Government ‘enslaved to deregulation and wilfully blind to safety concerns’ in years before Grenfell, lawyers for community say

The inquiry has previously heard months of evidence about the government’s failure to revoke a fire standard known as ‘Class 0’ for cladding on tall buildings, which allowed severely combustible materials to pass.

Ms Barwise said: “The seeds of the Grenfell disaster lie in the concealment of the fact that Class 0 cladding was a fire hazard.”

She said this was not addressed by government because of “the realisation of a burgeoning cladding crisis” and “a desire to allow the construction industry sufficient latitude to rapidly build housing”.

“Over time, this was exacerbated by an overarching, unyielding, safety-blind deregulatory agenda, which ministers deny, but officials believed allowed no change to, or clarification of building regulations or [official guidance] Approved Document B,” she said. 

Mr Stein referred to a test carried out in 2001, in which a Class 0-rated aluminium composite material (ACM) panel, similar to that later used on Grenfell, proved its horrendous fire performance in a government-funded test.

However, the results were buried until late last year when they were leaked to the BBC shortly before the inquiry revealed them. 

“It is a further total disgrace that this obvious, screaming risk to life was simply left hidden from the public eye until this inquiry’s investigation,” Mr Stein said.

Ms Barwise said that the panel would be required to resolve the “extraordinary conflict” between former ministers and officials – which saw ministers claim that officials had “laboured of their own volition under the fatal misapprehension” that deregulatory policies prevented changes to the building regulations.

She also said that her clients rejected the suggestion that key official Brian Martin – who had responsibility for Approved Document B for almost 20 years – was a “single point of failure”.

This was a description given to Mr Martin by the department’s former permanent secretary Melanie Dawes, and one he himself adopted at the end of his evidence.

But Ms Barwise said: “Given his physical proximity to colleagues and the way the department operated, this is not credible. The truth of the matter is that he was put and kept in that position to execute the department’s deregulatory strategy, and indeed promote it, even after Grenfell.”

She added that the department had “completely ignored all the coroner’s recommendations following the fatal Lakanal House fire in 2009”, which had been delivered to then secretary of state Eric Pickles in April 2013, and “withheld” important reports that suggested the need to reform regulations in the years that followed.

“The deliberate decision-making is only consistent with a desire to suppress known risks to avoid interfering with the two driving imperatives: energy efficient housing and deregulation,” she said.

She said the department will admit – in a closing statement due to be delivered on Wednesday – to a catalogue of 13 missed opportunities to revoke the dangerous Class 0 standard, although Ms Barwise said her team believes this list is “not exhaustive”.

She said that the failure in fact began earlier than the government admits, when someone from within central government appears to have instructed the Building Research Establishment (BRE) to “play down” the Knowsley Heights fire in a pilot cladding project in 1991.

That fire was interpreted for years as a result of missing cavity barriers in a non-combustible system, as opposed to the reality: burning combustible cladding that was compliant with the Class 0 standard.

Ms Barwise said this was “a necessary dissembling if one wished to detract from cladding being the cause”.

She added that the same tendency to cover up the risk had been in action after the 2009 Lakanal House fire, when the government’s chief fire officer, Sir Ken Knight, “focused on compartmentation as the cause, at the expense of downward fire spread in the cladding, which he now regrets”.

Sir Ken has been chair of the government’s Independent Expert Panel advising on fire safety policy since the Grenfell Tower fire.

Ms Barwise said that the government’s closing statement blames building regulations officials for “becoming totally internalised in their thinking” ahead of Grenfell.

“That is blaming individuals for a failure to resist an overpowering agenda fanatically adopted by ministers,” she said.

Mr Stein added a call for “accountability” for witnesses who were involved in the failings. He specifically called for two witnesses – Sarah Colwell, director of fire suppression at the BRE, and Mr Martin – to be sacked.

“Both individuals, through indolence or professional ineptitude, missed clear opportunities to change the system of regulation, which would have prevented the tragedy at Grenfell Tower,” he said.

Mr Mansfield repeated calls for former prime minister David Cameron – who gave a speech in 2012 outlining plans to “kill health and safety culture” and wrote to all ministers in his government in the same year ordering them to prioritise deregulation – to be called to give evidence to the inquiry.

Mr Mansfield said that the inquiry was like “Hamlet without the prince” in Mr Cameron’s absence, and that the inquiry has dismissed calls for Mr Cameron to give verbal evidence as “not proportionate”.

“There are obviously necessary questions that the public and that families deserve an answer to,” he said. “Did he recognise what he was doing? Creating a hostile environment in which these errors, these gaps, these mistakes occurred.”

Ms Barwise’s statement was also sharply critical of various bodies involved in the testing and certification of materials or the sign-off of buildings as compliant: the National House Building Council (NHBC), the BRE and the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS).

She said that the NHBC’s “behaviour demonstrates its total unsuitability as a putative regulator” and that it had accepted the use of combustible Kingspan insulation “to save face”, having wrongly approved it on hundreds of buildings.

She was particularly critical of the BRE, saying it was “complicit in government’s actions” due to the “misleading and therefore dangerous” investigations it carried out into real-world fires and advice it gave on revisions to Approved Document B.

She added: “BRE’s flaccid recommendations to the department were unscientific, and did not communicate a sense of the urgency or importance of the recommendation.”

UKAS, which accredits UK testing houses including the BRE, was described as “an ineffectual organisation, too willing to assume competence in the bodies it oversaw, and so focused on pleasing them, at the expense of public interest, that it will not even report fraud”.

“The frailty of this house of cards was an ideal prop to facilitate industry capture of an inadequately robust regulatory regime,” said Ms Barwise.

She said that despite the failings of government, the primary responsibility for the Grenfell Tower fire still rests with the industry – as those involved in the refurbishment of the tower disregarded and did not check the rules that were in force.

“To conclude that the failure to clarify or amend [Approved Document B] led to the lethal fire spread at Grenfell is to overlook the role of the construction sector in deliberate non-compliance, even in areas where [Approved Document B] left no room for debate, such as insulation and cavity barriers,” she said.