Anger at human rights watchdog’s ‘pointless’ parallel Grenfell inquiry

A HUMAN rights watchdog was accused of wasting public money yesterday after it launched a review of the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

The taxpayer-funded Equality and Human Rights Commission said its review would run at the same time as the Government-ordered public inquiry into the fire, and would examine much of the same evidence.

It will scrutinise whether the Government and the local council failed in their duties to protect lives and provide safe housing – and could make damning findings about their role in the blaze, which killed 71 people.

It will study the official response and question if survivors and the bereaved suffered ‘inhumane and degrading treatment’ while they waited for support and re-housing.

And it will analyse the Government’s investigation into the fire – including the public inquiry itself.

Critics questioned why a separate human rights review was necessary when a public inquiry was already under way. The TaxPayers’ Alliance branded it ‘pointless’.

The review was welcomed by families affected by the fire, who have threatened to boycott the official public inquiry unless they are allowed more direct involvement. They have called for retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick to sit with a panel including members of the community, but he rejected the request as it could jeopardise the inquiry’s independence and impartiality.

Sir Martin was today due to start two days of hearings on how the inquiry will run. A spokesman said survivors would be allowed to participate throughout.

The EHRC applied to become a core participant in the inquiry, meaning it could receive evidence in advance and question witnesses, but its application was rejected. It said there would be ‘ some overlap’ between its work and the inquiry’s, but said it had a duty to ensure questions of human rights and equality were not neglected.

EHRC chairman David Isaac told The Observer: ‘We think the human rights dimension to Grenfell Tower is absolutely fundamental and is currently overlooked.

‘Grenfell for most people in this country, particularly in the way the Government has reacted, is a pretty defining moment in terms of how inequality is perceived.’

The EHRC said it would provide commentary on evidence heard by the inquiry, and would make its own submissions to Sir Martin. It is expected to make a series of recommendations in April.

Sir Martin has said he hopes to publish a preliminary report by Easter. A second phase of his inquiry will consider the response to the fire, including advice to Grenfell residents to ‘stay put’ and wait for rescue, rather than try to escape the building.

The former judge said his team planned to interview almost 500 witnesses, including 225 tower residents and 260 firefighters. More than 400 individuals and organisations have been granted core participant status and will be entitled to submit written statements.

Given the scale of the inquiry, critics questioned why the EHRC review was necessary. Alex Wild of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘This is a classic case of a pointless public body desperately trying to justify its own existence … It’s time the Government revisited the role of all public bodies and closed down those like the EHRC which serve no purpose other than wasting taxpayers’ money.’

In 2012, a Government report found the EHRC provided poor value for money. At that time it received £60million a year in funding, which has now been cut to £20million. Mr Isaac told Channel 4 News: ‘It is not our intention to undermine the official inquiry. We respect the inquiry.’

An inquiry spokesman said: ‘We welcome any evidence the commission can provide that is relevant to the matters covered by our terms of reference.’ A police probe into the tragedy is also under way.

‘Wasting taxpayer money’

MOST people probably have very little idea what the Equality and Human Rights Commission either is or does, and I suspect they don’t really care.

The EHRC is a publiclyfunded quango set up in 2006 with a responsibility to promote and protect equality and human rights in this country, whatever that means. It is no doubt a well-intentioned body and may do some good.

But the normally obscure EHRC has just made an announcement that is both crass and destructive. The commission’s chair, David Isaac, told a Sunday newspaper that it is going to launch its own inquiry into last June’s Grenfell Tower fire in which 71 people lost their lives.

Tragedy

Yet there is already an official inquiry into the causes of the Grenfell tragedy under an independent retired judge, Sir Martin Moore- Bick. The EHRC’s parallel inquiry threatens to undermine the official one — and to overshadow it, since it is expected to be completed by next April, very possibly earlier than Sir Martin’s interim report, and certainly long before his full findings are published.

Moreover, the EHRC is not primarily interested in the causes of the fire. No; it wants to know whether the human rights of the victims were abrogated by the State. To judge by Mr Isaac’s remarks yesterday, its resounding conclusion will be that they were.

What on earth is going on? Grenfell was a terrible tragedy in which the occupants of the flats were fatally betrayed by various agencies: Kensington and Chelsea council; the management company that looked after the flats; and some of the builders responsible for their refurbishment, in particular the combustible cladding.

