London Grenfell Tower fire deaths were ‘avoidable,’ inquiry finds

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It took just 20 minutes for a fire to tear through the 23-storey Grenfell Tower apartment building in west London in 2017 and only a few hours more for it to kill 71 people.

But it has taken more than seven years for a public inquiry to determine why the fire happened, and a criminal investigation must still establish whether anyone should be held to account.

On Wednesday, the chair of the inquiry, retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, released his final report and offered a scathing assessment of builders, manufacturers, government officials and local authorities, saying they each played a part in the loss of life.

“The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable,” he said during a news conference. Not all of those involved in Grenfell “bear the same degree of responsibility for the eventual disaster. But as our report shows, all contributed to it in one way or another. In most cases, through incompetence, but in some cases through dishonesty and greed.”

Grenfell Tower was part of a social housing complex in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, or RBKC, one of the wealthiest in Britain. The fire started in the back of a refrigerator in a fourth-floor apartment just after midnight on June 14, 2017. By the time the fridge fire was contained, the flames had moved out the window and up the tower in a matter of minutes, fuelled by the building’s flammable exterior cladding, which is commonly used to improve insulation, weather protection and appearance.

Grenfell Fire timeline: How the disaster that killed 72 people evolved and what happened next

The inferno killed 72 people – 71 that night, plus a woman who died months later from her injuries – making it one of the worst disasters in Britain in decades.

London’s Metropolitan Police have been conducting a criminal probe that has focused on 19 companies and 58 individuals. On Wednesday, the force said the investigation will take at least another year to complete. “This will lead to the strongest possible evidence being presented to the Crown Prosecution Service so they can make charging decisions,” deputy assistant commissioner Stuart Cundy said.

The inquiry’s findings have also raised questions about the cladding, which has been used on thousands of other buildings in Britain. More than 4,600 high-rise residential towers have been identified as having similar material. Last week, 100 people had to be evacuated from an apartment block in east London that caught fire as builders were replacing the facing. The London Fire Brigade has said that cladding will be part of its investigation into what caused the fire.

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The Grenfell public inquiry spent years examining every aspect of the fire, and Sir Martin divided the probe into two sections. The first report considered the response of emergency services. In his findings, published in 2019, he found a litany of failings by firefighters who waited too long to evacuate the building, lacked proper training and urged residents to “stay put” even as flames engulfed all sides of the building.

The focus in Wednesday’s report was broader and examined the roles of the companies that manufactured the cladding. It also looked into the actions of RBKC officials who managed the building and central government authorities who oversaw fire safety regulations. In virtually every instance, Sir Martin found significant problems.

The fire was the culmination of “decades of failure” by the government and the construction industry “to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high-rise residential buildings and to act on the information available to them,” the report said.

The inquiry accused the cladding manufacturers of “systematic dishonesty.”

“They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market,” the report said. They succeeded partly because government certification bodies failed to ensure their certificates were accurate and based on test evidence.

As for the local council, Sir Martin said that in the years leading up to the fire, relations between the building’s tenants and the RBKC were “increasingly characterized by distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger.”

Tenants viewed the council as uncaring and bullying, while the council saw some occupants as militant troublemakers, the report said. In the end, however, Sir Martin said the responsibility for maintaining proper relations rested with the council, which “lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home and the privacy and dignity that a home should provide.”

The inquiry made more than 50 recommendations largely aimed at the construction industry, fire brigade and government regulators.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued an apology to the families and vowed to implement the recommendations. “I want to say very clearly from the whole country: You have been let down so badly – before, during and in the aftermath of this tragedy,” he told the House of Commons. “This must be a moment of change. We will take the necessary steps to speed this up.”

Relatives of those who died in the fire welcomed the findings, but many expressed concern that no one has been held criminally responsible.

“What we must never lose sight of is that Grenfell is a direct result of how our society treats people. Yet the report’s recommendations do little to empower or give agency to the community, instead framing the fire as an outcome of administrative failings,” advocacy group Justice4Grenfell said. The police “now have a duty to thoroughly examine the evidence, despite the troubling question of why they have not acted sooner, given their access to forensic evidence from the very day of the fire.”