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Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 16: ‘I conclude this was very serious evidence of professional negligence’

Insight30.10.20by Jack Simpson

This week saw members of Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation finish giving evidence, before the inquiry’s expert witnesses took the stand to make some highly critical assessments of the work they had seen before and during the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower. Jack Simpson recaps

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It was an explosive week at the Grenfell Inquiry with a number of revelations and some stinging criticism of the refurbishment. Here’s @JSimpsonjourno’s take on proceedings #UKhousing

The “offline” meeting

Before the inquiry’s expert witnesses could be questioned, the inquiry had one more day of questioning for Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), the organisation that managed the Grenfell refurbishment.

After two days of forensic questioning last week, Peter Maddison, at the time director of assets at KCTMO, was back once again with focus on the body’s procurement processes and the choice of Rydon as its preferred contractor. Mr Maddison was one of the leading players in the selection of Rydon as contractor.

At the heart of this was an interrogation around an “offline” meeting that took place between Mr Maddison, his KCTMO colleagues and Rydon, just a day before Rydon was officially named preferred contractor for the job.

While Mr Maddison refuted that this had been a “secret meeting” and said he had been “open and transparent” about it taking place to the KCTMO board, Richard Millet, lead counsel to the inquiry, pointed out that he had not mentioned this meeting in his notebooks and that it had been omitted from some future reports he had put together on the project.

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Mr Millett also brought to Mr Maddison’s attention advice from law firm Trower & Hamlins which suggested that any communication about price that was exchanged between a client and a contractor prior to the award of a contract would be in breach of the Official Journal of the European Union’s procurement rules.

Mr Maddison was clear that these discussions did not include conversations about price and were instead focused on the “processes” of the contract.

When asked by inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick whether he felt he had breached procurement rules by having these meetings, Mr Maddison said it was not a breach but it “didn’t strictly comply with the letter of the process”. He also said he knew it would open KCTMO up to a potential challenge from other bidders but believed it was “the right thing to do commercially”.

Later, another email from Trowers & Hamlins would emerge asking Mr Maddison directly if he had considered whether Rydon’s bid was “abnormally low” and “sustainable”.

Rydon’s initial bid had come in at £9.2m, £600,000 lower than the nearest bidder, Durkan.

When asked whether he thought the level of the bid was too low, Mr Maddison said that it had been a consideration in the original valuation but that KCTMO and its advisor Atelier had carried out a “very thorough evaluation” of the price.

And even though Rydon had bid well below its competitors, its £9.2m bid was still £700,000 above the budget set aside by KCTMO for the refurbishment work.

When pushed on whether that was too low a budget, Mr Maddison said: “There was a consideration given to this but in reality the project was delivered on budget and that’s the best sign as to whether or not the price was the correct price.”

Mr Millett responded: “Mr Maddison, if I should say so, the fact that the project was delivered on budget is not of great assistance to us given that we know what happened to the building.”

At the heart of this reduction was the switch from zinc panels to aluminium composite material (ACM) and installing these in cassette form. The cladding was non-compliant and the installation in cassette form was far more dangerous, but far cheaper, than the face-fixed form that was initially suggested

When asked whether he would have done anything differently in the project if he had known what he knows now, fighting back tears, Mr Maddison said: “Knowing what I know now, there is no way we would have ever clad that building in anything that was flammable.

“It’s just devastating, I am so sorry for the impact it has had on so many people.”

The missing notebooks

Mr Maddison’s evidence on the procurement of Rydon came seven days after one of the most dramatic moments during proceedings at the Bishop’s Bridge Road building.

At the start of his evidence just a week before, it was revealed that he had only recently disclosed eight day books and five diaries, totalling 300 pages.

Day one of this week’s evidence ended with Mr Maddison (pictured above) being grilled about this late disclosure.

The question has lingered since the stash of notebooks was unearthed, why Mr Maddison had only made the inquiry aware of these notebooks, which Mr Millet described as of the “utmost importance”, three years after the fire.

Mr Maddison’s response was simple: he had never been advised to do anything with them.

According to his account, he had asked a partner at Kennedys, the law firm representing KCTMO, what he should do with the notebooks in 2018, and he claims he was told to keep hold of them.

He said: “I’ve never, since I’d done the transcription, I hadn’t looked at those books at all, and after I flagged them up to Kennedys and they just said ‘keep hold of them’, and I have left them.”

Equally interesting was the revelation that Mr Maddison had in fact used the notebooks in the months after the Grenfell Tower fire to construct a timeline of events during the refurbishment and in the lead-up to the fire. This was sent in an email to Kennedys at the time, titled ‘My Notebooks’.

When asked by Sir Martin why it had not occurred to him to remind the solicitors of the presence of these books in recent years, he said the process was unfamiliar to him and he was just following the advice of his legal advisors.

He said that he had stored the books away and largely forgot about them, until a few weeks ago when he saw other KCTMO witnesses referring to their own notebooks. When he saw this, he reminded staff at Kennedys, who then disclosed them immediately, he said.

The ‘failings’ of building control

On day two, the focus switched to the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC), and the authority’s building control arm. RBKC building control was charged with checking the design and construction before and during the Grenfell refurbishment.

