Grenfell Tower inquiry: Refurbishment turned building into 'death trap using public funds'

Grenfell Tower was turned into a “death trap” by refurbishment work overseen by the local authority, the inquiry into the fire has heard.

Danny Friedman QC, speaking on behalf of a group of law firms representing survivors and the bereaved, said they were watching the inquiry in a “calm rage”.

He said the probe would examine how a local authority “instigated and oversaw a refurbishment of a social housing high-rise tower block in such a way as to render it a death trap”.

“The royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the tenants management organisation (TMO) did this with public funds paid to an array of contractors and sub-contractors – none of whom have yet taken any responsibility for what happened,” he said.

Mr Friedman said residents were “fobbed off” and “certainly not treated as equals” when they warned such a disaster could happen.

The hearing, which was held in Holborn Bars in central London, was also asked to consider whether the council or the TMO were guilty of “institutional racism” by another lawyer for the victims.

Imran Khan, who once represented the parents of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, said the same problems highlighted by the inquiry into his racist killing had been seen at Grenfell Tower. He told the hearing the current terms of reference should be broadened to see if race, religion or social class played any part in the disaster.

“We might ask if this was a product of deliberate social cleansing or segregation” or “pure chance and coincidence, pure bad luck for those who die”, he said.

He went on to say unconscious and some conscious racism was seen in the firefighters’ statements from the night of the fire.

Those in the block from black or minority backgrounds were not described by their clothes or features, but ethnic origin, he said.

This included “middle eastern appearance”, “of Arabic descent” and a reference to someone of “Tunisian appearance”.

Mr Khan asked what someone of “Tunisian appearance” was supposed to look like.

Stephanie Barwise QC, also representing the survivors and bereaved, said a “disaster of this scale arising from what started and should have remained a kitchen fire suggests failures at every level of design and construction of the refurbishment”.

“Of the six commonly recognised layers of protection against fire – namely prevention, detection, evacuation, suppression, compartmentation and the resistance of the structure to the fire – at Grenfell Tower, five of those layers failed,” she added.

Quoting an expert report on the fire submitted to the inquiry by Dr Barbara Lane, Ms Barwise described the insulation in the cladding as the lowest class and therefore “woefully low” in relation to the required standard.

Gaps in the windows were plugged with a material derived from crude oil – “the perfect medium for flame spread at the edge of the window”, she said.

“The combination of this highly combustible material and omissions of cavity barriers amounts to a collection of catastrophic failures in construction safety.”

Ms Barwise said regulations stipulate that works carried out must not make a building less compliant than it previously was, which is called a “material alteration”.

“We say, based on Dr Lane’s report, that the entirety of the cladding constituted a material alteration, since, as it stood before the refurbishment, Grenfell was constructed of virtually incombustible concrete,” she told the hearing.

“It was, however, covered by the polyethylene cladding now openly described by some in the industry as petrol.”

“Our understanding is that the ignition of the polyethylene within the cladding panel produces a flaming reaction more quickly than dropping a match into a barrel of petrol.”

Arconic, which manufactures the aluminium composite cladding that covered Grenfell Tower, has said the panels “at most” contributed to the fire and did not make the catastrophe “inevitable”.

“It is right to mark that whichever route or routes the fire took, it could have been stopped, or the speed of its passage slowed, had proper consideration been given to the fire engineering implications of the choice of materials, the design of the building and the detailed interrelationships of the construction elements and the actual process of carrying out the refurbishment work,” the company said in an opening statement to the inquiry.

“We submit that the evidence does not justify the conclusion that the ACM PE cladding panels supplied by the company were anything other than, at most, a contributing feature to the fire.

“The panels did not render inevitable the catastrophe which ensued.”

A number of corporate bodies involved in the refurbishment were accused on Tuesday of increasing the “pain and uncertainty” of victims’ families by not engaging properly in the inquiry process.

Several sub-contractors who worked on parts of the refit have refused to comment on their work until they have full disclosure of documents, the probe heard.

Ms Barwise described their silence as “inhumane” and claimed Rydon, the main contractor, was being “disingenuous” about its involvement.

She said: “These contractors should not be allowed, by their deliberate refusal to participate, to derail determination of the compliance issue even though we are concerned with blatant non-compliance.

“Despite their words of condolence to the victims, these corporates have no desire to assist this inquiry, even though their participation could save lives in the immediate future.”

During Tuesday’s hearing Mr Friedman said the evacuation of the tower had been hindered by the “stay put” policy and then by the over-deployment of firefighters and equipment, which crowded the narrow stairwell – the sole escape route.

He said statements from more than 250 firefighters revealed a lack of experience of a fire as large as that at Grenfell Tower.

They also showed significant communication problems and a lack of training for 999 call operators in the event that a stay put policy was abandoned.

“The near-universal view of those witnesses is that this was a fire utterly beyond their professional experience. But it is also clear that it was a fire beyond their training or indeed the London Fire Brigade’s operational contemplation. We say it should not have been,” he said.

“And in that recognition of systemic failure of foresight, the inquiry can join this and other fire brigades in remedying what is a violation of the state’s responsibility to have training and policy in place that is fit for responding to foreseeable risk to life in cladding fires of this nature.”

Mr Friedman said this posed a fundamental question: “Did the LFB waste limited temporal and spatial opportunities in trying to fight a fire that could not be fought, rather than immediately prioritising evacuation to save lives?”

Mr Friedman said a number of firefighter witnesses had “emphatically queried the logic” of the stay put advice. The advice was withdrawn shortly before 2.47am, nearly two hours after the fire took hold.

A deputy assistant commissioner came to the conclusion at roughly the same time at the control room in Stratford, “triggered at least in part by turning on the television and viewing the fire on Sky News”, Mr Friedman said.

In a statement to the inquiry published on Tuesday, the LFB defended its decision to stick to its stay put advice until late into the night, saying the magnitude of the blaze had presented unprecedented challenges.

“The LFB control centre was required to handle more calls requiring fire survival guidance from residents within Grenfell Tower on the night of the fire than the total number of such calls in the previous 10 years from the whole of London,” it said.

“Stay put advice was suitable for Grenfell Tower when it was originally built, as fire should have been contained in one flat,” the statement said.

“What is less clear, in the view of the LFB, is the extent to which maintenance programmes and refurbishments over the years have undermined the integrity of the original design and construction principles from a fire safety perspective,” it continued. “This is a vital aspect of the consequences of the Grenfell fire in the LFB’s assessment.”

A document submitted to the inquiry and published on Tuesday revealed a ventilation system intended to prevent the stairs at Grenfell Tower from becoming clogged with smoke was reported to have failed days before the fire.

On 6 June 2017, PSB, the company that designed the mechanical system, said it received an email saying a potential fault report had been made by Rydon – the main contractor on the block’s 2016 refurbishment.

PSB offered to investigate at a cost of £1,800 plus VAT, but no response or instructions were received.

A number of people managed to make it out of the burning tower on 14 June, but later succumbed to the toxic fumes they had inhaled.

The inquiry heard on Tuesday from a lawyer for the Metropolitan Police, who said the force had completed its forensic work inside the tower and anticipated it will cease being a crime scene by July or August.

The inquiry adjourned until 10am on Wednesday, when it was scheduled to hear from a lawyer representing Behailu Kebede, the occupant of flat 16, where the fire started.

Additional reporting by Press Association