‘Blind to the obvious and regarded accepting assistance as an admission of defeat’ - what the Grenfell inquiry said about the aftermath of the fire
Our latest summary of the report's findings covers the serious failure of both local and central government to provide for the basic needs of those impacted by the Grenfell Tower fire.
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The suffering of those who lived in Grenfell Tower, or had loved ones who did, did not end with the fire.
The aftermath of the disaster was catastrophically mismanaged, with displaced people left sleeping rough, bereaved families having the deaths of loved ones confirmed via the TV news and a rehousing process which dragged on for years.
The inquiry looked into this - through the frame of the legal responsibilities outlined in the Civil Contingencies Act, which governs how responsible bodies should act in the aftermath of the disaster.
The inquiry limited its investigation to the seven days immediately following the fire - but the report acknowledged that the failures did not stop at this point. “We recognise that the appalling after-effects of the fire continue to this day,” it said.
‘The picture we saw was that of a vulnerable group of people facing not only the shock, grief and trauma of the fire itself but also, as an immediate priority, the need to satisfy the most basic of their daily needs’ - residents’ experience
Its investigations revealed a picture of chaos from the moment residents left the burning building.
“Residents of the tower and those evacuated from surrounding properties were abandoned without information about where to go or what to do. There was ‘absolute chaos and confusion everywhere’. The scene was described as a ‘horror film’ and a ‘war zone’,” it said, quoting from some of the 220 witnesses from members of the community who gave evidence.
From the start, the 845 people who were evacuated from the ‘walkways’ (the low-rise blocks connected to the tower) were left destitute.
“Some of those who lived in the walkways were left wandering the estate, displaced and unable to return home,” the report said. “So far as [residents] could see, the council and the [Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation had vanished.”
At the Westway Centre - where a large rest centre was eventually opened - things became chaotic. Residents were asked to provide identification to enter, despite having lost everything in the fire. A process of interviewing arrivals was described as “astonishingly perfunctory and without compassion”.
“The centre was described as lacking ‘warmth’ and its atmosphere as being ‘formal and bureaucratic’,” the report said. “For example, one individual who was trying to find five loved ones was told to send an email.”
The council had no policy on the provision of financial assistance, which meant many survivors “had no access to funds at a time of unprecedented need and were trying to support themselves and their children”.
The provision of cash assistance was desperately inconsistent. Residents were refused assistance because they were employed, or because they were leaseholders rather than tenants. But most had no means to access their bank accounts, and no way to provide for their most basic needs.
“The process of obtaining assistance was an uphill battle and for many, embarrassing and intrusive,” the report said. Some were told to write down everything they needed.
“In the absence of such support, [survivors] described the humiliation of having to search through donations to find suitable clothes, in some cases without success,” the report said.
Meanwhile, those seeking their loved ones were left without information, or clarity on how to get it. “Some families desperately went from hospital to hospital, rest centre to rest centre, in their search for information, but to no avail,” the report said.
“The absence of a clear and centralised system for providing information about those who were safe and those who were missing led to the growth of false information. Some people were told that their loved ones had been seen alive when they had in fact died,” the report said. One family learned about their son’s death through the TV news.
The allocation of emergency accommodation was also botched. Some survivors had to wait days before being allocated accommodation, while many of those discharged from hospitals had no accommodation and no idea of where to go to seek it.
Survivors were also often not given support to travel to accommodation, despite having “no money and only the clothes they stood up in”. Some arrived at their designated hotel, to find no booking had been made, others went to three different hotels before finding the right one.
The report called the accommodation that was offered “wholly inadequate”. Families of four and five were given a single room with a double bed; many were placed on upper floors. They were given little information about how long the bookings were for and residents were sometimes given just hours to leave and find new accommodation for themselves after being placed in a hotel.
Cots were often not available for those with babies or young children, nor any means of sterilising bottles. Halal food was not available at many hotels, nor was there any provision for iftar and suhoor (the meal before and after fasting), despite the large Muslim population and the fire occurring during Ramadan. Many hotel rooms offered no laundry facilities. Many residents were also moved a long way from the tower, leaving them with an “acute sense of being completely isolated”.
These conditions endured for months as the permanent rehousing process floundered.
