Grenfell Inquiry day four: firefighters defend response to fire

Day four

Representatives for the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), the Fire Officers Association (FOA) and the LFB presented their verbal opening statements on the fourth day of evidence hearings at the Grenfell Inquiry this morning.

Soon after proceedings finished for the day, the BBC reported that the Metropolitan Police is investigating the LFB’s use of the ‘stay put’ police during the fire.

Speaking on behalf of LFB, Stephen Walsh said Grenfell was a “singular event” and that the scale of safety failures at the tower caused a “unique and unprecedented challenge” for firefighters.

He said that – unlike buildings with similar cladding in other parts of the world – Grenfell Tower was not designed to support an evacuation strategy in case of a fire.

Mr Walsh told the inquiry it is a “fundamental misunderstanding” to assume that the stay put policy at Grenfell could have been changed to simultaneous evacuation “at the stroke of a fire incident commander”.

Numerous factors, including the lack of a working fire lift or of an effective system to communicate the new message to residents effectively, would have made this difficult, he said.

The inquiry should question whether simultaneous evacuation was ever a “practical option” at Grenfell, Mr Walsh added.

He said stay put “is not a creation of the fire service” but a strategy they are supposed to apply when fighting fires in high rises which were built to contain fire, and that the inquiry should “urgently consider” whether refurbishments of buildings like Grenfell have undermined their integrity.

And he questioned whether it was reasonable and in the public interest to “expect fire services to develop operational policy on the presumption that buildings such as Grenfell Tower are inherently unsafe”.

He also called on the inquiry to recommend changes to fire safety regulations, including requiring the retrofitting of sprinklers in tower blocks.

FBU lawyer, Martin Seaward, said the refurbishment of Grenfell had left it “a highly combustible death trap” and said that criticisms of the emergency response to the fire “should not be exploited by those who created the danger”.

He said that neither Kensington and Chelsea Council nor Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation seemed to have planned for an evacuation strategy at Grenfell if compartmentation was breached, and that the inquiry should question whether there was also failure “at a national level” to prepare for this kind of event.

The inquiry was told that the FBU “reserves its position” as to when the stay put advice should have been changed because of the “difficulties and dangers” of evacuating the block.

Louis Browne, speaking for the FOA, said the inquiry should avoid judging firefighters’ actions on the night of the fire “with the benefit of hindsight”.

The tower’s stair and lobbies “did not create, nor were they designed to create” a safe environment for residents to evacuate the building while firefighters attempted to tackle the blaze, he added.

Mr Seaward and Mr Browne both strongly denied that racism played any part in firefighters’ actions on the night of the fire.

On Tuesday, Imran Khan, acting for a group of people bereaved by the fire and survivors, asked if there was “unconscious or some conscious racism” in the way firefighters responded to the fire.

Concluding proceedings today, Richard Millett QC, speaking on behalf of the inquiry, said the team will “give very careful consideration” to the possibility of publishing urgent recommendations before its chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, releases his final phase one report.

The inquiry continues.

Proceedings are due to resume with presentations from the inquiry experts on 18 June.