Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week one: a vivid picture of a broken industry

A plea for immunity

The shock moment of the week came on Wednesday morning when – after two days of damning revelations – a group of corporates, including Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, sought a guarantee from the Attorney General that the evidence they give would not be used to further a criminal prosecution against them.

This was widely misreported as a plea for immunity full stop, but it never was. Instead it would serve as a prohibition on the specific answers forming part of the crown’s case should these issues ever see the light of a criminal court.

There was a sense of hijacking the process (this could have been raised and dealt with many months ago) as well as holding it to ransom (there was an implicit threat that answers would be limited if the guarantee was not given).

Audible shock and anger from the survivors present was not surprising, given everything they had been through to this point and the callousness of the attitudes the evidence had already exposed. So what was this evidence? Below are short summaries of some of the key points.

The contractors and architects

Opening statements for architects Studio E, main contractor Rydon and cladding specialist Harley were given on Monday.

They focused on a criticism of the government’s regulations, which were described as “not fit for purpose”, as well as attacking the manufacturers of the cladding and insulation for making their products appear safe. The consistent theme was that they simply did not know that the very widely used products they were working with were dangerous.

This claim came under severe strain on Tuesday, however, when the counsel for insulation manufacturer Celotex unveiled an email chain from 2015 relating to a requirement to install fire barriers in the cladding system. There was general agreement that there was no point doing so because in a fire the cladding would “fail” regardless of any barriers.

“There is no point in ‘fire stopping’, as we all know; the ACM will be gone rather quickly in a fire! The whole point [of barriers] is to stop ‘unseen’ fire spreading in the cavity,” wrote Daniel Anketell-Jones of Harley.

They may argue when called to give evidence that the belief expressed here was that the aluminium composite material (ACM) would burn and fall off the building rather than rip up and around it, but it still shows they were well aware that the products they were dealing with carried a fire risk.

More broadly, the accusation is that none of these parties thought particularly hard, if at all, about whether the cladding complied with building guidance.

It did not meet any of the four routes to compliance available through industry guidance – thanks to having combustible insulation, no large-scale test data, no desktop study and no final sign-off from a fire engineer.

A requirement that all components of the cladding system be of ‘limited combustibility’ was also specifically incorporated into Rydon’s contract. But instead, materials of a much lower standard were used. Each of the key members of the design team – Rydon, Harley and Studio E – pointed fingers at each other for where the blame for this major error lay.

The manufacturers

Both Arconic (which made the cladding panels) and Celotex (which made the insulation) have also come in for heavy criticism.

Giving their opening statements on Tuesday, they ran slightly different versions of the same argument: all we did was sell the product, and it was up to those who designed the cladding system to ensure it was safe and compliant.

But these arguments appear to have been severely undermined by other revelations this week.

First Arconic. On Monday, emails were read out revealing that the manufacturer was well aware that its panels were testing below the standard they were advertised as and were potentially dangerous during a fire – particularly in their ‘cassette’ form.

“The classification obtained for the Reynobond PE cassettes is the same as that of competitors, ie ‘F’ [they were marketed with a certificate that suggested they were Class B], and therefore not suitable for use on building façades,” senior member of staff Claude Wehrle wrote in 2011.

Rather than simply sell the panels, lawyers for the survivors have pointed to evidence that Arconic specifically targeted the Grenfell Tower project from as early as 2012.

Other emails have shown that Arconic at least believed it had knowledge of where its products were used. In 2013, the BBC ran a report about a fire comprising ACM cladding in the UAE, and UK sales manager Deborah French sent a note saying the company was able to “follow what type of project is being designed developed and offer the right Reynobond specification including the core”.

For Celotex, the firm had managed to get its insulation through a test in May 2014 that would have made its use on high rises compliant with the regulations, if combined with non-combustible cement fibre cladding.

It claims that it is not to blame for the designers not sticking to this specification and using highly combustible ACM instead.

But its own marketing – which described the insulation as “acceptable for use above 18m” – was said to have been designed to exploit confusion about the building guidance by lawyers for the survivors.

It also aggressively marketed to Grenfell Tower, including the tower on a “must-win” projects list in 2014 and hoping to include it as a “flagship” project for its RS5000 insulation in future marketing, it was claimed.

The fire engineers

Exova, a major fire engineering consultancy, described by one of the inquiry’s experts as “top tier”, produced three reports on the Grenfell Tower refurbishment, the last in November 2013.

Each of these reports contained a statement that “the proposed changes will have no effect on the building in relation to external fire spread, but this will be confirmed by an analysis in a future issue of this report”.

The firm’s explanation is that this is before the final cladding system was defined, and they were never invited back to complete the final report, with Rydon electing not to use a fire engineer.

However, lawyers for the survivors and bereaved challenged this claim, pointing out that a cladding system of some sort had been proposed and should have been considered. “What should have been said was that the cladding would likely have an adverse effect, but the extent of the worsening of condition could not be known until the precise cladding system had been defined,” said Stephanie Barwise QC. She said that this claim gave “a false sense of security” to the design team and described it as “a negligent misstatement” that was “likely to be causative” in regard to the fire.

In a withering attack on Exova, she said that the firm saw its role as “playing down potential non-compliance in order to get around the building control officer”.

Cost cutting and aesthetics

There has been much discussion of so-called value engineering this week – the process of swapping one product for another, cheaper alternative in order to reduce costs.

It seems beyond doubt that it was this that led to the former zinc cladding being switched out for the deadly polyethylene-cored ACM.

It was said that in 2013, the project was “realigned” by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) to make “value for money” the “primary driver”. This resulted in the creation of a “value engineering hitlist” in December 2013.

Moreover, lawyers for the survivors claim that while a new contractor was being procured, KCTMO made a secret approach to Rydon – which eventually won the bid – asking it to reduce its quote by £800,000, including a £234,000 reduction by switching the zinc cladding for an alternative.

There were also claims that the decision on the insulation routed back to a desire to win environmental funding by exceeding the requirements for thermal insulation set in building guidance. To do this within the design required the use of combustible plastic insulation.

The project was also dogged by a focus on aesthetics. This has been well known since days after the fire, but new allegations were also made this week.

These include that architects Studio E “agonised” between “the brushed aluminium and the battleship grey” colour and therefore ignored fire safety almost completely. It was also suggested that with the construction of a new school next door, also designed by Studio E, Grenfell would become an “eyesore” and “poor frontage” for the new project – with cladding seen as the solution.

Building control

The only party to admit serious fault in the opening statements was RBKC, which acknowledged “serious failings” on the part of its building control team.

This was something it arguably had little choice in. With the project found to be in breach of the regulations, it is essentially already accepted as a matter of fact by the inquiry that building control failed.

What we learned, though, was the extent of this failure. Building control officers at the council did not seek to find out the details of the cladding system, did not identify the insulation as combustible and did not request an up-to-date version of the fire strategy.

This looks less like an accidental misunderstanding of potentially confusing guidance and more a total failure to apply the rules at all.

What’s next?

Monday will be given over to submissions from lawyers acting for the bereaved and survivors on the above issue of immunity, as well as submissions from the inquiry’s own lawyer on the same point.

Tuesday will be given over to the same issue and if oral evidence begins next week at all it will be on Wednesday, with witnesses from Studio E the first supposed to attend.