When Will There Be Justice for Grenfell Survivors?

This week, the long-awaited Grenfell report was published (the first hearings of the inquiry were convened in September 2017, in the halcyon days of Theresa May). The findings are absolutely damning. The Grenfell report identifies “systematic dishonesty” on the part of cladding and insulation manufacturers – stating outright that Kingspan, Celotex and Arconic “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market”.

Arconic, who produced the combustible cladding panels, had known about some of the risks of their cladding for close to a decade before the Grenfell fire. In 2007, company executives attended a presentation in Oslo which compared the combustibility of 5,000 sq metres of cladding to a truck containing 19,000 litres of oil. But according to the Grenfell inquiry, there are no signs that anyone at the company took steps to assess the safety of the product used on Grenfell Tower, or even just assess whether they might want to only sell cladding with a fire-resistant core. What are human lives compared to the profit margin, eh?

Worse still, Arconic withheld from the market (by which we mean the people building homes, and those living in them) that the fire-safety rating of their cladding had been downgraded. As the Grenfell report puts it, Arconic “was determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries (including the UK)”. The company has refused to accept any wrongdoing.

But, as the Grenfell report makes clear, it’s not just the cladding and insulation manufacturers who bear the blame. There’s the building materials tester, who compromised the integrity of their research by advising Celotex and Kingspan on how best to tickbox the safety criteria. There’s the government, who by 2016 were aware of the cladding risks to high-rise buildings, but failed to act on them. There’s the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, who failed to meet the basic needs of those displaced by the fire in the days following the tragedy. And there’s the Tenant Management Organisation, whose haughty attitude to Grenfell residents meant they “lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home.”

As John McDonnell once put it, the Grenfell blaze was “social murder”. 72 people, overwhelmingly working class people of colour, were killed as the result of the profiteering and callousness of multiple organisations. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, has urged the police and prosecutors to act “as quickly as possible”, and agreed with Grenfell campaigners that “justice delayed is justice denied”. But the exodus of MPs leaving the chamber just as Keir Starmer was due to make a statement on the inquiry report is a troubling sign of how politicians might be feeling about the Grenfell blaze. Had it been a statement about e.g. an inquiry into a terrorist attack, it’s difficult to imagine that MPs would similarly high-tail it out of the chamber. Though 72 people were killed, and many more live with the trauma of what happened, clearly a significant number of politicians consider Grenfell yesterday’s news.

Good investigations and inquiries take time. But time can also atrophy the drive for accountability. Momentum fades, and things start to go wrong. Though successive reports and inquests were damning, criminal prosecutions over the Hillsborough disaster collapsed in 2021 over a legal technicality. It is utterly critical that, in the case of Grenfell, the same mistakes aren’t made and urgency is maintained.