging the judge on his real conclusions, but were reacting to – and buying – the spin put on the story by the House Journal of the Conservative Party. It is them – not Moore-Bick – who were using firefighters as human shields. It was them – not Moore-Bick – peddling convenient deflections from the wider implications of the inquiry’s findings. Maintain a healthy scepticism, but don’t let synthetic fury drown out the real scandal.