Coffee House Shots
Grenfell report: why did it take so long?
Before we begin this podcast I'd like to tell you about a special deal. Subscribe today to the spectator for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Along with, here's the magic bit, a £320 John Lewis or weight-trails voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/veture Hello, and welcome to Coffee House Shocks. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by the spectator's Isabel Hartman and Liam Halligan, telegraph columnist and author of Home Truths. Now today the report into the Grenfell disaster has been published after seven years, a 1700 page report. Isabelle, you write on Coffee House that nobody comes out of this well. I mean certainly the people whose job it was to ensure fire safety prevents fire from spreading, listen to the concerns of residents and indeed help with those left in the aftermath pretty much all fail to one degree or another. I think the only group who come out really well from this is the local community around Grenfell who did some of the work that the local council should have done in the aftermath of the fire in terms of providing a resting place, providing food and helping with accommodation and so on. So it is a bleak report into institutional failure in central and local governments, into attitudes where you have toxic behaviour, distrust, dislike was described in the relationship between the tenant management organisation and the Grenfell residents, ministers in central government and the communities and local government's department being well aware of the fire risks in high-rise buildings but not acting on them even a year before the Grenfell fire but for years before then. And then this isn't just about public administration, this is also about companies who were commercial organisations but also working in a sector that had a huge responsibility towards the people who would be affected by their products. They weren't the purchases of the products but they were the people living in the buildings so particularly the manufacturers of the cladding that was placed on the building were considered, that cladding was considered to be the single biggest factor in the spread of the fire and the company who manufactured that cladding which was called Rayno Bond 55 and it was iconic which was a US firm, the report found that they had engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent data and mislead the market. Again the architect, studio E, who hadn't had experience of refurbishing and placing cladding on high-rise tower blocks before were engaged by the council, they also bore a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster so it's not just about corporate greed, it's not just about political failure, it's this path to the disaster as the report calls it, where basically everyone either failed to do their job or deliberately decided not to and that means and the report concludes very starkly that the 72 people who died in the Grenfell disaster could still have been alive today. Liam, I mean, as Bill there talks about corporate greed, what should be done going fall in this sector, you've written a lot about the housing sector, the companies involved, how much responsibility do they have for this and what should needs to be done now in the future? Well I think Isabelle summarised the report and the state of play well, this public inquiry is of course just a prelude to prosecutions, it's taken so long and it's really part of a pattern, there's lots of good things about this country but we're really, really bad at doing inquiries after tragedies in a timely manner and lots of the public feels that things are deliberately strung out despite the horrendous psychological impact on victims who want closure, who want their day in court, you know, think of the bloody Sunday inquiry, 40 years, think of the Hillsborough inquiry, the COVID inquiry and now this inquiry, because this inquiry has taken so long and little wonder, it took the Tories 23 months after Grenfell, after June 2017 to just come up with proposals for the scope of the inquiry, not the actual scope of the inquiry but proposals, that was almost two years, we're now many, many years on, the first, the earliest that defendants are going to get, are going to appear in court will be late 2026 for defendants to even appear, not prosecutions which is where this will end up, so there's been a ridiculous delay and for all our, you know, all that we do well, the UK is a grotesque outlier when it comes to the amount of time spent on the inquiries, the over lawyerisation of it, lots of people have got their hands out looking to make money out of this tragedy and we can't be naive about that but I think the delay is also ridiculous because of the safety concerns, here are some government figures, there are still James 4,630 residential buildings of 11 metres and over that have this flammable cladding which is clear acted as a chimney at Grenfell making the deaths almost inevitable as Isabelle said, that's as per the end of July, only 30% of these buildings have had the remediation work completed on them and that means that there are thousands of people now living in homes, not just social homes but also private flats as well, surrounded by cladding, living with that cladding even though the government has already passed a law saying that such cladding breaches, fire safety regulations, so the delays aren't just about trying to take the political sting out of something, trying to park a difficult issue, the delays aren't just about denying the victims of this horrendous tragedy, the worst residential fire since the Second World War, denying them soon closure in their day in court so they can move on with their lives, the delays are also mean without prosecutions, you have ongoing safety concerns where lots and lots of people are living in buildings which have been deemed unsafe by law and yet they're still living in them, that's an outrage. Yes, you could be right I think on that point on the the public inquiries as well, I think we've discussed from here that before the need to have an inquiry into inquiries, if that's not too meta, you know, a royal commission about the state of their different public inquiries and as you say Liam, the fact that criminal prosecutions can't, you know, begin until almost a decade on from the tragedy itself. I think the point that Liam makes about over lawyerisation is so interesting because, you know, if you talk to public inquiry lawyers, this is what they do, you know, they go on to the next inquiry, there's quite a few inquiries they can't do with them all at once but, you know, the sort of gossip between them will be old, which one are you working on next and it's sort of, you know, which examination of human misery moving from this inquiry to next and, you know, that's that's their job but I think my kind of view on this is firstly, I totally, I think, we've got a very strange addiction to public inquiries and then a complete aversion to actually doing anything about their recommendations afterwards. They're able to just sit on shelves and, you know, we maybe we needed an inquiry into the Iraq War but it would have been useful if we'd actually implemented some of the lessons that Chilcott published and perhaps if it had been able to publish, I don't know, within three years as opposed to what was it 12 in the end, by which time we'd already committed troops multiple times and repeated the same mistakes about post-conflict planning and so on and, you know, the shipment inquiry, the victims, had to wait 10 years for the implementation of the changes to death certification that was recommended, even