Grenfell Inquiry day one: expert evidence on cladding and ‘stay put’

Day one

Today was the first day of expert evidence at the Grenfell Inquiry hearings, following the commemoration events which have taken place across the past two weeks.

Richard Millett, legal counsel for the inquiry team, presented his opening statement, summarising the findings of five expert witnesses whose reports were also released to the public.

These findings included the perhaps unsurprising assessment that the cladding added to the tower in the 2012/16 refurbishment was the primary cause of the fire’s spread.

This was the conclusion of Professor Luke Bisby’s report, which went into detail about the specific failings of the cladding, including identifying it as the most likely reason for the fire wrapping the building in flames, rather than just going straight up.

This, he said, was probably caused by an ‘architectural crown’ added to the top of the tower, which exposed some of the cladding’s combustible polyethylene core.

For those who have been following the debate over building regulations which has been playing out since the fire, there was also a crucial rejection of the government’s position on flammable cladding and whether or not it was permitted by guidance.

Dr Barbara Lane, fire engineer at Arup, said she did not agree with the government that the core of the aluminium cladding was “filler” for the purposes of the guidance, as the government has claimed since the fire (see box: The cladding debate explained).

Confusingly, a report by another expert witness – Colin Todd, managing director of CS Todd Associates – came to the opposite conclusion on the same point.

Mr Millett was keen to stress that these were only preliminary findings.

A key question the inquiry will ask is over the ‘stay put’ policy that was in place at Grenfell Tower, and why it took nearly two hours from the first 999 call for this to be dropped. By the time ‘stay put’ was changed to ‘full evacuation’, around 187 residents, or 64%, had evacuated the tower.

Dr Lane’s report was also focused on this issue, concluding that the ‘stay put’ strategy failed at 1.26am – 32 minutes after the first 999 call. However, residents weren’t told to try and escape until 2.47am, even though the London Fire Brigade declared the blaze a ‘major incident’ at 2.06am.

Mr Millett also carefully criticised some of the core participants with knowledge of the refurbishment of the tower for not more readily coming forward, telling the hearing they “missed something of an opportunity to advance the inquiry’s knowledge on vital questions”.

Further into his statement, his criticism was more direct. He explained that the inquiry team had written to core participants requesting detailed statements from those who hadn’t already contributed, urging them to “resist the temptation to indulge in a merry-go-round of buck-passing”.