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Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 53: ‘They make for chilling reading and harrowing listening’

Insight29.10.214.00 PM by Peter Apps and Lucie Heath

The inquiry’s investigation into central government began this week with lawyers setting out their view on how and why firefighting policies failed. Peter Apps and Lucie Heath report

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The inquiry’s investigation into central government began this week with lawyers setting out their view on how and why firefighting policies failed. Peter Apps and Lucie Heath report #UKhousing

On Thursday, 637 days after the mammoth second phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry began, it started its examination of the actions of central government in the years before the fire.

This module of the inquiry will be split into four parts: firefighting, testing and certification, fire risk assessments and the role of government more generally in maintaining building regulations and responding to recommendations from previous fires.

The openings on Thursday related to the firefighting section, with lawyers for the bereaved and survivors, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade (LFB) giving oral statements.

The key points are summarised below.

‘The policy is one of benign neglect’

Speaking on behalf of one group of the bereaved and survivors, Danny Friedman QC (pictured) dedicated much of his opening to a history of UK fire policy – which he said contributed to the failures at Grenfell Tower.

He said that reviews of the service in the 1990s revealed the post-war fire service was “running aground”. These reviews called for change, but change was not forthcoming.

Instead, when Labour politician Nick Raynsford became fire minister in 2001, a senior civil servant told him “this won’t take up too much of your time”.

“The policy is one of benign neglect,” Mr Friedman quoted the civil servant (Philip Wood) as saying. “The fire service is a medium-sized problem: big enough to cause political trouble if confronted; small enough to be ignored without any apparent adverse consequences.”

In 2002, another review by Professor George Bain called for “change in the service from top to bottom”, in the words of Mr Friedman. This change was enacted with major reforms in 2004.

New Labour, he said, was seeking “modernisation” and “value for money”, as well as to take “an undeniable stand against certain aspects of FBU influence over the fire service”.

Mr Friedman called the union’s position “highly political”. He accused it of “playing to the gallery” and avoiding “open-minded conversation about what type of service was necessary to meet contemporary risk”.

The 2004 reforms introduced a policy of localism. The Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council, which had previously set standards and written policies, was abolished and specific policymaking pushed down to a local level.

Central government would retain the power to set national strategic aims – advised by its chief fire and rescue advisor – but specific policy decisions would now be taken at a local level.

When Labour was replaced with the coalition government in the early 2010s, this localism was “intensified… this time married to a deregulatory zeal”.

Inspections of fire services were axed and replaced with a less rigorous process of peer review. A national training college was sold to Capita, the outsourcing company.

The government was warned that this drive towards localism was not succeeding. Two reviews, one in 2013 and one in 2014, concluded separately that “localism had degenerated into siloism”, with some authorities “rejecting outside ideas and innovation”. But this warning was not heeded by government as it “cut too heavily across the grain of localism and the spirit of the red-tape challenge that prevailed at the time”.

At the same time, responsibility for firefighting was bounced between government departments and it underwent a more than 50% cut in staff. In 2013, a longstanding civil servant wrote that her team “no longer had access to the necessary technical expertise… to establish or determine the appropriateness of fire safety standards”.

The 2009 Lakanal House fire happened in this context: six residents died in south London after being told to “stay put” in a burning high-rise.

The coroner investigating this fire concluded in 2013 that national policy needed to be revised to “inform decisions on evacuation should it become clear during an incident that the stay-put principle is no longer tenable”. But after decades of “benign neglect”, was the government still capable of making such a change?

‘There is nothing like a funding cut to render a conservative and slow-to-change organisation that much more conservative and slow to change’

The key national guidance document in this context is Generic Risk Assessment (GRA) 3.2. This sets generic standards against which local fire authorities decide their policies.

The LFB had been asked to assist in redrafting this after the Lakanal House fire, but when civil servants saw a draft, they felt it “came up short”.

“The major criticism advanced by government was the lack of focus in the original draft on what incident commanders and the control room should do about stay put as a strategy when fire broke from the compartments of origin,” said Mr Friedman.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (responsible for this work, whose offices are pictured above) was also the government department that oversaw building regulations and had included references to the risks from cladding fires in various other policy documents.

“So why was that knowledge within government about a catastrophic risk not nationally highlighted or disseminated down into all fire services?” said Mr Friedman.

