Last week, for the first time, Grenfell Tower’s landlord faced questions at the official inquiry about why the fire spread. There was, predictably, an array of shocking revelations. The most eyecatching was perhaps the admission that during the refurbishment of the building the landlord, Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) held a secret meeting to cut costs.
This meeting, which negotiated reduced costs before Rydon was formally offered the contract, went directly against legal advice KCTMO had received, suggesting that such secret negotiations could break European procurement law. It also fills in a crucial gap in our understanding of how the deadly aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding came to be fitted to the outside of the tower.
When consulted on the refurbishment, Grenfell residents voted for fire-retardant zinc cladding. We know now that KCTMO cared so little for what its residents wanted that it deliberately avoided any democratic oversight of the meeting where it decided to save £293,368 by using ACM instead.
This attitude will not surprise anyone who has been following the story of Grenfell Tower as it has unfolded over the last three years. Grenfell residents, it is clear, were systematically ignored and disrespected before the fire, in ways that led directly to their homes becoming death traps. It has been widely reported that the Grenfell Action Group, made up of residents of the tower, published a blogpost warning of fire safety issues and predicting “a serious fire”, “a catastrophic event”.
What is less well known is that the tower’s residents complained repeatedly about the specific problems which, in the end, allowed flames to rip through the 23-storey tower block. Testimonies submitted to the inquiry in 2018 show that after the refurbishment, at least 29 residents complained either to KCTMO or to the contractor, Rydon, about faulty fire doors or poorly fitted windows.
Residents reported drafts coming through the windows, pointing towards the faulty construction that allowed fire to spread from the cladding on the outside of the building and into people’s homes. The resident in whose flat the fire started says he personally told builders there were gaps in between the windows and window frames in his home. According to the report submitted to the inquiry by expert witness Luke Bisby, these gaps allowed the fire to spread out of the kitchen, where it started, and on to the extremely flammable cladding.
Just as importantly, many of the fire doors in the tower lacked self-closing devices, which are crucial to prevent smoke and flame spreading through a building. In some cases, when other problems were reported with the doors, according to residents’ testimonies, KCTMO tried to solve these problems by actively removing self-closers.
On the night of the tragedy, fire spread up the ACM cladding in a way it wouldn’t have if the zinc cladding requested by residents had been installed. Flames lapped into people’s flats through poorly constructed windows that residents had complained about repeatedly. As residents tried to escape down the single stairway, fire doors failed to stop the spread of smoke, which clogged the stairwell, blinding and choking those who tried to escape.
This evidence goes directly against the picture of complaining Grenfell residents that defenders of the council have tried to paint. They have often claimed that residents’ complaints were based merely on their political opposition to the Conservative council leadership and did not address factors that led to the fire spreading. And last week, we learned that in return for their questions and complaints, residents were branded “antagonists” in an email sent by their own landlord and “rebel residents” in an email from a Rydon manager. Is it any wonder, if this was how KCTMO thought about its tenants, that it would hold a secret meeting to reverse their wishes for the refurbishment?
Of course, it is also important to consider why KCTMO was so desperate to save money on this project. We have seen numerous pieces of evidence showing that the local council, which owned the tower, was constantly looking for ways to reduce the project’s budget. As revealed by Inside Housing, this was the direct result of a government limit on council borrowing introduced by George Osborne in 2012, a limit that was scrapped in 2018.
Questioning has produced other shocking evidence. KCTMO asked only about the “cost” and “appearance” of the cladding, not its fire safety. The architectural firm working on the project had never been involved in a cladding project before this one. KCTMO’s project manager destroyed notes of her work on the refurbishment after the fire without informing the police.
It is to be hoped that the inquiry also considers how national government policy made the devastating fire possible. Apart from the borrowing rules, the inquiry heard last month of the impact of austerity on the council’s building control department, which signs off construction projects. The team was cut in half, leaving the inspector in charge of Grenfell covering three roles on his own, with 130 projects on the go at once.
Meanwhile other, larger issues have yet to be mentioned. Will the inquiry look at the effects of Thatcherite deregulation, New Labour privatisation or the failures of successive housing ministers to respond to repeated warnings about fire safety rules?
Many of these broader considerations are just as revealing of negligence and a disregard for residents’ safety as the inquiry’s revelations. The fear, however, is that these are political matters and that the inquiry is not equipped to deal with them. For the sake of Grenfell residents, we must hope that someone is.
• Luke Barratt is an investigative reporter for SourceMaterial