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Right, okay.
Get out! Get out!
We were first there.
Um, first on the scene.
Words can't explain it. It was just mayhem.
Get out of the tower!
It felt like I was in the middle of a disaster movie.
Uh, that one whole side of the building was just, like, completely in flames.
I'd never seen anything like that.
Wow. It's Towering Inferno, innit?
- Fuck. - How is that possible?
When people saw a disaster like this happening in the UK,
there was this sense of, "How could this have been allowed to happen here?"
It seems to me there's bits of the building falling off now.
I've never seen nothing like it. It's like we're having our own 9/11, mate.
At Grenfell,
you had something completely different, which I'd never seen before,
which was a fire engulfing the whole building.
- Oh my gosh! - How will someone help them?
And it was obvious that something had gone desperately wrong.
There are many questions, most urgently about the cladding
on this building.
Arconic made the aluminum cladding in question.
I do remember thinking somebody had been grossly negligent.
What happened here? How did that get sold? I don't understand that.
Tests had been manipulated. Tests had been hidden.
We've got so much evidence now of really serious wrongdoing,
um, and still no one's been arrested.
The warnings this building was a firetrap apparently went unheard.
This is a police crime scene.
- What do we want? - Justice!
- When do we want it? - Now!
We want answers!
I always think to myself, you know, "Why...
why did this have to happen?"
People losing their lives, you know?
Losing friends, family.
I just think to myself, "Why?"
We want answers! We want justice!
BBC News at four o'clock. This is Fenella Fudge.
Plenty of sunshine,
and this sunshine is going to stay with us throughout the day.
The temperature, 24, maybe 25 Celsius. We could even sneak...
No change in the top three.
Luis Fonsi's "Despacito" made it a month at number one.
It's now the longest-reigning foreign language number one
in official chart history.
Despacito...
Back in 2017,
I remember quite a few famous songs at the time.
"Despacito" was a big one.
Remember my mum kept playing it, um, in the house and in the car.
...a besos despacito...
It's your girl Esi,
and you're listening to the biggest station in West London.
This is 100% the song of the summer.
It's J Hus with "Did You See."
Came in a black Benz Left in a white one
I'm just a hoodlum, uh, uh, uh
Yeah, yeah.
Did you see what I done? Came in a black Benz
Left in a white one
I'm just a hoodlum I came with the bonsam
When brothers wanna try some...
I was excited because I was going into year 8.
You know, it was becoming summertime.
It was becoming hot.
I would definitely say I was very bubbly.
Um, I was very happy.
Did you see what he did? The black Benz...
I always wanted to do good in my grades.
Yeah, I was... I was a good, happy 12-year-old.
The A2 is building westbound from Eltham towards Kidbrooke.
Northbound traffic on the Blackwall Tunnel southern approach is building...
I do remember later on that night, we just went out for dinner.
By the time we drove back, it might've been about 11:30.
And then I got a text from a friend,
"Fancy going on Xbox?"
Played a few games.
Said, "Oh, I've got work tomorrow." Switched off and went to bed.
So, yeah, it was as simple as that, really.
Feeling very warm again, with a top temperature of 26 Celsius,
79 Fahrenheit.
I think I went off to bed around midnight.
I was, uh, sleeping in the gym around that time,
just because I didn't like sleeping in the dorm...
...um... with a load of smelly firefighters.
Vio!
Madness.
The bells went down at about five to one.
So, being the local station at North Kensington,
Grenfell Tower is on our grounds.
On arrival, we saw some smoke coming out of a window,
which we knew was where the fire was.
We, uh, made our way into the tower.
The two, um, firefighters got ready in all their breathing apparatus.
You could hear 'em breaking the door down, and then they entered the flat.
It was your everyday kitchen fire,
which they managed to put out quite quickly.
As you do after you've put the fire out, you use your thermal imaging camera
to have a look around to check, make sure there's no hot spots.
And that's when they noticed the droplets of flame dripping,
and they realized that the fire had got out.
I've sent the second crew in to back them up.
I've been to other fires where the fire has got into a flat above.