Expert witness Beryl Menzies (pictured above), a building control officer with decades of experience, was tasked with putting together a report looking at the performance of RBKC.

Ms Menzies revealed what she claimed to be a series of failings in its work to identify and remedy issues with the block’s design.

When asked whether the plan put forward to building control was adequate, she said that she believed it was not, and that it should have been rejected by building control before construction work even started.

At the heart of this was what she called a “fundamental failing” in not asking about the block’s cladding system. The ACM on the tower has now been proven as the key contributor to the spread of the fire.

Ms Menzies said that at no point did it appear that the building control team sought details about the materials in the cladding system, or the external wall as a whole, and ascertain whether they were compliant.

She added: “Failure to ask for detailed information about the cladding system was a fundamental failing.”

Alongside this was Ms Menzies’ belief that the building control team failed to recognise that some of the information from the project team was out of date and contradictory.

John Hoban, a building control surveyor at RBKC, said he did not read in full the specifications for the dangerous cladding and insulation that were put on the block before approving the products, and said building control teams would accept these certificates – published by an independent third party certified by the British Board of Agrément – “without question”.

Interrogating Grenfell’s fire strategy

The past two days at the inquiry saw expert witness Dr Barbara Lane assess the work of Exova. Dr Lane did not pull any punches in her criticism of the work, providing a litany of examples of what she saw as “missed opportunities” and “inadequate advice”.

Exova was responsible for providing the fire reports for the existing Grenfell Tower ahead of the refurbishment, and was retained to provide fire safety advice and strategy during the refurbishment.

Dr Lane began by taking aim at Exova’s work on the existing building. During evidence it was revealed that the initial check had consisted of a two-hour visit of the building, and that Exova billed KCTMO for just three-and-a-half days of work to compile the report for the existing building.

Dr Lane called this a “wholly insufficient” timeframe for the checks and an “inadequate amount of time” to compile the fire safety strategy as a whole. She said she believes that the initial check would have required two people inspecting for a day, and that the report should have taken weeks to compile.

The Exova report would later to go on to state that “due to a high degree of compartmentation (in the Grenfell Tower) and therefore a low probability of fire spread beyond the dwelling of the fire origin, simultaneous evacuation of the building is unlikely to be considered necessary”.

Dr Lane questioned what evidence Exova had used to come to that conclusion about the building having a “high degree of compartmentation”.

The "rapid" failure of compartmentation inside Grenfell Tower was deemed a "very considerable concern" in chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick's first phase report.

In the afternoon, when questioning focused on the advice provided by Exova during the refurbishment, Dr Lane gave her strongest criticism.

In two Exova reports to KCTMO that were submitted ahead of the refurbishment work starting, Exova’s engineer Terry Ashton said that “proposed changes [in the refurbishment] will have no adverse effect on the building in relation to external fire spread”. He added that this would be “confirmed in a future issue of this report”.

Responding to this evidence, Dr Lane said that this “critically” failed to identify that overcladding was part of the refurbishment but that it went on to report that the changes would not impact the spread of fire.

“The records show the staff at Exova had never analysed the external wall construction proposals and so were not in any position to make this statement.

“Therefore, I conclude this was very serious evidence of professional negligence, from my perspective as a practising fire engineer.”

Exova would later say that it would respond in full to Dr Lane’s evidence in its submission in May 2021. However, it did point to the fact that it was never informed of the decision to use ACM and that it was not involved in the choice of cladding panel.

It also said that it made clear that the question of external fire spread was subject to analysis, and that responsibility of the project was transferred to Rydon when it became principal contractor of the scheme.

Construction’s culture problem

Dr Lane’s evidence was not only focused on the work that took place on Grenfell Tower. She also used the inquiry to highlight a more widespread culture problem within the construction industry.

While she was keen to point out that many firms in the construction industry carry out great work, she was keen to point out that some things seen in the refurbishment of Grenfell were examples of behaviours that were far more widespread across the sector.

After being shown an email from Exova staff member Cate Cooney to a colleague, in which she described the refurbishment of Grenfell as “making a crap situation worse” and saying Exova’s work would be a matter of “working the worse bits out and making the new stuff work”, Dr Lane (pictured above) said that this sort of attitude reflected a culture in the sector that she had experienced during her career.

She said: “For me, fire safety engineering is about protecting people.

“It is a massive responsibility. I used the word scary, and I mean it most sincerely. It is a massive responsibility.

“But when you forget that, and you get caught up in the game of, you know, making things work, getting things through, you forget about your primary responsibility, which is protecting people. And this has been a problem in the construction industry, based on my own experience.”

After giving nearly a day and a half of evidence assessing Exova’s performance, she was then asked by counsel Kate Grange if she had a response to those who might say she was benchmarking the work at Grenfell to a “gold standard” that was not practical for fire safety engineers to adhere to in the field.

Responding, Dr Lane said: “I would say, ‘how rude’, and then I would ask what is ‘gold standard’. The only benchmark I have used in this work is all of the published guidance and absolutely nothing else.

“If I was to draw anything else, I think my report would be classified as even more critical than it has been.

“So I have expressly and deliberately relied on published guidance docs and referred to them every time. And if there are people who think that is gold standard, well shame on them.”

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