Grenfell Tower inquiry chair makes statement as report published – live

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Key players named in the Grenfell Tower report

Arconic

Arconic is the multibillion-dollar US company whose French subsidiary made the combustible cladding panels on Grenfell Tower. The inquiry found that despite close to a decade of internal knowledge about some of the risks, it was “determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries including the UK”.

Kingspan and Celotex

The Irish company Kingspan, which turns over €8bn a year, made about only 5% of the combustible foam insulation on Grenfell Tower, but the inquiry found that by its “dishonest marketing” of its K15 product it “created the conditions” for Celotex, another insulation company, to try to break into the market by “dishonest means”.

According to the inquiry, “from 2005 until after this inquiry had begun [in 2017], Kingspan knowingly created a false market in insulation for use on buildings over 18 metres in height”. It did this by claiming a fire test of a wall system showed it could be used in any building taller than 18 metres when this “was a false claim, as it well knew”.

Central government

Officials and some ministers were “defensive and dismissive” when MPs raised concerns about fire safety of cladding before the Grenfell disaster.

“In the years that followed … the government’s deregulation agenda, enthusiastically supported by some junior ministers and the secretary of state [Eric Pickles], dominated the department’s thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the fire safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded.”

But the problem in government went back further – as far as a cladding fire at Knowsley Heights, Liverpool in 1991. Between then and Grenfell, “there were many opportunities for the government to identify the risks … and to take action in relation to them”.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation

The council landlord and its tenant management arm were behind the £10m refurbishment plan for Grenfell Tower. For years there had been “distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger” between officials at the tenants management association (TMO) and tenants.

“The TMO regarded some of the residents as militant troublemakers led on by a handful of vocal activists, principally Edward Daffarn, whose style they found offensive,” the inquiry found. “The result was a toxic atmosphere fuelled by mistrust on both sides.”

Daffarn was the resident who wrote on a blog eight months before the fire that: “Only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents” would expose “the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation”.

Studio E, Rydon and Harley Facades

The architect, main contractor and cladding contractor were strongly criticised. Studio E, a now defunct architectural practice, “demonstrated a cavalier attitude to the regulations affecting fire safety” and did not recognise that the cladding was combustible. It specified Celotex but it did not realise it was not suitable for use on a building more than 18 metres in height, in accordance with the statutory guidance.

Rydon gave “inadequate thought to fire safety, to which it displayed a casual attitude” and “failed to take proper steps to investigate Harley’s competence … it was complacent about the need for fire engineering advice”. It “bears considerable responsibility for the fire”, the report added.

Meanwhile, Harley “did not concern itself sufficiently with fire safety at any stage of the refurbishment and it appears to have thought that there was no need for it to do so, because others involved in the project and ultimately building control, would ensure the design was safe”.

The bereaved and the survivors are gathered in the inquiry room awaiting the publication of the report and a statement from the chairman of the inquiry Sir Martin Moore-Bick. Among them are Anthony Roncolato, Wilie Thompson, Ed Daffarn and Thiago Alves. Also here are Elizabeth Campbell, the leader of RBKC and her deputy, Kim Taylor-Smith alongside a couple of dozen lawyers. The room is silent.

Sir Martin Moore-Bick has said that the inquiry has taken longer than he had hoped because “as our investigations progressed, we uncovered many more matters of concern than we had originally expected”.

Grenfell report blames decades of government failure and companies’ ‘systematic dishonesty’

The Grenfell Tower disaster was the result of “decades of failure” by central government to stop the spread of combustible cladding combined with the “systematic dishonesty” of multimillion-dollar companies whose products spread the fire that killed 72 people, a seven-year public inquiry has found.

In a 1,700-page report which apportions blame for the 2017 tragedy widely, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the inquiry, found that three firms – Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex – “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to … mislead the market”.

He also found the architects Studio E, the builders Rydon and Harley Facades and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s building control department all bore responsibility for the blaze.

The inquiry was highly critical of the tenant management organisation (TMO), which was appointed by the local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), to look after its thousands of homes but consistently ignored residents’ views. The TMO chief executive, Robert Black, established a “pattern of concealment … in relation to fire safety matters” and the TMO “treated the demands of managing fire safety as an inconvenience”.

Moore-Bick reserved some of his most damning conclusions for central government. The inquiry found that the government was “well aware” of the risks posed by highly flammable cladding “but failed to act on what it knew”.