“The picture we saw was that of a vulnerable group of people facing not only the shock, grief and trauma of the fire itself but also, as an immediate priority, the need to satisfy the most basic of their daily needs. Survivors described it as living in limbo, with no space to heal,” the report said.
Meanwhile, the 845 people displaced from the Walkways were “forgotten”. “Although they had been displaced from their homes, their needs were considered to be less important. They were left in an invidious position, unable to return to their homes while the [police] cordon remained in place but with insufficient hotel rooms available to accommodate them all,” the report said, with some left “sleeping on the grass close to the tower”. One pregnant mother with three children aged between one and 12 was not offered a hotel room for two weeks.
So how was this chaotic response allowed to happen?
‘In our view his attitude was defensive and his confidence in RBKC’s ability to manage the response was misplaced’ - the failure of local government
The problems began with Category One responder - the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), which was supposed to take immediate responsibility for the provision of humanitarian assistance.
But over years, disaster response was an area which had been neglected by the borough - with training of key staff patchy or non-existent, and key roles left unfilled. The report called it “systemically ill-equipped to deal with a serious emergency”, adding that there had been “clear warnings to senior management” in prior years that this was the case without action.
It said there had been “a culture of neglect at RBKC over a number of years towards planning for humanitarian assistance”.
This lack of capacity may not have mattered: RBKC could have been assisted in its response by other boroughs, who immediately made formal and informal offers of help. It could also have invoked the ‘London Gold’ arrangements, where the capital’s councils jointly co-ordinate a city-wide response to a major incident.
But RBKC did not ask invoke these arrangements, and refused the help which was offered. The report said this was because it “did not wish to appear incapable of managing the situation” and “feared that invoking the Gold Resolution would be seen as a sign that its response had failed”.
At a meeting on the morning of the fire Nicholas Holgate, the borough’s chief executive, was told by his managers that RBKC had insufficient staff to manage the incident for an extended period, and that he should invoke London Gold. But Mr Holgate responded by saying “that looks like we can’t cope”, according to a log of the meeting.
“In our view his attitude was defensive and his confidence in RBKC’s ability to manage the response was misplaced,” the report said, saying he was “blind to the obvious and regarded accepting assistance as an admission of defeat”.
But without the borough asking for it, London Gold could not unilaterally take over. The system was set up for an incident involving several boroughs at once, like a roaming terror attack or a major river flood. Where just one borough was impacted, there was no mechanism to force it to relinquish control.
“If RBKC had asked for assistance, we are confident that it would have been provided with alacrity,” the report said. In the event, it did not ask for any external support until 5.03pm, on the day after the fire.
By this stage, the response was already seriously failing. The Gold arrangements did not actually come into force until 2pm the next day - with no explanation offered for this further delay - and structures to address the crisis were not in place until the weekend. “It took a number of days for London Gold to steer the response in a more effective direction,” the report said.
“It appears that for that reason a significant part of the department’s limited resources was taken up with reviewing its response to the earlier Lakanal House fire” - the failure of central government
What about central government? Why - in a moment of national crisis - did senior ministers allow one failing local authority to botch the emergency response so badly, and with such a serious human cost?
From the very early stages, communication within central government was inept. The incident was noted at 1.30am within those monitoring major incidents in the Cabinet Office, but it took time to spread this news through the government machine. The various responsible bodies and departments did not share information with one another until cross government meetings were held the next morning at 10am.
“In our view the failure to share information from the strategic co-ordinating group promptly undermined at a critical stage the government’s understanding of what was going on,” the report said.
The cross-government meeting was chaired by fire minister Nicholas Hurd - who had been appointed two days previously and had no briefings or experience in emergency response. The home secretary (Amber Rudd) was said to have been unavailable.
“In our view, the cross-government meetings would have benefited from being chaired by a more senior minister who had a better understanding of what was required to respond to an emergency,” the report said.
Support was periodically offered to RBKC by central government figures throughout the 14th of June, but officials and ministers operated under an assumption that the borough was coping. This was partly influenced by Melanie Dawes, permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) writing that Mr Holgate “had previously worked in the Treasury” and that “the department had a very good relationship with him”.
