Grenfell Tower Inquiry report recommendations: The transformative, the good, the mixed and the missing
What to make of the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report? Here, I run through my views on some of the key changes it suggests
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Rightly, most people’s focus in the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report coming out was what it said about the parties involved: the complacency of government, the cavalier attitude of the architects, the systematic dishonesty of the product manufacturers and the chronic and sustained failures of the social housing providers.
But attention must also turn to what the report has recommended should be done in the future.
There are 58 recommendations in all - and this post will only look at a small selection of them. In particular, I’m not looking at the fire service or aftermath recommendations today. Both are very important areas, but I want the chance to build my own understanding of them a bit before pronouncing on them.
For the other areas, my overall view is mixed. I think there are some very smart and important recommendations for change, which will have a bigger impact than may first be apparent. But I also think there are some areas where they do not quite go far enough, where the impact may be mixed and some key areas where the report is silent.
Let’s start with the transformative.
The transformative
A new construction regulator. This was the first recommendation of the inquiry, and it came on the basis of the finding that the “degree of fragmentation [in building regulation] was a recipe for inefficiency and an obstacle to effective regulation”.
In place of the current system, it wants to see “a single independent body headed by… a construction regulator, reporting to a single Secretary of State”.
This regulator will take on a number of functions including the regulation, testing and certification of construction products; the oversight of building control; research and advice on regulatory reforms and the licensing of contractors who will work on higher risk buildings.
At first glance, such a change might seem merely procedural: bringing existing functions under the remit of a single body. But what it is actually doing - in my view - is quietly nationalising our broken and captured regulatory system. What will be the point of private bodies like the Building Research Establishment (BRE) and the British Board of Agremènt, both sharply criticised in earlier chapters, when a public body is doing the same work?
And what change might there be in the attitude of contractors when an official, public body could remove their license for shoddy or defective work?
The practise of industry writing its own rules (the ‘desktop study’ route to compliance for combustible cladding systems was essentially invented by private sector bodies) would also go with a public body responsible for this sort of change.
There are dangers. To succeed this regulator must be a substantial public body. It will need high quality, expert staff and a large workforce. There is a very serious danger of failure if the government tries to do it on the cheap. The current Building Safety Regulator - which has a fraction of the responsibility of this new regulator - is well known to be struggling for resource.
Industry capture also remains possible for a public body, as does a reluctance to say and do things ministers don’t want to hear. The inquiry report makes clear that the BRE’s failings did not begin with privatisation. This new body - if created - would need strong governance and total independence. But it has the potential to drive major change if it is a success.
Publicly available test reports. All of the three materials in Grenfell’s cladding system had at some stage either directly failed fire tests, or been part of a system which had failed a test. But the designers and specifiers who put them on their buildings knew nothing of this, because the manufacturers kept these results to themselves.
The inquiry recommendations would stop this in the future with a requirement that “the full testing history” of a product is supplied to the construction regulator and included in the certificate.
A basic requirement, one might argue, but one which (if properly enforced) drives a train through the murky world of testing, retesting and burying inconvenient results. This isn’t just about cladding, insulation and fire, but a whole range of products which might not be quite as good as their manufacturers sometimes claim.
A licensing scheme for contractors working on higher risk buildings and personal declarations of safety by senior management. The inquiry has said that in order to work on higher risk buildings (a definition which will expand - see below), contractors should be licensed as competent and a “personal undertaking from a director or senior manager” should be submitted as part of the sign off process to ensure that reasonable care has been taken, and the building complies with regulations.
This is very significant - it fixes responsibility at a senior level in the organisation and provides an enormous commercial incentive (loss of license) for the contractor to do the job properly.
The good
Fire engineering to become a registered profession. I am a fire engineer.
I’m not, actually, I’m a journalist of middling success, but in telling you I’m a fire engineer in the previous sentence, I didn’t do anything wrong in law because it isn’t a protected professional title and there is no definition of what it actually requires.
The report recommends overhauling this sorry state of affairs and making ‘fire engineer’ a fully registered and accredited profession - like solicitors, doctors and architects. Practitioners will need to keep their skills sharp and will face being struck off if they misbehave. This is very good news.
Fire risk assessors to be registered. When the requirement to risk assess multiple occupancy buildings was introduced in 2005, Tony Blair’s government elected to allow the wisdom of the market to decide who was best placed to carry them out. So they set no minimum standards and no basic requirements for fire risk assessing - trusting building owners to find the best available contractors.
Sadly, building owners responded by finding the cheapest available contractors, and a new army of chancers with a white van, a clipboard and a couple of weeks training took on this pivotal life safety role. That was an obviously poor state of affairs, noted by fire sector experts, fire chiefs and coroners throughout the 2010s, but utterly ignored by policy makers. The inquiry report recommends changing it, with “a system of mandatory accreditation to certify the competence of fire risk assessors by setting standards for qualification and continuing professional development”. A good change, which will take the worst practitioners out of this important industry.