Eric Pickles, David Cameron’s housing secretary until 2015, had “enthusiastically supported” the prime minister’s drive to slash regulations and it dominated his department’s thinking to the extent that matters affecting fire safety and risk to life “were ignored, delayed or disregarded”, the inquiry concluded.

Pickles also failed to act on a coroner’s 2013 recommendation to tighten up fire safety regulations after a cladding fire at Lakanal House, another London council block, killed six people. It was “not treated with any sense of urgency”

Sir Martin Moore-Bick gives statement as Grenfell Tower inquiry final report published

Sir Martin Moore-Bick will be giving a statement as the final inquiry report is published at 11am. You can watch the inquiry’s chair give the address here …

We will bring you the key lines that emerge.

While we are waiting for the report to be published, here is a reminder that as long ago as 2019, our social affairs correspondent Robert Booth wrote this long read on how the biggest challenge facing survivor groups already appeared to be government inaction. It is well worth a read …

Here is another extract from Robert Booth’s earlier article on the imminent publication of the final Grenfell Tower inquiry report:

Today’s publication will be the second and final inquiry report. In 2019, phase one conclusions focused on the night of the fire and found London fire brigade commanders were not properly prepared and there were “serious deficiencies in command and control”. It also found the cut-price refurbishment breached building regulations and the plastic filled aluminium cladding panels made by Arconic were the main cause of the fire spreading.

The longer, second-phase report will explain why the fire at Grenfell Tower happened, examining the decisions that led to the refurbishment, the conduct of the construction companies and shortcomings in government regulation.

The inquiry has already been told by its lead counsel that “each and every one of the deaths … was avoidable”. The government has previously said it was “truly sorry” for its “failure to realise that the regulatory system was broken and it might lead to a catastrophe such as this”.

Many of the companies, consultants and contractors involved were accused of engaging in a “merry-go-round of buck passing” and several key witnesses from Arconic, the US industrial giant whose French subsidiary supplied the combustible cladding panels, refused to face cross-examination.

Read more from Robert Booth here: Final Grenfell inquiry report released as companies involved brace for criticism

Police have previously said that it may still take years for any criminal prosecutions of people involved in the failings at Grenfell Tower to take place.

Speaking to the BBC this morning, former chief prosecutor Sir Max Hill said:

I think that the process of looking at the material through a criminal investigation and prosecution will be sped up. I wish I could say that means we’ll have an instant decision, or a decision in a number of weeks or months

But the complexity, as proved by the extraordinary length of the inquiry, means that I would like to think by the end of next year, so in one year’s time, we’ll know.

I think the police very recently have been saying it’ll be 2026. Let us just hope it is as early as possible in 2026. To say it should be any earlier, I think is unrealistic, given the complexity of what now must be considered.

At the end of August the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, called efforts to remove unsafe cladding from thousands of at-risk buildings “too slow”. She said it was her job in the new Labour administration to ensure remaining works finished as quickly as possible.

She made the comments during a visit to Dagenham, east London after a fire tore through a block of flats that was undergoing remedial works to remove “non-compliant” cladding. She told the media:

We have identified 4,630 buildings that do have the cladding on. Over 50% of them have already started the remediation work. This was one of those buildings that had started that but this is too slow for me. We need to hurry it up.

Placing blame for the lack of progress firmly on the previous government, Rayner said:

[Survivors and campaign groups] spent seven years fighting to make sure that these changes were put in place, and now it’s my job to ensure that that happens as quickly as possible. We can’t continue for another seven years. We’ve got to do this very quickly, because these are people’s homes, and people deserve to feel safe in their own home.

At the weekend, James Tapper and Yusra Abdulahi for the Observer spoke to people who are still living in buildings where the cladding is now considered unsafe. They spoke to Gemma Lindfield who is still waiting for flammable cladding to be removed from her eight-storey apartment block in east London. She told them:

What’s so scary about the whole thing is that until December 2020 we had a ‘stay put’ fire policy in place. Which is chilling. If these developers can’t build a property according to building regs at the time, how can I be sure that they’re going to remediate it in a way that’s safety compliant?

You can read more of James Tapper and Yusra Abdulahi’s report here: Seven years after Grenfell disaster, thousands live in fear of cladding fire

Earlier today on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, a firefighter involved in tackling the Grenfell Tower blaze said there were a “cataclysmic series of failings” in the building.

