It is June 14, 2017, a few dozen minutes after midnight. A fire broke out in the kitchen of an apartment on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey social housing building in North Kensington, one of the richest districts of London. Eight hours later, 72 people, including 18 children, lost their lives, trapped in this building renovated in 2016 and burning like a torch. This terrible tragedy in the heart of the British capital has traumatised hundreds of the victims’ relatives and shocked the United Kingdom.
On Wednesday 4 September, seven years after the events, the independent inquiry launched by Theresa May’s government (2016-2019) in the summer of 2017 finally published its damning conclusions. Across its 1,800 pages, the result of four hundred days of hearings, the report recounts an incredible collection of errors and negligence, and exposes all the flaws of an era: the race for profitability, deregulation, the dilution of responsibilities. For Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the retired appeal judge who chaired the inquiry and held a press conference in the presence of the victims’ families on Wednesday, “All deaths at Grenfell Tower were preventable”. “This tragedy should never have happened”said Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who also called for the “Let justice be done” and said companies implicated in the report should be prevented from obtaining public contracts.
At the centre of the drama: so-called “ACM-PE” cladding, cladding made up of two layers of aluminium filled with polyethylene, used to insulate and beautify somewhat dilapidated buildings cheaply. These should never have been used on high-rise apartment buildings, because of their flammable nature. Previous fires should have alerted the authorities: the 1991 fire at Knowsley Heights, a tower block near Liverpool covered with suspect cladding, or the tragedy at the Lakanal House tower block in London in 2009, which left six dead.
Standards and tests bypassed or ignored
The use of these composite panels was not finally banned until 2018 in the UK. Before the Grenfell tragedy, it was limited by fire regulations and tests that were circumvented or ignored. The Grenfell Tower tragedy “It is the culmination of decades of failure by central government and building regulators to carefully consider and act against the dangers of covering apartment buildings with flammable material.”, specifies the final report.
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