A review of the definition of higher-risk buildings. Currently the government has a hard 18m line governing the distinction between high risk buildings and the rest - a line which no one has ever seriously attempted to justify on scientific terms, and is only there for practical reasons.
The report calls for a new definition, with consideration of “the nature of its use and, in particular, the likely presence of vulnerable people, for whom evacuation in the event of a fire or other emergency would be likely to present difficulty”. This will link the risk status of a building to the potential for death in a fire in a much clearer way. I do foresee it being hard to define and implement, but that isn’t a reason not to do it.
A panel to consider a national authority for building control, and the end of private building control firms. This is a somewhat odd recommendation, on the basis that Grenfell itself was assessed by a public-sector contractor. But it is less odd, when you look at the evidence covering the National House Building Council (NHBC), and the way commercial incentives blurred their ability to block the use of combustible insulation on high rises.
I would approach this with some caution: public sector building control is not in great shape due to years of under-investment and a skills drain. Some of the better building control officers out there probably work for the small private firms and you don’t help anyone by kicking them out of the market. A national authority (effectively nationalising the building control function of the NHBC) would be a good move, but it would require a rapid build up of skills and personnel. Do it overnight and the whole thing falls over. But asking the question about building control reform with these options on the table is definitely necessary, so I like the recommendation.
The mixed
The appointment of a chief construction advisor. The inquiry wants a single secretary of state responsible for fire safety, and a chief construction advisor to assist them. I put this in the mixed category, because the inquiry’s own narrative (and the narrative that follows the end of its report in the seven years since Grenfell) suggests to me that the benefit of having a highly-powerful single advisor depends very greatly on who the advisor is.
I can’t name names here, but there have been some who have held that sort of role during this period and have done more harm than good. The power for industry lobbying (something the inquiry didn’t really touch) to play a corrupting role here is also something to worry about. So this really depends on who does it.
A review of Approved Document B, with specific considerations about the assumptions on stay put. The inquiry has told the government to get on with a review of Approved Document B “as soon as possible”, and that the assumption in the document “that effective compartmentation renders a stay put strategy an appropriate response to a fire” be particularly closely reviewed.
This is a good recommendation on the one hand, because a review of Approved Document B is desperately needed - especially with the rise of new construction methods, like fully volumetric off-site construction, and the risk that can pose.
But it is a bad recommendation (in my view) on the other, because it leaves too much in the hands of government when it should have been far more specific about the document’s shortcomings. The panel said they “do not think it appropriate for us to recommend specific changes to Approved Document B”, but this feels like a cop out. They have heard the evidence, have had the benefit of the experts and should have been confident enough to pronounce on what needs to change.
A fire safety strategy from a registered fire engineer for all higher risk buildings. On the one hand this requirement is very positive - because it should eliminate mistakes which occur because of a lack of knowledge and expertise.
But it also feels like it places too much confidence in an industry which is currently failing. The fire engineers at Grenfell didn’t only do a bad job, they also showed a willingness to “massage the proposals into something acceptable”, in the words of one of their own emails.
How can we know that future fire engineers won’t take the same route to please their clients? This isn’t really a question of competency, but ethics, honesty and financial incentives - something which can’t be trained away by new qualifications. If fire engineering statements start to undermine minimum standards (‘we are satisfied this combustible insulation does not pose a risk of external fire spread’ for example), could we find ourselves in a worse place?
Transparency over inquiry and inquest recommendations. The disastrous failure to act on the Lakanal House coroner’s recommendations was a major part of the Grenfell story, and one this report seeks to address.
The report says there should be “a legal requirement for the government to maintain a publicly accessible record of recommendations made by select committees, coroners and public inquiries together with a description of the steps taken in response” and that it should report on this annually to Parliament.
This will make it much harder to sweep things under the rug and is therefore very welcome, but is a step short of what INQUEST and others have called for - an independent body like the National Audit Office to monitor and report on its progress. We will be relying on ministers to admit failure themselves - not something they like to do.
The missing
Social Housing Providers. The wider story of social housing policy was always outside the inquiry’s remit, but the investigations into what happened at Grenfell itself could have provided justification for recommendations in this area.
Instead, despite finding major failure at the social housing providers responsible for the tower, the report shied away from recommendations, because changes have already been enacted by Parliament, in the form of the Social Housing Regulation Act.
Now - I like this act, and I think it will bring about positive changes. But I also don’t think it fixes everything. In particular, what struck me listening to the evidence about Grenfell was the point about power. Grenfell’s residents were a powerful voice, but they did not have power within the system - no access to legal aid, no formal role within the governance structures of their landlord, no statutory rights to have a say over what happened to their home or empowerment to form a collective voice to speak on behalf of their neighbours.
I wanted to see the inquiry address this. For me, the major problem with relations between tenants’ (and leaseholders’) is one of power, in short, that the landlord has power and the resident does not. I also felt the inquiry’s criticism of the failure to consult representatives of disabled residents about guidance on their own evacuation could have opened the door to recommending changes to the lack of a tenant or resident voice on the national stage. Not recommending change in either area feels like a major miss.
