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Kate Lamble returns to host a new 10 part BBC Radio 4 series that charts the Grenfell Tower Fire from a flat on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower through years of the public inquiry to now, two weeks before inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore Bick is due to publish his second report.
Grenfell: Building a Disaster carefully and succinctly repackages the complexity of the seven year story of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 people in a tower block in West London in June 2017. Kate reported on the inquiry for six years and revisits aspects of it through interviews with many who also gave evidence at the Inquiry. She tells us “this was a fire that was both foreseeable and preventable.”
“This is a story of corporate deceit, government deregulation and a construction industry engaged in a race to the bottom. It’s a story of missed opportunities, unheeded warnings and the failure of a state to protect its citizens.”
She speaks to Ronnie King, the long-term secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety that was led by the late Sir David Amess. It is a reminder of how that group relentlessly sought to get Ministers to focus on fire safety after the Lakanal House fire in 2009 and how prescient some of their warnings were – the retelling continues to be unsettling.
Professor Guillermo Rein and Dr Barbara Lane offer their expertise based on decades of academic research on buildings and fire behaviour. They offer a renewed rigour that outside of the Inquiry room and free from those restrictions, allows them to express themselves in a way that is, it seems, liberating for them and deeply enlightening for us.
The second phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry focused on the refurbishment of the building in the years before the fire. Kate takes us through the complexity of the combustible material insulating the building and the reason why the fire spread so quickly up and around the 23 storey tower. It took just 18 minutes to climb 19 floors. Picking out the extracts from weeks of inquiry evidence is a huge task and she is only able to touch the surface in this series.
Episode 6 digs into the detail of the myriad contractors working on the refurbishment of the tower. It is startling how little consideration there was by any of the professionals involved in the design and selection of materials for the outside of the tower of fire safety and the implications of wrapping a building in highly flammable cladding.
“If the non-combustible metal cladding was switched out and replaced with the cheaper alternative – the one with the combustible plastic core – that would save more than £400k. It would change everything. This cladding was the main cause of the spread of the fire.”
Ally this with a political environment where regulation was ‘a dirty word’ according to Brian Martin, the civil servant who oversaw the fire safety elements of the building regulations in central government, then you get to a position where cost wins and fire safety comes a very poor second, if it is considered at all.
It is this refurbishment that is the focus of the report that will be published on 4 September. It will carefully and diligently step through the process and undoubtedly contain recommendations for change. The first report that came out back in December 2019 contained 46 recommendations for fire and rescue services, London Fire Brigade specifically and for the government. Services continue to report on their progress and much has changed since the fire in terms of how firefighters are trained and equipped to deal with a fire like Grenfell.
Kate talks to Andy Roe, the London Fire Commissioner. He led the response to the fire on 14 June when it rapidly grew to involve hundreds of firefighters. He wasn’t in charge of the Brigade at the time, taking over from Dany Cotton a few years later. He tells Kate the Brigade knew that cladding represented a risk and that on arriving at the fire in the early hours of the morning to take over command he recalls thinking, “I hope they aren’t telling people to stay in their flats here, this isn’t a fire I intend to put out.” Stay put policy is well explained here by Andy Roe, and goes some way to understand why it was said during the Inquiry to be ‘an article of faith.’
“I still, to this day, think it would have been very hard to foresee the absolute extremity of that incident.”
Andy Roe, Commissioner Fire Commissioner.
He offers an honest and at times hard to hear assessment of the position of the Brigade in 2017. He said it was looking inwards, not communicating with staff and suffered from an erosion of training standards.
“All these things that probably looked small on their own, did something to our ability to learn and communicate and be match fit for the most complex firefighting environment just about anywhere in the world.”
Andy Roe, Commissioner Fire Commissioner.
“It was the most awful thing I’ve ever seen,” says Ed Daffarn who escaped from the fire and relives his experience talking to Kate for this programme. He isn’t the only former resident we hear from in this series and it’s heartbreaking to listen to his neighbours as they recall that night.
The series concludes with the aftermath, how displaced residents sought respite and shelter; how poorly they were treated and all while grieving or not even knowing if their family members or friends were still alive.
Distilling six years of work into 10 episodes, Kate talks about the layers of people who over many decades all “had a chance to change history, step in or ask a question.”
“I’ve tried to unpick some of those unspoken threads of the British system. Safety regarded at best not a vote winner and at worst an obstruction to the economy. Regulations seen as guidance to be bent. An inherent lack of curiosity because of a presumption that something that bad couldn’t happen here.”
It takes 2.5 hours to listen to the series. Do that ahead of the publication of the second report from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry on 4 September to understand what that report and its recommendations mean and why they are so very important to honour the memory of those who died needlessly that summer night seven years ago.
You can hear all episodes of Grenfell: Building a Disaster on BBC Sounds.
