It was a few minutes past midnight on June 14, 2017. A fire broke 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 London's wealthiest boroughs. Eight hours later, 72 people had lost their lives, including 18 children, trapped in this building which had been refurbished in 2016, and which burst into flames like a torch. This terrible tragedy in the heart of the British capital traumatized hundreds of relatives of the victims and shocked the whole of the United Kingdom.
On Wednesday, September 4, seven years after the events, the independent inquiry launched by Theresa May's government (2016-2019) in the summer of 2017 finally delivered its damning conclusions. Over its 1,800 pages, the result of 400 days of hearings, the report recounted an incredible catalogue of errors and negligence, and exposed all the failings of an era: the race for profitability, deregulation, the dilution of responsibilities. Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the retired appeal judge who chaired the inquiry and held a press conference with the victims' families on Wednesday, said, "The deaths that occurred [at Grenfell Tower] were all avoidable." The tragedy "should never have happened," said Labour prime minister Keir Starmer, who also called for justice to be done and said the companies implicated in the report should be barred from public contracts.
At the heart of the tragedy is the so-called "ACM" cladding, made up of two layers of aluminum filled with polyethylene, used to insulate and embellish slightly outdated buildings at low cost. They should never have been used on high-rise buildings, due to their flammability. Previous fires should have alerted the authorities: the 1991 fire at Knowsley Heights, a tower block near Liverpool covered with a suspect cladding, and the tragedy at London's Lakanal House tower block in 2009, which claimed six lives.
The use of these composite panels was only definitively banned in the United Kingdom in 2018. Before the Grenfell tragedy, it was restricted by fire standards and tests that were circumvented or ignored. The Grenfell Tower tragedy "was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility 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," stated the final report.
You have 60.87% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.