Unfortunately, even while smoke was still emerging from the blackened building, the issue of responsibility became politicised, with some on the Left alleging that the fire represented a callous and calculated assault by the State on the poor. The EHRC is now in danger of feeding that myth by calling its own inquiry.

A month after the inferno, Labour’s hard-Left Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell described what had happened as ‘social murder’. This outrageous phrase carried the implication that the fire was virtually a deliberate act of homicide on the part of the authorities.

Relatives of victims and survivors of the disaster found themselves represented by an intemperate group called Justice4Grenfell. One of its members, Ishmahil Blagrove, who seems fairly typical in his extremism, said after the fire: ‘I want there to be a revolution in this country.’

After it was announced at the end of June that Sir Martin Moore-Bick would be in charge of the official investigation, Justice4Grenfell wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May to inform her that it was withdrawing its support for the public inquiry.

Sir Martin’s ‘crime’ appeared to be that he was white, male and relatively privileged. Labour MPs such as David Lammy and Emma Dent Coad (who represents Kensington) had the temerity to attack him on these very grounds.

In fact, Sir Martin is a highly experienced, independentminded man, and certainly no lackey of the State. He is extremely expert in the law of contract, and if anyone can untangle the overlapping responsibilities of the 60 firms involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, it’s him.

His terms of reference are to ascertain the causes of the fire, to apportion blame where there is evidence of fault, and to establish whether there are lessons to be learned that should be applied to other blocks of flats.

Surely that is what most of the relatives of victims and survivors also want — if only their voices could be heard. How could this fire have happened, and so many people have died, in the heart of London in 21st-century Britain?

Needless to say, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has demanded a much broader review into social housing policy — in the hope, no doubt, that this might supply it with ammunition with which it could embarrass the Government.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission wanted a similarly wide-ranging inquiry which addressed the issue of whether the human rights of the occupants of the flats had been breached.

It applied to be a ‘core participant’ in the official investigation, but was rejected, possibly because Sir Martin feared it would try to hijack the proceedings with its own agenda.

And so the EHRC has decided to launch an inquiry of its own, which it will produce in doublequick time. We may be almost 100 per cent sure of the outcome. The commission will declare that the State failed to respect the human rights of the occupants of the flats.

Heartless

My contention is that this would be an utterly meaningless conclusion, which won’t help the relatives of victims or survivors of the Grenfell fire, or throw any light on its causes or on preventive measures that should be taken in the future.

But it will nonetheless encourage those who are striving to frame the debate in heated political terms, and aim to pin the blame on the heartless and mean-minded State — which in this instance, of course, means the supposedly wicked and hardhearted Tories.

Well, the Tories can perhaps look after themselves. I feel more concerned about justice and truth. For the effect of the commission’s rushed and entirely predictable report will be to shake the confidence of many people in Sir Martin’s far more painstaking — and probably much more openminded — version.

What he eventually says will have been pre-empted by all the publicity enjoyed by the commission’s meretricious point- scoring — publicity that will be seized on by Justice4Grenfell and the Labour Left, both of which want the tragedy of Grenfell to be judged through a political prism.

Undermine

The danger is that when Sir Martin’s full report is finally published, its findings and recommendations will be taken less seriously than they should be, or even disregarded. Justice4Grenfell will doubtless insist that the issue is all about the human rights of the occupants of Grenfell Tower having been ignored.

How incredible that the EHRC, which is a publiclyfunded body with an annual budget of £20 million, should seek to undermine the credibility of an official inquiry. In effect, it is exploiting the present mood of public scepticism in which the integrity of conscientious public servants such as Sir Martin is increasingly doubted. God knows how David Isaac, who appears to be a respectable City lawyer, could have got mixed up in such an ill- conceived project. He chaired the gay rights group Stonewall from 2003 until 2012, and doesn’t seem an obvious political subversive.

There is always a danger of normally quiescent and generally harmless quangos doing something idiotic in order to justify their existence. Ironically, the damaging decision by the EHRC to mount its own inquiry may lead to calls for it to be wound up.

The tragedy is that the more the catastrophe of Grenfell Tower is politicised — and the more there is loud but empty talk about human rights violations — the less likely it is that the occupants of Grenfell Tower will ever secure the detailed explanation of these appalling events that they deserve.