Nine years on from Grenfell, one writer is still asking why don’t we learn?

Gill Kernick lives near Grenfell Tower and in the early hours of 14 June 2107 she watched it burn, the place where she had once lived and where she knew many of the residents. In 2021, she wrote about her experience and looked at how organisations can learn and found that systemic change is incredibly hard to achieve. Her book, Catastrophe and Systemic Change has been revised and updated to include the findings from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.

She says in the preface to her book that what should have taken a few months, has taken a year. “Writing it has been harder than I imagined,” she shares, “I realise now that writing allows me to process what happened.” She concludes that she is not the same person who wrote the first edition five years ago and now, nine years after the fire that resulted in the deaths of 72 people, it is timely to reflect on what has been learned and if a system can truly change after disaster.

“Catastrophic events have the power to be disruptive and bring about lasting change.”

Gill writes that she hoped that the worst residential fire in London since the WW2 would drive an urgent desire for change. “I was wrong,’ she says. The fire at Grenfell revealed systemic failures in building safety that have seen thousands of tenants and home owners have to leave their homes because of flammable cladding and even today, the work is not complete to identify every affected building.

Since Gill wrote the first edition of her book there has been new legislation. The Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Act 2022 both create new duties to improve buildings and make clear who is accountable. They are large, complex pieces of law that embrace the wide ecosystem of buildings – those already in place and those yet to be built.

The Building Safety Regulator was set up to provide oversight, scrutiny and accountability back ultimately to Parliament. Its Chair is former London Fire Commissioner, Andy Roe, ennobled earlier this year to sit in the House of Lords as Baron Roe of West Wickham. He responded to the fire when he was an Assistant Commissioner in London Fire Brigade.

So, some of the system has changed since 2017 but Gill writes that the myths, known issues and lessons from Grenfell “contribute to our inability to learn.” One of those myths is the regulation itself. She argues that an over reliance on what she calls “regulatory fixes” fails to address the “increasing vulnerabilities of regulatory systems.” If that is the case, then the wealth of new law described above may not be enough to create the systemic change she says is sorely needed.

Systemic change needs disruption, she says. Disruptive opportunities “can move us towards meaningful systemic reform.” She offers four forms of disruption including developing the capacity to deal with complexity and ambiguity and by doing so “regulate more appropriately and create change and safety in complex contexts, where the very nature of risk is constantly evolving.”

It is this description of risk and regulation, attitudes and whether legislation can survive contact with reality that helps question whether the new rules are right and if they will work to ensure another Grenfell could never happen again. Her update is valuable and a chance to reflect nine years on because we must never forget.

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Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters by Gill Kernick is published by London Publishing Partnership.