though everyone claimed that they were in favour of this and so there's, you know, we love calling for them, we like a lock-in where everyone, you know, the journalists go and read the report and then five years later we suddenly realise that absolutely nothing has changed and so our public inquiry system is not working but another way in which, just coming back to the over-lawisation point, we have an issue. I don't have a problem with there being lots of lawyers, you know, some of my best friends are lawyers and some of my best friends are public inquiry lawyers actually and, you know, I think it's really important to have a robust legal system but we don't because in public inquiries we are often investigating an earlier failure in the legal system where a group has not had access to the same legal advice, whether it be in a criminal prosecution, an inquest or just advice about their rights as a citizen as the organisations who have crushed them and but that inequality of arms that we see, we saw, for instance, in the Hillsborough scandal that we saw in the infected blood scandal that we've seen in a slightly different way in Grenfell but still those tenants did not have access to the same advice and support that they should have had and that the organisations that they were going off against had and I think that's the great scandal. I don't care how many lawyers there are but they are distributed deeply unequally and in favour of people who are already very powerful. And elsewhere in Westminster today, of course, as the Prime Minister is responding to that, we have news what's happening in the Tory leadership contest as well. I mean, Liam, you came on our podcast a couple of weeks ago and talked about the beginning of that, how it's gone and what it all takes on how it's all developed since then and it looks likely we're recording this now at sort of lunchtime on the Wednesday, a couple hours before the result be declared at 3.30. What do you think is going to happen in terms of the people most likely to be eliminated first and how the contest develops? Well, not to bang on about the same theme, James, would that I do that on your review podcast. But again, it's taking far too long. The Tories aren't going to come up with a leader until early November and the election was in early July. That's too long for us not to have a leader of the opposition. We're not going to have a leader of the opposition when Rachel Reeves delivers what is billed as a, you know, a game-changing budget on October 30th, autumn statement, game-changing in a way that a lot of the public won't like. We should never forget that for all the optics of Labour's, you know, 170 odd seat landslide, they only got 33% of the vote on a 60% turnout, which is 20%. So four out of five people didn't vote for the Labour Party. There's a lot of alarm out there about what the Labour Party are saying about all kinds of pretty ideological tax moves that they're going to bring in, that they're going to bring in, even though they're unlikely to raise much revenue, just because they want the kind of ideological hit of doing that. The country needs an effective leader of the opposition and sharpish people of all parties and none should want that. So it's taking far too long. Having said that, when it comes down to it, I do think it will be between Tom Tuganha on the one hand and Robert Genwick, Kenny Badenock on the other hand. I think Kenny is the person who Labour fear the most. Several very senior Labour people have told me that in private conversation. Peter Mandelson has said that. Having said that, I think the danger for Kenny is that, you know, the remaining Tory Parliamentary Party of one-two-one MPs rather than three-six-five. It's much smaller than it was, but it's probably got a higher share of so-called one-nation Tories because so many of the brexity red-wall Tories lost their seats in Labour's victory. And if the existing Parliamentary Party much smaller has a higher share of one-nation MPs, I think what's going to do for Kenny is if that side of the Parliamentary Party, just like they stopped Michael Portillo getting through to the constituents round where he would have won in the late 90s, I think there's a danger there could be a kind of stop-kemi campaign because I think everyone would agree objectively if Kenny gets through to the final round where the constituents, where the party activists are much denuded number, where they vote, I think she's almost nailed on to become the Tory leader. But the danger for her is that she doesn't get through because a kind of powerful one-nation caucus in the Parliamentary Party stops her because they know if she does get through, she's going to win. Although, I have to say that Dizzeba watching Prime Minister's question today, I mean, this recession at CHAP, making a rare political intervention as the leader of the opposition, actually, he did a pretty good job today, didn't he, and actually a bit of opposing some of the things Labour's been doing? Well, it's a good thing that you called him the leader of the opposition because Kiestama kept getting confused and calling Rishi Sunak the Prime Minister, I think he did it about three or four times in different questions, and look, I mean, obviously he's just getting used to everything, but I think it was also a telling slip because a lot of Labour's schtick at the moment is them complaining about what the Conservatives did, almost as though they're still in opposition rather than the guys with the power, and so I think it sort of says a little bit about Kiestama's mindset, that he's still more comfortable being the complainer rather than the person who's able to defend their own decisions, and then there was another slip which was less hilarious, but I thought still quite telling, which was that he called Ed Davie the Learned Gentleman, which is obviously the phrase that you use when you're talking in court, as opposed to being in Parliament, although I'm sure Ed Davie has usually learned it, I think it also showed that Stalin was in a very loyally mindset today, particularly when he was answering questions, not from Ed Davie because he was talking about the Winter Fuel Payment, but from Rishi Sunak on the Israel Arms Export Licenses, and he kept insisting that this was a legal not a policy decision as though you're able to make that distinction when you're a politician because politics is about making decisions, and he had also appointed as his Attorney General somebody who I think it's fair to say most of us could understand where arms policy might be going as soon as the Attorney General was appointed, giving his sort of activist history as a lawyer on Israel, so the idea that it's not a political decision, even the timing of the announcement, sorry, on suspending those around 30 arms export licenses was something that Stalin had to answer for, and Sunak made, I thought, quite an unusual sort of emotional point actually in one of his final questions about this, where he pointed out that the announcement from David Lamy had come on the same day as the funerals of the hostages who'd been killed by Hamas were taking place and that, you know, the board of deputies in this country and others heard called that decision really shameful and very upsetting, and so as you say James, you know, it was a strong performance from the leader of the opposition, not the prime minister, and it did underline also how many different fronts Keir Starmer is having a really difficult time already. We shall keep looking at how those fronts develop over the coming weeks. Thank you very much, Liam. Thank you, Isabel, and thank you for listening to Coffee House Shots. [Music] (soft music)