Grenfell Tower – Shutterstock
The Grenfell Tower disaster was caused by “individual private companies which were allowed to put profit before people”, according to oral evidence given to the inquiry by Fire Brigades Union lawyer Martin Seaward.
The disaster “represented the culmination of a generation of central government policies including deregulation and the ‘war’ on the culture of health and safety, privatisation, fragmentation, austerity and the degradation of social housing”, Seaward told the inquiry. Elsewhere in his evidence he also emphasised that lessons must be learnt by the London Fire Brigade.
Seaward said that “the building failure was so total and the systemic failings so widespread across the country that it would be wrong to scapegoat the Fire and Rescue Service for the failures of central government and a corporate culture that made people’s homes unsafe”. He added that “the performance of the fire and rescue service” at Grenfell must be assessed “in the wider political and economic context, apportioning blame where it is due, particularly, in relation to those who created and enabled this truly horrifying disaster”.
He added that “it is particularly wrong to blame the individual firefighters and control staff who attended the disaster in its early stages”, in part as “any deficiencies in the performance of the London Fire Brigade were institutional or due to inadequate senior management”.
“The manufacturing companies manipulated the flawed testing and certification regime, the private companies involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower created a wholly unsafe building surrounded by highly flammable material, from which the Tenant Management Organisation’s under-resourced and ineffective fire-risk management system failed to safeguard the residents.
“The lack of care shown by the private companies was facilitated and enabled by policies made since 1979 by central government in the service of a social and economic system driven by the pursuit of profit above all else, including people.”
Naming specific policies here, Seward said “deregulation and the ‘war on the culture of health and safety’ facilitated the use of the inflammable cladding that destroyed Grenfell Tower… privatisation weakened public services and introduced conflicts of interest between safety and profit as we have seen in the testing and certification regimes”.
The union’s latest written submission to the inquiry, released this week, also raised important questions about what the government knew about combustible cladding as far back as 1991 and why this information was not conveyed to the London Fire Brigade. After the fire at Knowsley Heights, Merseyside in 1991, a handwritten government note from the Department of the Environment, which at the time had responsibility for building regulation, to the Building Research Establishment, asked them to “play down” the issue of the cladding fire at Knowsley. Cladding’s contribution to the fire was then “suppressed”, according to the union.
The union believes that the note shows that “the government and the Building Research Establishment” were “significantly invested in the success of cladding schemes”, and in oral statements, Seaward added in relation to the note that “the risk of rapid fire spread associated with combustible cladding systems was deliberately downplayed by government and this significantly contributed to the widespread misunderstanding of this risk”.
Seaward added: “There are important lessons to be learnt by the London Fire Brigade and the fire and rescue service more generally from Grenfell Tower.” Among other things, he said, “operational crews in London had not been informed that building failure was not rare, that compartmentation could not be relied upon and some cladding materials were combustible, nor of the heightened risk of total building failure these combined risks presented in cladded high-rise residential buildings, nor of the resulting need to consider revoking stay put and evacuating such a building, and had not been trained when or how to do so”.
He said that equipment issues caused problems, including communications equipment and aerial appliances.
However, he said responsibility here went wider than simply the fire brigade itself. “Central government, the Chief Fire Officers Association, National Fire Chiefs Council, Chief Fire and Rescue Adviser and the London Fire Brigade failed to equip and prepare the operational crews, incident commanders and control room staff for a major disaster such as Grenfell Tower”.
He added that “any changes or improvements to the fire and rescue service… need to be properly resourced. Central government cannot deregulate, privatise and cut away whilst at the same time increasing the duties of the fire and rescue service”.
Seward stated that “weaknesses in the preparation and performance of the London Fire Brigade”, including in relation to stay-put in buildings where cladding and compartmentation failure were issues “can be traced back to the decision of central government to remove any form of national body for discussing and developing strategy, equipment and operation guidance across the fire and rescue service”. The Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council, which held this role, was abolished in 2004.
He added: “We submit that a properly resourced national body, crucially including the involvement of firefighter representatives, is… essential to ensure that knowledge of risk is translated into policies and guidance which are properly discussed and then disseminated and implemented across the fire and rescue service.”
Expecting individual fire and rescue services to do this themselves was, he said, unfeasible. “It is unrealistic, even where the subject matter is drawn to their attention, to expect fragmented, under-resourced fire and rescue services across the country to be on top of what might be happening at another fire and rescue service without national coordination.”
