‘Islamophobic’ police document predicted ‘crime and disorder’ after Grenfell fire due to ‘Muslim background’ of victims

Ms Munroe also drew attention to “slurs” by staff at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), which included warnings of “great concern over community tension” with “hostile residents very vocal in negative comments towards the incident” in the days after the fire.

The inquiry has heard evidence that armed police were stationed at the entrance to an official rest centre to support survivors, and those who were searching for missing loved ones were shouted at and threatened with arrest by police. 

“This focus on public order detracted resources and focus away from the relief effort,” said Ms Munroe. “This we find extraordinary, inexcusable and unforgivable.”

She added: “Racism and discrimination, we say, played a very real part in the response to this tragedy.”

Danny Friedman QC, appearing for another group of bereaved and survivors, said that the authorities involved in the response were “more concerned about an uprising or unrest than they were about looking after families”. 

He said this was demonstrated by the police risk assessment, but also the fact that council workers who attended the scene hid their lanyards, out of fear of being identified. 

“For several days, the Westway [where council support was being provided] remained a site of intimidation, rather than refuge,” he said. 

He added: “In the post-Brexit electoral storm of June 2017, [the response] also spoke to fears of broader collapse of social control.”

Ms Munroe noted that RBKC, despite being one of the wealthiest boroughs in London, has a large population of black and minority ethnic residents and areas of extreme deprivation.

“The institutional indifference was there. The discrimination was there, and it was very real,” she said. 

She cited issues such as the lack of communication with those who did not have English as a first language, including a failure to provide counsellors who spoke the language of the bereaved and survivors. 

There was also a lack of Halal food for Muslim survivors, or flexibility regarding their need to observe the fasting during Ramadan. 

She also raised issues of disability discrimination. “People who were frightened, they were grieving for friends, relatives, neighbours. They were bereft of their worldly possessions. These residents were placed nonetheless in hotels and high floors in rooms that are not adapted for their most basic means. There was no consideration of mobility issues, or non-visible disabilities,” she said. 

“Families found themselves in hotel rooms with no facilities to sterilise bottles and cots if they had small children, babies and infants,” she added. “School-aged children, some of whom had exams to sit, had no uniforms to go to school in. They had no room to study. Often families were sharing one hotel room, so teenagers had no privacy and no space.”

Ms Munroe also drew attention to one of her clients – who was 80 at the time of the fire – and was evacuated from her home in the low rises connected to Grenfell. 

She was then placed into temporary housing with fire safety issues so serious that it had to be decanted. 

“Sadly she died in January of this year at the age of 85, four-and-a-half years after the fire, awaiting still placement in sheltered accommodation,” she said.

Mr Friedman particularly criticised Laura Johnson, then director of housing at RBKC, for her efforts to provide rehousing. 

“Everyday moral restraints make it hard for people, especially public servants, to admit inhumanity or comprehend that inhumanity is not restricted to bad people,” he said. “And yet, it occurs in bureaucracies and businesses when basic moral restraints become neutralised or otherwise compromised.

“Consider Laura Johnson. She presided over the assignment of residents into hotels with no regard to their human well-being once warehoused in this way. 

“Johnson’s account is about the movement of bodies and things, not people. And she did this in a fashion that no one would ever do to their own family or friend or anyone whose lives they knew anything about.”

Ms Munroe also criticised the emergency planning of RBKC, saying there was “a systemic lack of internal oversight of the contingency arrangements”. 

“There was a lack of investment in contingency planning, under-resourcing, and a culture steeped in ‘this is how it’s done’ and a resistance to change,” she said. 

She said that despite the admission of some fault in RBKC’s closing statement, its witnesses had continued to evade responsibility for the response. 

“If lessons are to be learned, from institutional failings, and meaningful change implemented, we as a society must cleanse ourselves of the cancerous culture of institutional defensiveness and bypassing,” she said. “Candour cannot be lip service, it must constitute the framework of public accountability.”

Mr Friedman specifically criticised RBKC chief executive Nicholas Holgate, who declined to call for outside support in the hours after the fire because “that looks like we can’t cope”. 

“When he protests that it was not part of his make-up as a career civil servant… what he really means is ‘I am not the kind of person who would want to be seen as refusing help for those reasons’. However, out of arrogance and defensiveness, that is just what he did,” said Mr Friedman. 

“The truth is many years preparing for an emergency could not ready the borough for anything more than a bus crash on the high street or a minor fire,” he added.

He said that central government was “ridiculously hands-off” with Mr Holgate in the early stages, not even noticing his absence from a key conference call on the morning of the fire.

“Based on what this inquiry has learned across its modules, subsidiarity [which sees local government take control of the response and leaves central government with a simple oversight role] is another species of unaccountable and unmonitored localism,” Mr Friedman said.