The official inquiry into the disaster was launched some seven years ago, and has already highlighted the role of highly-flammable, combustible cladding fitted to the building in a renovation — despite long-running concerns among residents who tried to raise them with the council landlord.
Its final report takes aim at “decades of failure” under Conservative and Labour governments dating back to the 1990s. “There were many opportunities for the government to identify the risks … and to take action in relation to them,” the report said, citing a 1991 fire involving cladding in Liverpool.
Successive governments “ignored, delayed or disregarded” concerns about safety practices, it added. Britain’s housing ministry was “poorly run” with “inadequate oversight.”
Much of the blame is allocated to “systemic dishonesty” from cladding firms themselves. Highly flammable panels were fitted to the building’s exterior despite having failed fire safety tests before their installation. A police investigation into the disaster is ongoing.
Britain’s then-Conservative government was “well aware” of the risks posed by combustible cladding a year before the fire, the report found, but “failed to act on what it knew.”
A “seriously defective” system to regulate the construction and management of high rise buildings was in place, the report says, with the local council and block owner — Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea — criticized for a “persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people.”