Although it was unusual,
it wasn't, um, beyond possibilities
that the fire could, um, move up to the flat above.
So I had no reason to believe
we wouldn't soon be going back to the station
to carry on our night shift.
I'd got to the ground floor where I met a young girl
who explained to me that her little sister,
um, was on the 20th floor
and was it all right for her to go up and get her?
She told me her name was Jessica.
I thought I would quickly go up and bring her little sister down to her
and then carry on with what I was doing.
I wasn't worried at all.
I pressed the 20th floor...
...and, uh, suddenly the light came on on the 15th floor.
Fifteen.
The doors opened...
...and a huge rush of black smoke just filled the lift.
I'm in trouble here. I need to get out.
I need my breathing apparatus, for one,
and I need to get down as quick as I can to get this, um, girl out of her flat.
The breaking news this morning that a major fire
has engulfed a tower block in West London,
and it's been confirmed as Grenfell Tower.
Questions about how a building
that is of a concrete construction
could have been engulfed by flames so quickly.
Get out! Get out!
The thing went up in seconds. Just going up and up and up and up.
I never seen nothing like it.
It was like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie.
I've been writing about Grenfell for seven years.
If you added up all the articles I've written,
it would be over 1,000 by now.
When people saw a disaster like this happening in London, in the UK,
there was this sense of, "How could this have happened here?"
Because it shook people's sense of the country they live in, I think,
that that was a possibility here.
It's changed my life, really.
There was my career up until Grenfell, and then there's my life since,
and it's completely different.
I'd only been the news editor for, um, about five or six months,
which is kind of... a bit of a... bit of a throw-in at the deep end.
I think everyone probably remembers the first time they saw those images.
To be honest, you would not think a cement building...
I think in the aftermath of a fire like Grenfell,
there's a desire, I think, among the media, I would say,
to find a simple scapegoat, a simple narrative.
Someone whose picture they can put in the paper.
Someone who they can paint as the bad guy who made this happen.
The Daily Mail newspaper ran a very aggressive piece
which named the owner of the flat where the fire started.
There's a suggestion on social media
that it's something to do with, like, Islamic terrorism,
when the guy is an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian
who had a picture of the Virgin Mary in his flat.
He was an Uber driver.
He'd lived in a flat on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower for about 25 years.
It's the fourth floor. Quick, quick, quick! Burning.
The police suggested he go into witness protection
because of the level of harassment.
Because once The Daily Mail started,
all the other newspapers were trying to get their story about him too.
He was a survivor, you know, and a victim of what had happened.
He... he had no responsibility at all
for anything that happened at Grenfell Tower.
Today is 14th June...
I did have this sense
that something has gone deeply, deeply wrong here.
So you wanna find people who understand fire safety risks in high-rise buildings
and just wanna ask them as many questions as you can.
I had got a phone call early in the morning, and it was the BBC.
And then Sky News. That was bad.
So I went online to see the news. I immediately saw a massive fire.
I've been investigating fires in high-rise buildings for some time.
When I first saw the images of the fire,
I knew it was probably because of cladding.
Very quickly, we started to look into ACM,
which is a type of cladding.
ACM is aluminum composite material.
So you can see, it's aluminum here and aluminum here.
And then in the middle of it, the thicker, darker part, is the polymer.
Polymers are plastics. All plastics... all plastics are flammable.
The polymer that is in the middle, the most popular one is PE, polyethylene.
This happens to be a raw PE.
We see that, actually, the material then becomes very flammable,
and it isn't safe.
The reason why aluminum composite material is dangerous
is because fire spreads really quickly, and it's difficult to put out.
This is a building material that's, by the 2010s, very popular.
It's in use in buildings in every continent.
Millions and millions of square meters of it are being sold.
There were many companies around the world
that were producing, marketing, and selling ACM,
and one of them was Alcoa.
You don't have to look far. You're sitting in a hotel,
sitting on a plane, checking your emails,
there's a good chance that the aluminium you're seeing
has come from Alcoa alumina...
...Alcoa alumina, Alcoa alumina...
Alcoa was the Aluminum Company of America,
shortened to Alcoa.