Non-betterment, grandfathering and existing buildings in general. An occasional feature of the evidence in the inquiry was the argument of professionals involved in refurbishing Grenfell that there was no “betterment” requirement in the building regulations, along with the linked idea of ‘grandfathering’.
This essentially means that new rules don’t apply to old buildings, and if you do some work (to the smoke ventilation system for example), all that is required of you is not to leave it in any worse shape than you found it - even if that means it wouldn’t match up to modern standards.
Grenfell was built in 1974 and is emblematic in some ways of a problem which will become more acute as we move through the 21st Century. Our older buildings will need improvement. Making adaptations to existing buildings is very hard, but the inquiry should have turned its mind to how we do it. Too many of its recommendations will make things better for new builds, but won’t do much for the residents of tower blocks which have already been built.
Prescriptive regulation in general. Philosophically, the inquiry report recommends a review of the existing regime, along with a state regulator to take away the conflicts of interest and enforce it more consistently. This is good.
But it is also effectively endorsing the continuation of this regime: functional headline requirements (the walls of a building must adequately resist the spread of flame, for example) supported by non-mandatory official guidance.
In my view this system gives us the worst of both worlds - a race to the bottom (compliance with the minimum standards in the approved documents) and inconsistent, unenforceable standards which give too much freedom to industry to set its own rules.
Instead, I think we should simply move to the sort of prescriptive standards used in other jurisdictions and set the bar high. The industry described in the report is not one which should be trusted to work things out for itself.
In her report on recommendations, inquiry expert Dr Barbara Lane said the inquiry should have recommended a “transition to a clear, unambiguous approach for future regulations and mandatory prescriptive standards that govern fire safety in [high risk residentia buildings] in the long term”, and this is something I feel the panel should have followed.
The inquiry might have felt itself unable to recommend what would have been a major shift in economic policy (and I do understand that), but in my view, the evidence it heard calls for it.
Smoke toxicity, sprinklers and fire alarms. There were also various other things I wanted to hear more on. We heard all of the victims died from smoke inhalation, but received no recommendations on smoke toxicity, either for construction products or internal contents of flats. That remains something our regulatory system is completely silent on.
We should have at least had a view on whether the retrofit of sprinklers in existing properties is a policy aim worth pursuing. In Phase One, the chair said he had “heard no evidence about the use of sprinklers” and therefore “cannot make any recommendation at this stage”. But in Phase Two, the report remained silent on them.
And fire alarms. The Phase Two report went back to its recommendation from Phase One to double down on the need for Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans for vulnerable residents (something government has finally committed to). But it didn’t specifically draw attention to another major missing part of its Phase One recommendations: that manual fire alarms be installed in existing buildings, in case the need for a full evacuation arises. With a fire where precisely this need arose at 2.45am in Dagenham taking place a week before the report came out, this feels like something which should have been loudly and firmly re-established as a necessary change.
Next steps
In Parliament, Kier Starmer promised to come back to the house in six months with his view on the recommendations.
This seems slow, and some will have wanted him to objectively promise to implement them all, but I don’t actually mind it as an approach.
These are genuinely complex recommendations with multiple trade offs and it is right that they get proper consideration. I prefer it to the last government’s approach of accepting all the recommendations verbally and then privately ditching many of them and pretending they hadn’t.
But it does require us to keep an eye on what he says and does next. This is a slippery leader with a poor track record on keeping promises. And these are changes which many of his friends and donors in the construction industry will not like. Watch him closely.
If you want to read the recommendations for yourself, they begin on page 229 here and (like most of the report) are written in plain English and will be a quicker, easier read than you might imagine. I’d be interested to hear any readers’ thoughts in the comments below, or by hitting reply.
My coverage
For those of you interested in my views on all this - and since you’re about 3,000 words into this Substack I assume that’s you - I have written quite widely on the report already elsewhere.
For Inside Housing my news report on the findings on government is here and product manufacturers here. A summary of some of the key findings is here, a piece on the anger over the lack of recommendations covering social housing here and an opinion piece aimed at staff at social housing providers is here. I will write more for the magazine over the coming days.
I have also written this opinion piece for The Guardian about the report in general, this (about Tony Blair’s comments on it) for The Spectator, and this about the government’s long record of dissembling for Unherd. I’m due to have a piece out later on the social housing providers aspect for Prospect.
Somewhat amusingly, I’m also quoted giving my view that David Cameron’s remarks on the report are “total bullshit” here, and I’m also on the Tortoise Podcast here and the wonderful BBC podcast here. I’ve also tweeted quite a lot (probably too much) on my account here.
Pre-publication, I reported on the views of Shah Ahmed, former chair of the leaseholder association at Grenfell, for The I here and the current whereabouts of former key civil servant Brian Martin for The Times here.
Over the coming months, though, this Substack will be the primary place where I sift through the detail in the 1,700 pages and seven volumes of the report - so please do subscribe to keep up to date.
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.