Ultimately, the GRA redraft would include instructions to consider evacuation, but this would not be developed into a national strategy. In particular, separate guidance to the social housing sector which encouraged total reliance on stay put and talked down the need to provide plans for disabled residents would not be revised.

The government “should have appreciated that this… combined dangerously with the lack of readiness on the part of operational firefighters to deal with a mass evacuation”, said Mr Friedman. It did not.

Then there was the effect of austerity, which led to a 28% cut to fire services nationally and 19.2% in London.

“There is nothing like a funding cut to render a conservative and slow-to-change organisation that much more conservative and slow to change,” said Mr Friedman.

The brigade felt it was “politically easier and more conducive to labour relations… to make savings in areas that did not reduce the number of fire stations, fire appliances or firefighters”.

Mr Friedman said: “This is significant, because while there is no sensible basis to argue that more firefighters, stations or appliances would have improved the LFB response to the Grenfell Tower fire, it is now obvious that better prevention, protection, policy and training would have done. Austerity prohibited those things.”

‘They make for chilling reading and harrowing listening’

A second opening statement for the bereaved and survivors was given by Professor Leslie Thomas QC (pictured above) and focused on ‘fire survival guidance’ calls (where a resident is trapped in a burning building and can’t escape).

He said the calls “make for chilling reading and harrowing listening” and “lay bare the threads of the institutional failings” within the LFB.

The calls he detailed certainly were upsetting. They included the El-Wahabis, a family of five on the 21st floor, who all died in the fire. The family first called 999 at 1.38am – around 45 minutes into the fire and 10 minutes after flames had reached the top of the tower. The call lasted for just under an hour.

As it progressed, the family explained that they were trapped by smoke and that the flat next door was on fire. But they were continually advised to stay put, and assured help was coming. Even as fire entered their flat and ignited their kitchen, they were not told to leave.

The family was eventually told to leave when they phoned back at 2.46am – but the operator told them to “cover yourself ... [in] wet towels, wet sheets, anything” but did not stay on the line. “Going to have to leave you ... got so many calls coming in,” Professor Thomas read from the transcript. “Caller: ‘You can’t leave.’ Operator: ‘Sorry, I ’ve got to go.’”

During the El-Wahabis’ call, other relatives – who lived in a flat lower down the tower – were watching from outside and saw the flames reaching the flat. They had implored them to flee.

Professor Thomas drew attention to the fact that the control room in Stratford did not have a television turned on during the fire: the control room operators could not see the pictures available to the rest of the world which showed the progress of the fire.

He read several other calls – some from residents who did eventually escape and others from those who died. These included residents with various vulnerabilities that made escape through the smoke-filled corridors particularly hard: asthma, pregnancy and young children.

This was not something the operators picked up on or explored – which Professor Thomas said “illustrate how poor training, poor practices and poor implementation of policies… might result in discriminatory practices and actions”.

More generally, he linked the failures in the call centre to austerity. He cited a 2013 report by Sir Ken Knight, the chief fire and rescue advisor for England at the time who now chairs the government’s independent expert advisory panel, which said cuts to control rooms “can and should be made”.

He also cited a 2017 report from the FBU which said control rooms had been “subjected to more than a decade of…cuts, mergers and under-investment”.

Mr Friedman also touched on the control room, saying that the LFB had considered privatisation before abandoning its plans and keeping the operation in-house but with the addition of a new IT system. He said technical problems with this system “had a significant effect on morale within the control room” and “arrested the development of the quality of the service”.

'They were swamped and did their best'

The lawyers for the bereaved and survivors were followed by short opening statements from lawyers acting for the FBU and the London fire commissioner.

Speaking for the FBU, Martin Seaward (pictured) said the control room was not equipped to cope with more than six calls from trapped residents at any one time.

The control room received 20 of these calls between 1.24am and 1.30am, which he said “outstripped the capacity” of both staff and policies.

“[The control room officers] were swamped and they did their best,” he said. “We say it’s unfair that they should have to bear personal criticism from this inquiry for shortcomings caused by the underlying systemic failings and their inability, despite doing their best, to overcome them in truly extraordinary circumstances.”

Mr Seaward called for the chair of the inquiry, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, to revise criticism of these officers in his report into the night of the fire if he were to conclude “the shortcomings on the night were largely due to systemic failings”.

This was echoed by Stephen Walsh QC, appearing for the commissioner, who said the brigade received more fire survival guidance calls on the night of the fire than in the previous 10 years combined.

