A journalist who has provided the most comprehensive coverage of the Grenfell Tower inquiry has admitted the failings the probe has exposed can be “rage inducing”.
Peter Apps, deputy editor of the trade magazine Inside Housing, and his colleagues have provided daily reports of the judge-led public inquiry, which opened almost 1,750 days ago and has heard from 644 participants, including civil servants, politicians and survivors.
On Tuesday, Grenfell survivors and bereaved family members will mark the fifth anniversary of the deaths of 72 people on June 14 2017.
While a specialist housing publication is duty-bound to cover every aspect of the investigation, some may question why such a high-profile disaster only periodically makes headlines when there are shocking stories emerging all the time.
This was underlined last week, when Apps published a stunning 76-tweet “highlights reel” of the two-plus year inquiry to date, succinctly spelling out how the victims were failed by the state that was there to protect them, and the private sector that put profit above most other considerations.
The thread makes clear how it appeared to be an open secret that the cladding used at Grenfell – and blamed for the rapid spread of the blaze – was extremely flammable. That experts were aware of the shortcomings of the tower’s refurbishment. That the “bonfire of red tape” deregulation agenda – first fashionable in the 1980s but adopted by each government since – underpins many of the problems revealed.
There’s also some all-purpose nepotism and petty corruption (one headline runs: “Manager at Grenfell sub-contractor offered ‘very nice meal’ after deal for deadly cladding secured”) to get the blood boiling.
It’s hard to know what to be most angry about. Asked by HuffPost UK what he thinks is the most significant story in the thread, Apps points to cladding giant Arconic not telling certifiers about a “disastrous” failed fire test on one of its products, but continued to sell it in any case. The certification was presented to the Grenfell team that chose the Arconic-made panels that were deemed to be “the principal reason” the fire spread so quickly in June 2017.
He said: “It seems extraordinary that – even given a pretty cynical view of a large corporation as interested only in the bottom line – you could have testing demonstrating such an incredible level of danger to life and keep selling the product for high rise buildings regardless.”
Despite all four housing secretaries since the blaze promising lessons will be learned from Grenfell, the signs are ominous. The government has been condemned for rejecting the inquiry’s call two primary recommendations from the first phase – that all buildings should have an evacuation plan, and that residents with disabilities should have personal evacuation plans. It’s also made no progress on the recommendation that manually operated fire alarms should be installed in high rise blocks
Apps says: “I think the precedent is worrying. The recommendations from the second phase will be much more wide ranging and more time will have passed. I think it’s incredibly unlikely they will be fully implemented, but it may at least trigger some partial reform.”
As most know, the impact of the tragedy has stretched beyond the victims and the bereaved. Almost 500 high-rise buildings have since been identified as having Grenfell-style cladding on them, and a long-running battle over who should pay for their removal has often left blameless homeowners caught in the middle. Hundreds still require emergency measures such as a 24-7 “waking watch” fire patrols to ensure they are safe.
Apps reflects: “The cladding crisis comes in part from the government’s unwillingness to accept its own faults before Grenfell. If it had admitted from a much earlier stage that building regulations guidance had failed and there were likely to be thousands of blocks with dangerous materials it would have been in a much better place to deal with fixing them.
“As it is, it has always resisted taking an active lead and instead issued loose advice and let the market unpick it. That, combined with the fact that leaseholders pick up the bill by default in the private sector has given us a three year stalemate. While there are welcome cost protections now, this problem hasn’t gone away. There are still many people unable to sell their properties with no clear plan for when their homes will be fixed.”
Apps is the first to admit a subject where terms such as BS 8414 – the name for the UK’s large-scale fire test – are commonplace can be off-putting to a general audience. But he seems disappointed by the lack of consistent coverage from the mainstream media.
He says: “The BBC podcast has been with the inquiry from the start and has been absolutely first class. But I think it’s a shame the BBC has not given it more promotion, or used the content it delivers more widely across its various channels.
“For the rest of the media, I do understand the difficulty in following the inquiry: it’s technical, complex and layered and incredibly difficult to pick up once you’ve lost the thread. I think they basically wrote it off as stuffy and over complicated from an early stage and then when things started to get more interesting, they’d lost track of it. But I think they should have committed reporters to sticking with it.
“So much of what has been revealed has enormous relevance to everyone, not just specialists and my experience on Twitter is that there is a much broader audience for this than the specialist media has access to. I think the nationals may have made a judgement that their readers wouldn’t be interested, when in fact they very much would. People wanted to know why Grenfell happened.”
In any case, he’s “enormously proud: of the work his team has done. “It hasn’t been easy, especially during the height of lockdown,” he says. “The details have been a weird mix of fiendishly complex, but also intensely heartbreaking and rage inducing.
“I’ve asked a lot of my team to stay with it and produce the content they have – including the sub-editors who often end up with copy out of hours when we overrun. I’m glad we have made a record of what’s been revealed for anyone who wants it, and I hope they’re proud of that too.”