Sort of one of the older and bigger,
historically, I would say, prestigious corporations
in the United States.
A lot of products in different markets.
Wings for airplanes.
Aluminum panels in the automotive industry.
Very big on the stock market.
There was a feeling that the stock value could be unlocked
by splitting up the company.
Arconic: Innovation, engineered.
That's what became Arconic.
Arconic was a division of Alcoa,
and it was their French arm that handled the sale
of the ACM PE cladding to Grenfell Tower.
As investigators assess the damage,
one supplier has been thrust into the spotlight.
Arconic.
Arconic made the aluminum cladding in question.
Visible from miles away...
When the fire happened, I found out Arconic had been involved,
and I can remember thinking,
"I really hope they didn't put polyethylene panels."
Because it's a petroleum-based product,
it's gonna burn, and it's gonna burn vigorously.
So on a high-rise building,
thinking about when you have something that is highly flammable,
people don't have the time to evacuate.
Families had been sleeping here.
Some were still trapped inside.
And then later on,
it came out in the news that it had been the polyethylene panels.
How did this get sold?
Why was it sold? We wouldn't have sold it that way in North America. Um...
How... how did this happen?
Behind each window was a home, many completely incinerated.
When I was offered Grenfell,
I was slightly apprehensive about living in a tower block.
But my dad had always told me that you'll know
when you walk into a property whether it's for you or not.
I definitely had that feeling when I walked into 134 Grenfell Tower.
I did actually fall in love with it.
I was at work, got a call from Andreia.
She was like, "Yeah, I've got news."
I said yes.
We were gonna make, um... make a home, really.
Like, our permanent home.
I think I was either two or just about to turn two
when we moved there.
So, I... Like, I say Grenfell was my home.
From my bedroom window, I would always see the London Eye.
I felt lucky, in a way,
because we were getting, like, a bird's-eye view,
and obviously, not a lot of people get that.
Oh. Oh my days, man.
So we were sleeping.
Now, when you're sleeping
and you hear constant commotion, it's not one thing that wakes you up.
It's constant commotion.
At that same time, our neighbor banged on our door.
Literally, bang, bang, bang.
So Andreia got up to open the door.
It was Helen and her daughter, Lulya.
They were like, "There's a fire! There's a fire!"
And I said, "Come in. Let's try and figure out what's going on."
I remember my neighbor was waking me up,
and obviously, I thought that was weird.
Why are you here in the middle of the night?
I was very confused.
And then she told me that there was a fire.
My sister Megan, she was still sleeping.
I asked my mum if I should wake her up,
and my mum said, "No, not yet,
just in case, you know, there's no need to."
You know, I thought the fire was just gonna stay in that flat and that was it.
I was trying to look out the window from the 21st floor.
All I can see was the lights from the, uh, fire brigade.
Yeah, I felt everything was gonna be okay. I... I didn't feel in danger, um, at all.
And I still didn't really...
...comprehend the scale of the fire.
Anyone with LFB? Anyone with LFB receiving? Over.
I knew that I needed to find this little girl, Jessica.
I was really worried,
'cause smoke was everywhere, and this little girl's on her own.
Ran down the stairs.
Don't remember passing anyone else, any public or firefighters.
I got to the ground floor.
Receiving.
It was pandemonium by this time.
Bravo Sierra One, receiving...
A lot of chat on the radio.
Confirm your location...
Firefighters in breathing apparatus waiting to go in.
Units, just make way. Just make way. Update us.
Got my BA set
and kind of jogged into the building.
When I saw two firefighters from my station,
I explained that Jessica was on the 20th floor
and we need to get up there to get her out.
We looked for Flat 176.
The door was slightly ajar.
The flat was, um... filled with smoke.
We searched the flat twice.
We were shouting. We was banging. We was doing everything we could.
But we couldn't find her.
We desperately hoped she had, um, left the flat...
...and made her way downstairs.
They're there! They're waving their light!
Yeah, that's what I hoped.
There's someone waving their light! Can you not help them?
In the UK, we have this policy called Stay Put,
which is the belief that we've built buildings in a way
that means the fire will stay in the flat where it started for two hours.
