Final investigation report issues damning verdict

It is June 14, 2017, a few dozen minutes past midnight. A fire breaks out in the kitchen of an apartment on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower, a 24-story social housing building in North Kensington, one of the wealthiest boroughs in London. Eight hours later, 72 people will have lost their lives, including 18 children, trapped in this building that had been renovated in 2016, and which has burst into flames like a torch. This terrible tragedy in the heart of the British capital traumatizes hundreds of victims’ relatives and shocks the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday, September 4, seven years after the events, the independent inquiry set in motion by Theresa May’s government (2016-2019) in the summer of 2017 finally delivered its damning conclusions. Over the course of 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 failings 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 Grenfell Tower deaths were preventable”. “This tragedy should never have happened,” said Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who also called for the “justice be done” and said that the companies named in the report should be prevented from obtaining public contracts.

At the heart of the drama: so-called ACM-PE cladding, cladding composed of two layers of aluminium filled with polyethylene, used to insulate and embellish somewhat dilapidated buildings at low cost. These should never have been used on high-rise residential towers, because of their flammable nature. Previous fires should have alerted the authorities: that in 1991 at Knowsley Heights, a tower near Liverpool covered with a suspect cladding, or the tragedy at the Lakanal House tower in London in 2009, which left 6 dead.

Standards and tests bypassed or ignored

The use of these composite panels was only definitively banned in the United Kingdom in 2018. Before the Grenfell tragedy, it was limited by fire standards and tests that were circumvented or ignored. The Grenfell Tower tragedy “is the culmination of decades of failures by central government and construction regulators to carefully consider and act against the dangers of covering residential buildings with flammable material,” specifies the final report.

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