The report said this personal connection “contributed to a confidence in the ability of RBKC to respond to the fire that turned out to be misplaced”.
After a further cross government meeting at 4.30 - which no one from RBKC attended - Mr Hurd told the media that he felt “reassured that the resources and the capacity needed to support people were in place”.
“It appears to us that the government had fundamentally misunderstood the position,” said the report.
This meeting paid remarkably little attention to the needs of survivors and bereaved. There was no discussion of the need for financial assistance or information, or other areas in which guidance said those impacted by a disaster should be offered assistance.
“Although it was agreed that trauma counselling should be offered to firefighters and ambulance workers, we have seen nothing to suggest that there was any discussion about providing counselling of a similar nature to former residents of the tower,” the report said.
The day after the fire, several senior government figures became aware of the chaos on the ground and started to raise more serious concerns.
At a meeting later in the day, the mood of government towards Mr Holgate changed when it “became clear that RBKC did not know how many people had been displaced from the tower”. “Mr Holgate was defensive and tried to assure ministers that no additional help was required,” the report said.
Mr Holgate was unable to answer questions around a plan for housing, how much housing was needed and what other services were required. Mr Hurd felt that it represented “the complete collapse of Mr Holgate’s credibility under questioning”.
“However, DCLG still failed to recognise the seriousness of the problems with RBKC,” the report said.
Finally, after visiting the Westway Centre the next day and witnessing the chaos, officials helped facilitate the transfer of responsibility to London Gold.
As the days moved forward, prime minister Theresa May promised - now infamously - that all residents of the tower would be rehoused within three weeks. “The commitment was no doubt well meant but was always unrealistic and raised expectations in a way that was irresponsible,” the report said. “Some residents were still living in hotel accommodation two years after the fire.”
The report noted that one of the reasons why the government failed to respond properly was that DCLG was under-resourced. “It was short of staff and was in the process of being reduced in size,” the report said.
It was also distracted by the role it may have played in allowing the fire to happen.
“It appears that for that reason a significant part of the department’s limited resources was taken up with reviewing its response to the earlier Lakanal House fire,” the report said.
This included - as I have noted previously - pushing information into the public domain about its guidance which was at best wrong and, at worst, a deliberate cover-up.
Amid all of this failure, though, the report did point to the community and faith groups who responded to the disaster with what it called “a spontaneous outpouring of compassion”. This included the Rugby Portobello Trust, The Clement James Centre and the Al Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre.
“The people who emerge from the events with the greatest credit are the members of the local community, who, with the support of local voluntary organisations, provided support in the hours immediately following the fire when the authorities were conspicuous by their absence,” the report said. It said their “willingness and ability to organise themselves effectively at short notice” was “exceptional and deserving of the highest praise”.
Author’s note
This post is a brief distillation of the findings of the report. As all of the posts have been, it is a summary, and key details are missing. For those who want to read the full version, it is presented in plain English and is accessible. You will find it in the first 171 pages here.
I stress this with this post particularly, because my experience of reporting on story after story about displaced residents tells me that these are mistakes we repeat over and over again.
Whether it is a gas explosion, flood, building collapse or fire, once a mass of people are forced out of their homes at short notice, the multi-agency response required fails to materialise and we end up repeating the sort of chaotic, traumatising mistakes that were so depressingly evident after Grenfell.
In a century where climate change will push us towards many more such instances, this is an area of policy we need to figure out - but I don’t think we are. Much of the government’s response to the inquiry has been to hector local councils to get their act together, without acknowledging the catastrophic funding crises town halls face.
I would be in favour of radical legislation. Could we - for example - pass a law which allows us to clear out a hotel and keep the displaced community together, in one space, where support and information can be easily provided? The inconvenience to business people and holiday makers would be less than the benefit to those who have just faced a disaster. I hope to return to this subject in the coming months.
But that is almost the end of my summary of the Inquiry report. I plan one more on fire doors, because my (now extensive) travels talking about the fire tell me that is a critical area which is too poorly understood. Subscribers can read the previous summaries below (campaigners, tenants, students - I’m willing to offer free subscriptions, hit reply to ask):
RBKC and the TMO as client and building control
The recommendations and the government’s response to them
This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.
If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book. Or you can buy a copy here.