And the London Fire Brigade place complete faith in the Stay Put policy
and this idea that fires in UK tower blocks
never spread from flat to flat.
But by 1:30 in the morning,
the fire has started to enter dozens of flats around the tower.
There's dozens of individual flats on fire.
Despite these conditions in the building, people are being told to stay put.
I was lying in bed,
and I hear my neighbor's smoke alarm going "ping, ping, ping."
And then about, like, five minutes later, I heard some shouting.
And at that time of night, that really wasn't normal.
And, like, my first thought was like, "We've been advised to stay put."
"I... I think what I'll probably do is just, like, stay in my flat,
call the fire brigade."
But at that moment, my mobile phone rang.
It was a neighbor of mine from downstairs
who'd already managed to exit the building.
And he shouted at me.
He shouted at me in such a powerful way,
"Get out! Get out of the building!"
There was something so powerful about what he said
that I just made the decision there and then, "I'm gonna go."
And then joined the kind of, like, small crowd
of some residents, some onlookers.
That fire was so violent.
That was the most violent thing that I've ever, ever seen in my life.
My first phone call to the LFB, I think I was still quite calm.
I didn't wanna try and portray any nerves
or being scared or anything to... to the girls.
Now we're in this flat, Flat 183, 21st floor.
I'm here with my pregnant wife.
Andreia was seven months pregnant with a baby boy.
She's asthmatic.
I remember them saying they were speaking to the command center
and would send help.
I said it to the girls, "Let's just be prepared to go,"
'cause the idea was as soon as they bang on the door, we're getting out.
I know my dad called them multiple times.
They were telling us to stay inside.
But the fire was getting closer, so it didn't make no sense.
Yeah, we got movement.
I remember me and my mum, you know, kept telling him, you know,
"Call them back. Call them back."
- Oh my gosh! - How will someone help them?
Please.
- Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! - Can you help them?!
Central to the tragedy of Grenfell, flammable cladding.
The cladding made by Arconic, a multinational corporation.
In September 2007,
Arconic's marketing manager, a guy called Gerard Sontag,
took a corporate trip to an industry conference in Norway.
...LDPE. This is a low-density...
One of the presentations given at that conference
was about aluminium composite material.
...with a thin layer of aluminium...
About how dangerous this product was.
Aluminium coating is usually only...
And it actually compared it
to sticking a petrol tanker to the outside of a building.
Once the composites are...
So it's about as clear and stark a warning as you can imagine.
...composite material will start to fall...
There's a member of Arconic's senior team sitting in the audience,
listening to this presentation.
...smoke can be seen for miles.
He came back from this quite frightened,
knowing that Arconic was selling the flammable version of the ACM.
What he did was write a very blunt warning to his seniors
of a fire involving this material killing 60 to 70 people.
And that warning was made in 2007, ten years before Grenfell.
But unfortunately,
I don't think that warning would have come to those people as a surprise.
Because Arconic had actually already tested that product,
but they were keeping that result secret.
Arconic ran two tests.
One of them tests the product when it's fitted to a wall
and hammered in with rivets.
The other one tests the product when it's been bent into an L shape
and then hung and clicked into rails which hold it onto the building.
What they would call cassette shape.
The difference between rivets or cassettes is mostly about aesthetics.
And what we have learned is that the cassette one, by bending the ACM,
it allows a pool of the fire drips to accumulate.
And that creates a massive fire at the bottom of the cassette,
and it happens every one of the cassettes.
It burns ten times as quickly.
It releases seven times as much heat, three times as much smoke.
Arconic reacted in a way that, instead of embracing the results,
learning from them and delivering safety to people through their products,
they pretty much did the opposite.
And I wish they had acted on it.
In 2011, Arconic did another test of the ACM cladding.
What they discovered was a very fast, very large fire that had to be stopped.
Claude Wehrle was a technical manager at Arconic
during this period...
...and actually, ironically enough, a volunteer firefighter.
So the laboratory emailed Claude, and they said,
"Hello, Mr. Wehrle. We have performed a test on your reference."
