Five Years Since the Grenfell Fire
In June 2017, a catastrophic fire in Grenfell Tower killed seventy-two people and should have changed housing standards for good. Instead, the establishment has failed victims — and resisted all efforts at change.
Visual tributes are left to the 72 dead at Grenfell Tower on 14 2022 in London, England. (Guy Smallman / Getty Images)
One July afternoon in 2009, a broken TV caught fire on the ninth floor of a fourteen-storey tower block in South London. Lakanal House had no sprinkler system, and the cladding panels fitted outside weren’t fire resistant. In the ensuing blaze, six lives were lost. Three of them were young children, one of whom was a twenty-day-old baby.
Four years later, Frances Kirkham—the coroner in the Lakanal House Fire inquest—wrote to the government recommending changes to national fire safety regulations. This was disregarded: Stephen Williams, the Liberal Democrat minister responsible for building regulations at the time, recently told the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry that he never read Kirkham’s letter and only discussed the fire twice.
Williams was not an anomaly. Operating on a ‘one-in, one-out’ model of rules balancing (later two, then three), the Tories and Lib Dems in power encouraged departments to compete over how much they could save through deregulation. Housing staff at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council (RBKC) were also provided with a summary of Kirkham’s recommendations, and they chose not to act on them.
Then, in June 2017, the twenty-four-storey Grenfell Tower in North Kensington caught alight, and a further seventy-two working-class people died in one of the most horrific ways imaginable. Pip Hickman, the father of Catherine, a thirty-one-year-old fashion designer killed in Lakanal House, told the Mirror that day: ‘You do hope lessons have been learned but obviously not. When I put the news on and saw what had happened, my first thought, was “oh no, not again”.’
A Community Scarred
If Lakanal House wasn’t the trigger for change, Grenfell should have been. But the state of progress in the run-up to the fire’s fifth anniversary this June is a lesson in frustration.
‘A lot of people are still really, really struggling, and that’s for lots of reasons,’ Emma Dent Coad tells Tribune. With a wafer-thin majority, Dent Coad unexpectedly became the Labour MP for Kensington days before the fire, and remains a councillor on the Tory-dominated council. Living just streets away, she sees the scars left on the community in an area that, despite its famous wealth, is home to some of the most extreme poverty in Britain.
‘Some of it is trauma that hasn’t been dealt with,’ she continues. ‘And some of it is the huge frustration of there being zero change.’ Part of the stasis stems from the council’s treatment of Grenfell families: initially placed in hotels or temporary flats, the i reported in May 2021 that six surviving households had still not been assigned permanent accommodation. Of those that have been, Dent Coad says, many are still unsettled, with underlying psychological traumas ignored: ‘Some people were pretty much forced to take housing on second, third, fourth floors, but they had to be on the ground or first floor because they’re terrified.’
Other problems have been more shocking: Doveberry Place, a block purchased by RBKC specifically for Grenfell households, had a round-the-clock ‘waking watch’ installed in December 2020 when an assessment found it contained fire risks like those in the tower. ‘There’s a hundred and one reasons why people aren’t settled and are asking to move again,’ Dent Coad explains, ‘and the council treats it as a nuisance.’
In contrast to the survivors, those implicated in the fire enjoy relative impunity. Five months after the watch appeared at Doveberry Place, materials from Kingspan—a company that manufactured some of the insulation used on Grenfell, and whose staff were revealed by the inquiry to have lied and joked about fire safety—were found on an RBKC building site set to become a school for children with special needs. ‘Our council has now said—as if this was mind-blowing—they’ll be sure not to specify materials from any of those companies,’ Dent Coad says. ‘They should have done that on day one.’
Faced with the reality of what went on at companies like Kingspan, groups of survivors and the bereaved increasingly feel criminal charges can’t wait until after the inquiry publishes its final report next year. ‘For the bereaved families in particular, prosecutions are key,’ Yvette Williams, co-founder of campaign group Justice for Grenfell, tells Tribune. ‘They were led to believe at the beginning that the criminal process was going to run concurrent with the inquiry, and then in the middle of Phase 1, the Met Police said they were actually going to wait until after the inquiry was concluded.’
But the inquiry’s role in reaching the truth has made the case for urgent prosecutions stronger. In a video published to launch its #demandcharges campaign in December 2021, members of Grenfell United run through just some of the evidence unearthed: Kingspan and Arconic’s knowledge of the risk their materials posed; the council’s decades-long refusal to invest in the tower or hear residents’ fears; the lack of evacuation plans for those with disabilities, fifteen of whom lost their lives that night. ‘All this evidence,’ the speakers say, and ‘Still no action. Still no justice.’
Yvette is keen to add that ‘as we’re seeing with Phase 1 of the inquiry, the government don’t have to take any notice of its recommendations anyway.’ When the first phase reported back in October 2019, it included a set of fire safety recommendations, including twelve aimed at the national government. None of those have yet been implemented, leaving an estimated three million cladding scandal victims in limbo.
The government points to its Building Safety Bill, which is soon to become law, as evidence of action. Here, a pot of funding for high-rises and a plan to ‘force’ developers into fixing cladding on mid-rise buildings were announced recently. But beyond the media fanfare, the reality is ugly: smaller buildings remain exposed, the developers’ ‘pledge’ is non-binding, the cost of non-cladding fire safety problems remain unmet, and the entire timeline is totally unclear. Plenty of residents have already been forced to shoulder waking watch fees and catastrophic hikes on insurance, while persevering through lockdown in homes they knew could go up in flames any minute.
Dent Coad is frustrated and angry with how things have gone. ‘There should’ve been some emergency measures straight away, and then they could catch up with legislation.’ Instead, she says, ‘everything has gone round and round in painful circles.’ For a nation accustomed to government apathy, one of the revelations of the pandemic was the speed with which politicians can act when they choose; when it came to change after Grenfell, though, Dent Coad explains that everything was ‘slowed down to a snail’s pace’ as soon as it reached Parliament.
For her, it’s a clear sign of disdain for those in need of action. ‘If it was seventy-two of the neighbours of any of our cabinet ministers who had died horribly over the space of eighteen hours, those cabinet ministers … would feel so differently,’ she says. ‘But they think these are the little people, and that it doesn’t matter.’
Another Grenfell?
In May last year, another fire broke out in New Providence Wharf, a nineteen-storey block in Poplar. Although the building was covered in the same aluminium composite materials (ACM) cladding as Grenfell, the London Fire Brigade’s report found the timber balconies—which residents had previously complained about—fuelled the spread, with a failure in the ventilation system causing the escape route to fill with smoke.
Everyone got out, but as Dent Coad says, the fact the fire broke out in the morning when people were up and going to work was a vital and chance factor—and proof of Grenfell’s survivors’ worst fears about the consequences of inaction. ‘Above all, they don’t want it to happen to anyone else,’ she says. ‘And it could literally happen tonight.’
The state’s prevarication, regardless, makes its casual disregard for working people’s lives unmistakable, and the need for change—not just in Kensington, or in construction, but in our political culture as a whole—undeniable. As Yvette Williams puts it: ‘It would be a travesty if Grenfell’s legacy is just about cladding. This is an opportunity for people to wake up and build the society we want.’ Only the strength of those still fighting gives reason to hope.