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‘Culture of complacency’ among politicians to blame for Grenfell tragedy, Fire Brigades Union says
Deep-seated “complacency” and years of deregulation of fire safety by successive governments is ultimately to blame for the Grenfell Tower fire, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has claimed.
In a new paper, the FBU said decisions made by every government since Margaret Thatcher have led to the “gutting of the UK’s fire safety regime”, which can be blamed for the tower block tragedy in June 2017.
The union has published a new paper to coincide with an event on Monday at the Labour Party conference in Brighton, at which Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will speak alongside Emma Dent Coad, MP for Kensington; Matt Wrack, general secretary at the FBU; and Gill Kernick, a former Grenfell resident and building safety expert.
The report, The Grenfell Tower fire: a crime caused by profit and deregulation, concludes that the government, over consecutive administrations, failed to regulate high-rise residential buildings properly for fire safety, and that the expertise of firefighters “has mostly been substituted with management consultants, industry lobbyists and chief fire officers”.
Mr Wrack said: “For at least 40 years, policies relating to housing, local government, the fire and rescue service, research and other areas have been driven by the agenda of cuts, deregulation and privatisation.
“Deregulation has been the dominant political ideology of most politicians in central government for decades. But it has also been fostered by the direct lobbying of private business interests. A deep-seated culture of complacency has developed regarding fire policy and fire safety, and central government bears ultimate responsibility.”
The paper covers events that the FBU said have led to the deregulation of fire safety, including the Tony Blair government’s 2004 scrapping of the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council, and the decision by Edward Heath’s government to remove a requirement for blocks of flats to have mandatory fire certification from the final Fire Precautions Bill 1970.
It also said that the last coalition government cut fire budgets by around 28% in real terms, and claimed that ministers ignored warnings from previous fires that raised risks seen at Grenfell, including the Harrow Court fire in 2005, the Lakanal House fire in 2009 and the Shirley Towers fire in 2010.
