Roundup: Report says UK’s worst fire “culmination of decades of failure”

LONDON, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) — The 2017 London Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 people was “the culmination of decades of failure” by government, companies, regulators and other responsible bodies, an inquiry report published on Wednesday said.
The 1,700-page report concluded that the tragedy was caused by the government’s failure to address fire risks in high-rise buildings, “systematic dishonesty” by the manufacturers of the combustible cladding in question, as well as the “incompetence” and “weakness” of regulators.
“The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable,” Martin Moore-Bick, chairperson of the inquiry, said on Wednesday.
He said that those who lived in Grenfell Tower had been “badly failed over a number of years,” adding that the responsible parties’ failures can be attributed in most cases to “incompetence” and in some to “dishonesty and greed.”
On June 14, 2017, a massive fire broke out in the 24-storey apartment building from the 1970s in the west of London, marking one of Britain’s worst modern-day disasters.
The first part of the inquiry report, which was published in 2019, said that the principal reason the fire spread was the aluminium composite cladding filled with plastic used on the building’s exterior.
The Wednesday final report said that, by 2016, the government “was well aware” of the risks posed by the use of combustible cladding panels and insulation, particularly in high-rise buildings, but “failed to act on what it knew.”
It pointed out that the government “displayed a complacent and at times defensive attitude to matters affecting fire safety,” with concerns raised about the fire risks “repeatedly met with a defensive and dismissive attitude by officials and some ministers.”
It said those who made and sold the products in question “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market.”
Such strategies succeeded partly because the certification bodies failed to ensure that the statements in their product certificates were accurate and based on test evidence, it added.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Wednesday apologized on behalf of the British state, saying the tragedy “should never have happened.”
He said the government will look at all 58 made in the report and will respond in full to the recommendations within six months.
“The duty of government should be to safeguard life, whilst protecting us from corporate greed,” Grenfell United, an organization of survivors and bereaved families of the fire, said in a statement in response to the final report. “But for too long, they have aided corporations, facilitating them to profit and dictate regulation.”
It hoped that the government could “break old habits” and implement the recommendations in the report “without further delay.”
The report also criticized the London Fire Brigade for its failure to effectively integrate the control room into the organization and ensure adequate training for control room staff. ■