Conclusion The need to learn before and after Grenfell
This book has traced the development of a regulatory approach towards fire safety and building control across twentieth-century Britain and its subsequent diminution from the late 1970s to the present day. It has shown how deregulation, both as ideology and practice, was dominant in shaping policymaking in these realms for successive governments since 1979. Predominantly concerned with relaxing and removing existing controls over the market, restricting the state’s powers of inspection, certification and enforcement, and devolving responsibility for safety to the individual, deregulation resulted in a confusing regulatory landscape under which it was legal to permit flammable and combustible cladding to be placed on tall buildings in which many millions of individuals and families lived. Historicising deregulation and multiple-fatality fires over the long twentieth century thus sheds light on the longer-term historical context to the 2017 disaster at Grenfell Tower, which has been largely peripheral to the public inquiry. While the fire has been shown to be the result of particular local circumstances, specific to the North Kensington community, it also reflects a historical moment defined by a confluence of national and international factors, not least neoliberalism, deregulation, globalisation and austerity.
While the official proceedings reveal undoubted systemic failures in governance and organisational management, the inquiry into the Grenfell fire has also exposed an ingrained culture of institutional insouciance towards public safety, especially in protecting those most vulnerable to fire risks. Institutional indifference permeates central and local government as well as the construction industry, and is manifested in a ‘race to the bottom’ of safety standards, commercial greed, local authority cost-cutting and the belittling attitudes of a political elite that resists calls for a more precautionary approach to fire safety because of its likely impact on ‘UK plc’. It is also reflected in the testimony of individual politicians and senior civil servants during the inquiry: in one particularly egregious moment, a former secretary of state incorrectly paid tribute to the ‘nameless 96 victims’ of the fire, confusing the fire with the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster. Such an example illustrates a casual nonchalance and has been bravely challenged by those with ‘lived experience’ of the fire and the public inquiry; in this case, the local community, survivor groups and bereaved families.1
Such an insouciant attitude has revealed the inability of governments, as well as other stakeholder organisations, to learn and change from their historic encounters with failure. It is further manifested in the unwillingness of senior ministers and industry leaders to accept responsibility for failure immediately following a catastrophic event: rather, the inquiry’s lead counsel has criticised ‘a merry-go-round of buck passing’ from responsible persons across the private and public sectors.2 Thus, lasting systemic change cannot be expected until this historic culture of indifference and ‘buck passing’ is conceded and challenged from within; that is, by those who have up to now been complicit in its continued operation. As Gill Kernick, a fire safety consultant and one-time resident of Grenfell Tower, has argued, what is required is a ‘democratisation of change’ in which a greater diversity of communities are invited to disrupt the status quo and brought into the fold in order to hold governments to account for their policies as they affect everyday lives.3 This final chapter will therefore draw two broad conclusions about how a history that foregrounds its ‘public purpose’ can help policymakers and other responsible organisations challenge the institutional culture that created the conditions under which the fire occurred.
Firstly, history shows us that a cultural change is required at the heart of government, especially one that embraces the value of regulation for public safety and the wellbeing of the nation. For too long, deregulation has been regarded by politicians, industry leaders and the right-wing media as the solution to Britain’s social and economic malaise, largely due to an entrenched belief that the market needs to be freed of all restrictions and can effectively become its own regulator. Yet the reality is quite the opposite and history reveals a need to question such deeply held contextual assumptions. The seventy-two victims of the Grenfell fire, as well as the many hundreds of other lives lost in the forgotten disasters examined in this book, tragically and repeatedly underline the marketplace’s inability to protect vulnerable communities, as well as central government’s unwillingness to step in and impose appropriate controls or sanctions. What is required, argue Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter in their compelling history of the Covid-19 pandemic, is a new mindset within central government that embraces ‘collectivist individualism’, reinforces the ‘psychological contract’ between the state and its citizens and stops seeing regulation as an unnecessary burden – on businesses, people and the state. The wellbeing of a nation can be assessed by how far a state is prepared to go to protect the most vulnerable people who fall under its duty of care. Indeed, universal protections coupled with a commitment to public safety are a positive means of enhancing the personal freedoms of the whole of society while also offering tangible benefits to the economy through a healthy and productive workforce.4
There is historical precedent here. Britain’s post-war governments recognised the terrible costs that fire damage was causing to the nation and its productive wellbeing, and prioritised public safety and security as core values that underpinned the building of the welfare state. So too did industry leaders. Matched funding from the government and the fire protection industry was fundamental in improving the safety of building materials, processes and products that fuelled the country’s reconstruction as well as the consequent boom in consumer spending. That drive to govern using research-informed and evidence-based policy underpinned the growth and diversification of the economy, but this has been lost through successive decades of untrammelled deregulation, privatisation and abandonment of state controls. Our economic and political leaders have lost sight of the benefits of a well-regulated country, not least in terms of the tangible benefits that regulatory governance can bring to our collective health and prosperity as a nation.