“If there are failings, it is not of those individuals. They will be systemic. And the London fire commissioner was very firm about that,” he said.

Mr Walsh used most of his statement to emphasise the ways in which the LFB has changed since the Grenfell Tower fire.

This section of the inquiry will run for five weeks and will feature evidence from former LFB commissioner Dany Cotton and incumbent Andy Roe.

The broader investigation into central government will run until March 2022.

‘The residents were largely regarded as an inconvenience to be managed, rather than human beings’

The inquiry also heard closing statements this week from module three of the inquiry, which was concerned with the management of Grenfell before the fire, zeroing in on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) and Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), the arms-length body that managed the council’s housing.

On Monday morning the inquiry heard from Mr Friedman, who read a statement on behalf of a group of the bereaved, survivors and residents that characterised the Grenfell Tower inquiry as a “human rights disaster”.

These rights included their “consultation rights”, Mr Friedman argued. Despite a legal duty for local authorities to ensure tenants are consulted on major works, the inquiry has heard ample evidence that they were not.

“The residents were largely regarded as an inconvenience to be managed, rather than human beings. The fundamental feature of that attitude is the characterisation of the refurbishment as an act of generosity,” he said.

In its closing statement, RBKC admitted that a “mindset was present within the council” that led it to often believe KCTMO over residents, meaning “residents were not listened to as much as they should have been”.

KCTMO was less forthcoming. Its lawyer, James Ageros QC (pictured above), said its employees “were all well-intentioned and conscientious individuals who have made the vocational choice to work in social housing” and that it was “highly improbable that they would ever have deliberately and purposefully sought to deceive or disadvantage”.

‘A defeatist strategy of make do and mend, even if that meant compromising safety’

Mr Friedman also argued that KCTMO and RBKC breached residents’ “fire safety rights”. Throughout module three, we heard that much of the fire safety equipment in Grenfell Tower was broken or poorly maintained, including fire doors and the smoke ventilation system that went unrepaired for six years.

We also learned that KCTMO had built up a huge backlog of unresolved fire risk assessment actions in the years leading up to the fire and had been served multiple deficiency notices on its stock by the LFB.

Representing another group of the bereaved, survivors and residents, Stephanie Barwise QC said the “insufficient funding of social housing” led to a “defeatist strategy of make do and mend, even if that meant compromising safety”.

RBKC admitted to some fault here as well. For example, it said it was wrong for its head of housing, Laura Johnson, to oppose the introduction of a fire-door inspection programme and conceded that it failed to scrutinise KCTMO properly. However, it also pointed the finger at KCTMO employees for hiding fire safety issues from its board and not making a good enough case to RBKC for investment.

KCTMO denied that employees sought to deliberately keep information from its board. It acknowledged that “not all aspects of its management of the active and passive fire systems were optimal”, but said these systems were not “expected to perform in the extraordinary conditions that pertained on the night when non-compliant fire-propagating products, widely misrepresented and thus misunderstood, had been installed”.

A third right Mr Friedman argued the residents of Grenfell Tower were denied was their “right to equal treatment”, due to KCTMO’s failure to develop personal emergency evacuation plans (PEEPs) for residents.

We know that 41% of disabled residents living in Grenfell died on the night of the fire, alongside many residents who stayed behind to help them. Anne Studd QC, representing the mayor of London, said this should “fill us all with shame”.

On its failure to develop PEEPs, KCTMO said its actions were “no different than that of any other UK provider of general-needs social housing” and said the debate over whether PEEPs should be required within a block like Grenfell “remains unresolved at a national level to this day”.

RBKC pointed to conflicting guidance on the matter at the time and outlined the measures it is now taking to develop PEEPs as it waits for further government guidance on the matter.

The inquiry continues.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry headlines: week 53

Government fire policy ‘an abdication of responsibility to protect life’, inquiry hears

Policies of localism, deregulation and austerity with regard to fire services amounted to “an abdication of responsibility” by the British state with “disastrous consequences” at Grenfell Tower.

Grenfell residents ‘not listened to as much as they should have been’ council admits

A “mindset” existed within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) that meant Grenfell Tower residents were “not listened to as much as they should have been” before the fire, the council has admitted.

Grenfell Tower fire was ‘human rights disaster’, say lawyers for residents

The Grenfell Tower fire was a “human rights disaster” that was caused in part by the council and tenant management organisation’s “disrespect for human dignity”, the inquiry into the fire heard today.

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