PA Media reports that Ricky Nuttall nevertheless defended the “stay put” advice initially given to people, saying firefighters were unaware of the state of the tower. He told listeners:

The idea of a “stay put” policy is, its principles are founded on a building working as it should. At the time, as a firefighter on the ground, we had no idea that the building wasn’t built as it should be, that areas were compromised, that fire doors weren’t fitted, that smoke vents wouldn’t open, that the outside the building was effectively covered in petrol, a flammable material that’s going to burn rapidly, window sills weren’t fitted correctly. There were a cataclysmic list of failings with the building, and none of that information was available to us at the time.

In 2019 the then-leader of the Commons, former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, was forced to apologise after he made comments suggesting victims on the night did not use “common sense” when they followed the fire brigade’s orders.

Timeline of the Grenfell Tower fire and inquiry

14 June 2017 – at 12.54 am a call is made to the London fire brigade reporting a fire has broken out on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower. Within half an hour flames have reached the top of the tower.

15 June 2017 – Theresa May orders an inquiry. Sir Martin Moore-Bick, a retired court of appeal judge is appointed to lead it.

July 2017 – Judith Hackitt is appointed to conduct review of building regulations.

September 2017 – London’s Metropolitan police widens its criminal investigation into the fire.

January 2018 – Maria del Pilar Burton dies, and is considered the 72nd victim of the fire.

May 2018 – Hackitt recommends “fundamental reform” of fire safety rules, and says there has been a “race to the bottom” on safety standards. The inquiry begins public hearings.

September 2018 – the British government issues a widespread ban on combustible cladding.

October 2019 – the first phase of the inquiry investigation is released, blaming cladding for the rapid spread of the fire, and criticising fire brigade “stay in place” orders on the night.

March 2020 – the chancellor at the time, Rishi Sunak, sets aside a £1bn fund to remove unsafe cladding.

May 2024 – London’s police say it may be 2026 before a decision on any criminal chargers.

July 2024 – government figures show that less than a third of buildings which need unsafe cladding removing have had the work completed.

Associated Press contributed to this timeline.

Here is how our social affairs correspondent Robert Booth has reported the imminent publication of the report:

Companies and public authorities involved in the Grenfell Tower refurbishment are braced for wide-ranging criticisms when the final public inquiry report on the 2017 disaster is released at 11am on Wednesday.

The 1,700-page report is expected to spotlight serious failings among national and local politicians, builders, material manufacturers and sales people, fire-testing experts and the London fire brigade. The inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, and his inquiry panel colleagues, the architect Thouria Istephan and housing expert Ali Akbor, will also make recommendations to the government to ensure such a disaster is not repeated.

Hundreds of bereaved people and survivors granted core participant status in the £200m, seven-year inquiry were shown the report on Tuesday to allow them to digest in private what many hope will be a landmark moment in their fight for justice.

The report comes seven years, two months and 20 days after the fire and was delayed from earlier in the summer in part due to the high number of people – about 250 – who faced criticism and needed to be informed in advance.

Read more from Robert Booth here: Final Grenfell inquiry report released as companies involved brace for criticism

What we expect today …

At 11am the Grenfell Tower inquiry will publish its final report, more than seven years after the fire which killed 72 people. We are expecting the following reactions throughout the day:

At 11am chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick will make a statement, which will be broadcast on the inquiry’s YouTube channel. We are also expecting a statement from the London fire brigade’s commissioner.

At 11.45am a statement is expected from campaign group Grenfell United.

12pm will see PMQs in parliament, where the inquiry may be raised.

1pm a statement is expected from the Grenfell Next of Kin group. At the same time a statement from the Fire Brigades Union.

At 1.30pm we anticipate a statement from the Metropolitan police at New Scotland Yard.

About 250 people have already been warned they may be subject to criticism in the report – likely to include former government ministers, council leaders and corporate executives.

Welcome and opening summary …

On 14 June 2017 a fire broke out at the Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, west London, which ultimately killed 72 people. The following day, the then-prime minister Theresa May ordered a public inquiry. Seven years and three prime ministers later, Sir Martin Moore-Bick will publish his report.

The two main themes are expected to be a failure of government to regulate the construction industry properly, and the dishonesty of the private companies who repeatedly misled the market over the supposed safety of their products.

The report is published at 11am, although survivors, families of victims, core participants in the inquiry and the media have had embargoed early access for a day already. Moore-Bick will make a statement, and survivors and family members of victims will also speak.

We do not expect a formal government response to the recommendations today, although there will be a statement in parliament later. We are also expecting a statement from the police about the contents of the report.

On this live blog we will bring you the details of the report as it is published, and the reaction during the day. You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com.