Fingers pointed at the “dishonesty and incompetence” attributed to private companies, but also to public institutions, emergency services, local politicians and the national government in the final report presented today on the fire at the Grenfell Tower in London, a public housing skyscraper on the edge of the luxury district of Kensington and Chelsea that was the scene of the most serious post-war fire in a British residential building over seven years ago. The fire caused the death of 72 people.
A report eagerly awaited by the media and families of the victims as an opportunity to finally “shame” those responsible for that “disaster foretold”.
The report, meticulously detailed in 1700 pages after years of collecting evidence and testimonies by the independent commission of inquiry led by Sir Martin Moore Bick, a retired senior magistrate, highlights the “decades of failure” attributed to various governments and a number of individuals as the ultimate causes of the massacre. Against the backdrop of regulatory, maintenance and control negligence that has multiplied over the years since the privatization of the management of much of the public housing in the United Kingdom.
Almost no one is spared in the indictment summarized this morning by Sir Martin: from the companies that produced or installed the incriminated panels, to the one that oversaw a restoration done on a shoestring in 2011, up to the political leaders. In this last regard, the document calls into question the various governments (Conservative and Labour) that have succeeded one another «since the early 1990s» for «the decades of failures» and «the missed opportunities» to legislate more severely on risky cladding; as well as, specifically, the Tory-LibDem government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, guilty of having even eased the control rules in 2010; and the administration of the Kensington and Chelsea council, for the “persistent indifference” to the repeated alarms of the local community regarding the “safety of the most vulnerable people” (words in stark contrast to the acquittal of the alleged good faith of the municipal authorities contained at the time in a controversial journalistic investigation by the writer Andrew O’Hagan). There is also no shortage of reprimands for the firefighters of the London Fire Brigade, for not having prepared adequate evacuation plans.
In the fire at Grenfell Tower, a total of 72 tenants died – on the night of 14 June 2017. The fire was fueled in particular by the ‘aesthetic’ cladding of the facade: made of panels that have since been revealed to be flammable and outlawed in the United Kingdom, but have not yet been completely removed from all buildings, according to several complaints.
Meanwhile, a parallel investigation is continuing on the criminal front, but the police have confirmed that they do not expect any charges for negligence or manslaughter before 2026. A timing criticized by associations of the victims’ families and those who survived.
This article is originally published on .tio.ch
