Justice for Grenfell Tower is about accountability, not ideological war

Scrutiny, not febrile words, will ensure those responsible for the fire suffer the consequences

The pictures of the missing hit you as soon as you step out of Latimer Road station – the smiling mothers, uncles, children. On Friday, there were people standing all along the street. A number were eating Mr Whippys from an ice-cream truck laid on by a local estate agent. They were clustered in grim-faced groups, seemingly at random, until you walked along the road and saw what everyone was looking at: the appalling, blackened tower. It was hard to look at – and hard to look away.

The charred façade had been added to help make the building better. After years of complaints, the council finally earmarked Grenfell Tower for a total overhaul a few years ago. In March this year, the residents’ Grenfell Action Group, who complained regularly about the decrepit state of the building, cited the council’s decision to fund a renovation as one of its campaigning achievements.

How devastatingly, unbearably wrong it went. In the small hours of Wednesday morning, terrified residents were throwing their children out of windows to escape the fire and calling their loved ones to say goodbye. I haven’t seen anything as horrifying in a city I know since 9/11.

This has quickly become a political battle. That is not surprising. But it has also, with grotesque speed, become an ideological battle. Even while the tower was still smoking, Labour politicians seemed to know exactly why it had happened. They rushed on to the airwaves to blame austerity and deregulation for the disaster – before an inquiry had even been called, let alone assessed the evidence. This is wrong.

The correct response is to hold accountable the individuals and organisations whose actions led to the disaster. At some point in the chain of events that led up to this point, negligent, corrupt or incompetent decisions were made. Justice means scrutinising those decisions, rather than rushing to blame an ideology you dislike, using the deaths of innocent people to score political points or pointing bitterly at the fortunes of Kensington’s wealthier neighbours, as if they somehow willed this to happen. The facts we know so far appear, to me, more complicated than the narrative so far would suggest.

The central government’s direct responsibility is for building regulation and it’s being blamed angrily for deregulation. It’s clear that the cladding used on Grenfell shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a high-rise building. It is used on skyscrapers in France, the UAE and Australia but it’s banned in the US and Germany. In the UK, it is meant to be fitted only if there are firebreaks behind it.

Warnings about the flammable cladding dates back to at least 2000, when the Commons environment and transport select committee suggested the issue be examined. The then Labour government responded by reiterating that cladding was always fitted with fire barriers and should therefore pose “minimal risk”. It was wrong and in 2009 cladding was a factor in the Lakanal tower block fire in Camberwell, south London, that killed six people. The Tory government’s reaction seems to have been no better than its predecessors’, despite the deaths. The regulations remained unchanged. Why? We simply don’t yet know, but it does not seem to have formed part of a massive deregulatory programme. The rules were not abolished; they were simply not updated as they should have been.

Aside from what the regulations were on paper, we still don’t even know if they were followed. The cladding might have been installed without firebreaks, or the firebreaks might have been damaged. The building’s gas pipes, which were recently refitted, might not have been finished properly. Its fire doors might have been faulty or left open. Some of these factors might explain why the fire seems to have spread not just on the outside but up the building’s interior, too, with desperate residents describing flames licking at their doors and smoke filling the stairs. There might well be other causes we do not yet know about.

The immediate response has been to blame all of these factors on austerity, without citing any particular evidence. Complaints about the building’s awful state go back much further, though. The council had even discussed pulling the whole estate down and replacing it with modern, high-density housing, funded by building in extra units and selling them off. If only it had.

If austerity had been the overriding motive, it seems odd that Kensington & Chelsea would have gone ahead with the refurbishment at all. It cost a total of £8.7 million, more than £70,000 per flat. The recladding and renovation of a similar estate, Edward Woods in the borough next door, was finished in 2012 at a cost of under £30,000 per flat and was cited as a wonderful example for others. Every building is different, but Grenfell Tower’s total budget does not, on the face of it, seem unreasonably tight. If shoddy work was done and poor materials used, it is those decisions that merit study first, before blaming the Government’s fiscal mandate.

Some critics are determined to see the direst of motives, however. They claim the renovation was only done to “prettify” the building to make it less of an eyesore for Kensington’s wealthy residents. This ignores the fact that it was also meant to insulate the tower, making it cooler in summer and warmer in winter, meeting green standards and cutting energy bills, as well as providing individual control over boilers for occupants. And yes, the cladding was also meant to make the tower look less grim, both for residents, who came home to it every day, and neighbours.

It’s easy to create narratives by piecing together newspaper headlines. It’s easy for activists to wave Socialist Worker banners claiming that the Tories “have blood on their hands”. It’s especially easy when the Conservative Prime Minister has left a leadership vacuum. But it’s much harder and more important to subject the details to the scrutiny they deserve, to bring charges, to fire and fine people or companies and to change the rules and systems that need changing.

The survivors of Grenfell have every right to be furious. Those responsible for the fire must suffer the consequences of their actions and the Government must ensure this can never happen again. But it is through criminal and public investigations that this will happen, not by engaging in a febrile, ideological war of words.