Grenfell Inquiry day 50: the LFB commissioner

The inquiry’s QC, Richard Millett, showed the commissioner a copy of a letter sent to Kensington and Chelsea Council, along with all other London boroughs, in April 2017, warning of the dangers of flammable cladding.

Inside Housing, along with a number of other media outlets, reported on this letter last year. Ms Cotton told the inquiry she had never seen it before.

She added: “Standing here answering these questions is very difficult, because I would love to have had the foresight. I would love to have had the ability and the knowledge. But even if we’d had that, we wouldn’t have been able to extinguish the fire.

“So it’s very difficult to stand here and say, yes, we would have done this and that, because it wouldn’t have made a difference to the response on the night.

“And that’s the point that I feel is really important, that the building behaving the way it did, failing the way it did, causing the rapid fire spread the way it did… even had we known about the cladding and the potential for that, we still wouldn’t have been able to extinguish it.”

Ms Cotton also discussed the mental impact of the fire, saying that she felt she couldn’t fully execute her role as monitoring officer on the night because of the emotional support she had to provide to firefighters.

She told the inquiry: “Where normally you’d just go out and make an operational assessment of the plans and tactics, I’d spent a large amount of time talking to firefighters who’d broken down in my arms: firefighters I’d never met before, firefighters I didn’t know. I’ve never seen a situation on the fire ground where firefighters are openly crying and distressed.”

The commissioner also revealed that her memory of the night is very bad, and much of it, she suspects, is in the wrong order. She attributed this to trauma from the fire and said she was receiving counselling.