Secondly, in order to re-embrace the value of regulatory governance as being in the best interests of society, there is a need for a new arrangement of checks and balances that simplifies, as well as strengthens, the existing patchwork system. Tentative steps were made with the 2021 Fire Safety Act and the following year’s Building Safety Act, not least with greater clarification issued for the role of ‘responsible persons’ for multi-occupied residential buildings. Further piecemeal change is on the horizon with the announcement, in December 2022, that government is consulting on requiring second staircases in new tall residential buildings, mandating sprinklers in all new care homes to help firefighters with building evacuations and adopting tougher European fire testing requirements.5 However, more could still be done to bring about, in the words of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ legal counsel during his final statement at the Grenfell Inquiry, ‘lasting changes to overhaul a regulatory system that has been shown to have been unfit for purpose’.6 In this sense, politicians and senior civil servants need to act bravely, embracing a greater diversity of voices from those with lived experiences on new regulatory bodies that monitor, enforce and hold to account the decisions made in their interest. Those who have lived in unsafe buildings, lost friends, relatives or neighbours in fires, and entered burning buildings to save lives should be listened to by those who are tasked with creating a new regulatory system that is fit for purpose. Public safety should be realigned as the priority of everyone in a post-Grenfell era; joint regulation, with a fuller diversity of lived experience and knowledge, would help ensure that the system of checks and balances is in place to make this happen in practice.
Again, history reveals a precedent for joint regulatory working in the form of the Joint Fire Research Organisation (JFRO) and the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council (CFBAC), both of which drew together experts to lead on fire safety research and advise on national policy in the decades following the end of the Second World War. JFRO’s fire and building research stations – later amalgamated into the Building Research Establishment (BRE) – conducted world-leading research into fire behaviour and made a material contribution to improved safety in the home as well as the workplace, especially between the late 1940s and 1970s. CFBAC, on the other hand, brought together a coalition of ranks and experiences from across the fire service to advise government on national policy, including the representative unions of frontline firefighters as well as senior fire officers. Taking BRE back under national ownership, as advocated by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the Fire Brigades Union, would signal a decisive step in the move to make public safety a national priority by establishing a new statutory body to advise the government on fire service matters.7 Were ministers also to reconstitute BRE’s membership, with representatives drawn from the fire and rescue service as well as consumer and residents’ bodies who speak on behalf of local communities, alongside more traditional voices representing the engineering and building professions, this would signal systemic change by focusing regulatory attention on building safety beyond the design and completion stages. It would also hopefully end the ‘path of least intervention’ approach taken by governments, which, as we have seen here, only leads to more deaths and misery for families and communities.
Learning from disasters requires a fuller range and diversity of voices and experiences to be heard than is currently allowed. Learning must also by necessity involve listening to uncomfortable truths, especially if government is to be compelled to act in the moral as well as the economic interests of the nation. Citizen participation extends beyond the public inquiry process – not least because this formal process of learning often happens after the event – and should be embedded within the formal mechanisms that produce and monitor existing regulations. A more inclusive, honest and historically reflective approach towards building regulation – in which governments learn and publicise the lessons from past fires before future ones occur – would herald lasting change, including greater security for communities. This would be the most fitting memorial to those who lost their lives in past building fires.
1 GTI, Closing submission by Sam Stein QC on behalf of the bereaved, survivors and residents, 10 December 2018, 193–4; Hackitt, Final Report, 5; Apps, Show Me the Bodies, 306–7.
2 GTI, Opening statement by counsel to the inquiry, Richard Millett QC, 27 January 2020, 18.
3 Kernick, Catastrophe, 221–5.
4 Cooper and Szreter, After the Virus, 251–85; Kernick, Catastrophe, 222–3.
5 Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, ‘Government Proposes Second Staircases to Make Buildings Safer’, 23 December 2022, <https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-proposes-second-staircases-to-make-buildings-safer>.
6 GTI, Closing Statement by Jason Beer, King’s Counsel, 10 November 2022, 25.
7 See Tweet by Tom Copley, London Deputy Mayor for Housing, @tomcopley, 29 December 2022, <https://twitter.com/tomcopley/status/1608483554253574144>, accessed 3 January 2023; Fire Brigades Union, ‘FBU Calls for Grenfell Building Safety Body to Be Nationalised’, 13 May 2022, <https://www.fbu.org.uk/news/2022/05/13/fbu-calls-grenfell-building-safety-body-be-nationalised>.