It is three years since we awoke to the news that Grenfell Tower was on fire, accompanied by images of a dark grey smear of smoke across the London skyline, and a rapidly climbing death rate. What happened in those early hours of June 14th 2017 is ingrained in the public mind. However, despite the numerous investigations, reports and public inquiries, we have witnessed very little change since.
No tragedy is so painful as one which could have been avoided. Grenfell Tower Fire is a heart-breaking example; before the fire had even been extinguished it became horrifyingly clear that faults in the fire safety systems of both the building’s interior and exterior were to blame for the scale and ferocity of the blaze. Grenfell Tower, owned by KMCO Group, was missing many basic fire safety measures. Whilst combustible cladding lining the exterior allowed fire to climb up and along the outside rapidly, major interior flaws such as incompetent ventilation systems and having a single staircase that would fill with smoke greatly impeded any chance of effective evacuation.
No one can deny that paying attention to these details would have mitigated the consequences of the fire. The survivors needed justice, but with so many buildings similarly flawed, change was needed first.
A snap ban was applied to combustible cladding on high-rise buildings in November 2018, a year and a half after the tragedy. But with this ban doing nothing to target buildings which already had the cladding, it has been no match for the years of damage done by the deregulation of fire safety in privatised buildings. Government data in January revealed that, two and a half years on, there were still 450 high-rise residential buildings in England with combustible cladding. 72 of these had no plans to remove it.
These findings pushed government to create a fund to help remediate any buildings with unsafe cladding, as well as pledge to publicly name building owners who fail to do so. This, in addition to the 2019 release of a set of recommendations to regulate the fire safety procedures and evacuation plans in high-rise buildings, show that progress is perhaps finally nudging its way through. However, it is frankly astonishing that changes which could be a matter of life or death have taken so painfully long to break through.
An area we have seen more progress in is the response of the London Fire Brigade (LFB). A report released last November condemned the LFB’s measures for fires of such scale as ‘gravely inadequate’. This is difficult to dispute: the response showcased an array of ill-thought out procedures (many blame the LFB’s advice to residents to ‘stay put’ for the deaths of their neighbours) to equipment inadequacies among the LFB (on the night a firefighting platform had to be called in from Surrey).
Yes, a fire of such scale was unprecedented, but was it totally unexpected? The LFB were aware of the risk inherent in tower blocks such as Grenfell, but had implemented no plan or regulation to protect such vulnerable buildings or their residents.
Nevertheless, LFB chief Dany Cotton continuously refused to admit any mistakes made in her response. If we are to learn anything from this tragedy it is that we cannot underestimate the importance of listening to residents’ concerns and implementing immediate change where necessary. Cotton’s attitude was not only highly insensitive; it risked impeding the responsiveness of our public services in learning the tragic lessons of Grenfell.
However, some felt that criticism of LFB chief Dany Cotton’s was unfair and a distraction tactic from the systemic problems that contributed to the catastrophe: a policy of austerity that resulted in insufficient funding for the LFB. Whilst blaming an individual’s response is a fast and effective way to see immediate change, I agree that Cotton’s response (to resign from her position 4 months early) was wholly insignificant in the course of justice and change.
So what lessons have we learned? With its highly-combustible cladding, failing fire doors and lack of a central fire alarm system, to many it now seems bizarre that Grenfell Tower was never identified as the ticking time-bomb it turned out to be.
In fact, it was.
Grenfell Action Group, a team of residents, foresaw and warned on their blog that inevitably only ‘a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord’. So why did these warnings fall on deaf ears? And why do they continue to? Amongst the council for the richest borough of London, Kensington and Chelsea, it would seem there was no empathy for the wellbeing and safety concerns of its lower income residents.
We cannot ignorethat this was a classist tragedy. What Theresa May called on that day a ‘failure of the state’ supersedes fire-safety negligence and ill-planned responses; it exposes a terrible danger in the treatment of low-income communities as second-class citizens. In ignoring this we only stall the course of justice for Grenfell.
Hence, 3 years on, despite the private interviews conducted by police and the talk of manslaughter charges, there have been no arrests. This disappointing inaction ignores that, although Grenfell Tower Fire was no act of arson, it has its own set of criminals. I will remind you of a sentiment we have all become very familiar with recently: ‘if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor’. In the same way, we must regard the indifference of councils and landlords towards the safety and lives of their citizens and tenants as more than carelessness – it is negligence that directly cost lives.
So how can people get away with such a blatant disregard for human life? It is because the lives of the working class are viewed as expendable. Cast your mind back to all but one month ago, when the government asked people who cannot work at home – that is, people undertaking typically working class professions – to return to work despite the risk. Consider also the fact that, despite the horrors of Grenfell, in which at least 72 people lost their lives, three years on 358 similar buildings still have that infamous flammable cladding. It is an uncomfortable but very real truth.
Years of underspending had allowed the Royal Borough Of Kensington and Chelsea to amass £274 million, yet they refused to pay the extra £294 thousand that would have provided Grenfell Tower with non-combustible cladding. In doing so they put a price on human life, and then decided that it was too expensive.
The value of these individual lives was further degraded when Theresa May’s government announced that, despite their amnesty on immigration checks for survivors who came forward as witnesses, these survivors could still be subject to deportation 12 months later. The significance of Grenfell’s residents has varied greatly since the tragedy, as they went from ‘tenants’ to ‘victims’ to ‘witnesses’, but landlords, council and government seem to have difficulties in viewing them as anything beyond. In its scrabble to satisfy the calls for justice, the government failed once again to see the residents of Grenfell Tower as a community of precious and individual lives.
There will be no justice until we acknowledge that at the foundations of Grenfell Tower Fire lay social injustice. A combination of policies of deregulation and austerity were further exacerbated by neglect towards lower income communities. It is beyond a disgrace for citizens to not have access to safe shelter – it is a breach of human rights. Yet in January this year 210 000 households were still living in high-rise buildings with combustible cladding.
Grenfell Tower still stands. Anyone who drives on the Westway will be familiar with the strange silence that automatically settles in the car as the soft green wrapping, imprinted with a bold green heart, looms up next us. For those driving into London, it serves as a melancholic reminder – and a warning – that the vitality and opportunity promised by the city still seems to be off limits for so many. With plans for its demolition to be completed in 2022, let us set to work dismantling the societal structures that paved the way for this tragedy.
Words by Isabella Ward