"Note:
Fall of large pieces of the small wing,
widespread fire on the surface, reaching critical values,
resulting in the termination of the ongoing test."
If a product fails a test,
you contain product or you stop product, you stop production.
You don't let anything else go to the customer.
You would never ignore and walk away.
Nothing changed. They kept selling it.
There's an internal Arconic email where they say,
"The grade of the panel following the test today is an F."
Which is just uncategorized. It'd be ungradable.
And then just the word "oops."
They learned that once you bent this product into a certain shape,
you were gonna get this terrible result in a fire.
And, unfortunately, that is the shape that it ended up being used in
on Grenfell Tower.
The most thing that I used to love is having my coffee
next to my window in Grenfell Tower,
listening to different types of music with my brother, Mohammad.
That life is very peaceful.
The tower used to look nice.
I was like, "Okay, I mean, that's a good place. Let's move there."
So me and my brother, Mohammad, moved to this apartment
around September 2016.
Me and Mohammad, we had just one year, like, between us.
We were very close.
He was my best friend, I would say, not just my brother.
I managed to get into university.
As well, the same for my brother, Mohammad.
Then we managed to find a job.
We were... we were happy together. We were happy in that apartment.
That night, I started to hear some noise.
People outside screaming, ambulance cars, police cars.
Straight away, I left my room, and as soon as I left my room,
I saw as well my brother in the corridor area
saying, "Omar, I can smell smoke."
We had our pajamas on. We were like, "Let's leave."
As soon as we opened the door,
we were shocked by the amount of the smoke in the corridor.
We went to the windows.
We are, like, shouting to the people, saying, "Hey! Hey! Help!"
Police or fire brigade told us, like, "Stay. We are coming to you."
We were like, "Okay, they're doing something,
and they will come to us to bring us out
or, like, give us some... something to protect us and then leave."
Coming from Syria,
for me, like, living in the UK,
I was thinking that I am in the right, safe place.
In the years leading up to the Grenfell fire,
there were a lot of groups pushing the government quite hard for change
in terms of building safety regulations.
And that was particularly because of a fire in 2009
at a building called Lakanal House in South London.
Firefighters arrived at the building within minutes,
but the blaze was so ferocious,
it was hours before they reached the bodies of the six victims,
which included two children and a baby.
It was a quick, very fast, ferocious fire.
There was combustible and flammable material,
um, used in the building's fabric,
which contributed to the speed of the fire at the time.
Lakanal House was a huge opportunity for this country to take notice
and to improve fire safety measures.
Our group was meeting with various MPs in Westminster.
We did push for change as hard as we could without physically door-stopping them
and grabbing them by the hand, or even the neck.
I had to work out ways to prove that the guidance relevant to fire
was not fit for purpose.
It was badly designed for use,
and there was, uh, factually incorrect information provided.
You would have to start the document at the beginning, then flip to the back,
then flip to somewhere in the middle, and it was just awful.
After the Lakanal House fire, there was a coroner's inquest,
which resulted in the coroner writing a letter to government
and to the London Fire Brigade which called for change.
She said we needed to train call handlers.
The London Fire Brigade needed to work out how to fight fires in a high-rise building
when they got out of control.
Government policy needed to define
when we switched away from the Stay Put policy.
Many sheltered in their bathrooms,
and when they phoned 999, the fatal advice was to stay put.
Well, I think, with hindsight,
had the advice been to get out earlier in the call
when the people were involved,
then that may have contributed to them staying alive or being saved.
It's out there. It's a letter. It's black and white, and it's clear.
The letter that the Lakanal House coroner wrote to government was really important,
but unfortunately, it landed at a really bad time.
One of the key aims of this coalition
is to massively reduce the number of rules, laws, and regulations
that, frankly, treat all of you like idiots.
We're gonna have a new rule,
which is that any minister in my government
who wants to introduce a regulation has to scrap one first.
Which we've now changed to the "one in, two out" rule.
You've gotta get rid of two regulations if you want to introduce a new one.
One of David Cameron's driving political ideologies
was deregulation.
He believed that the state had no place
telling private businesses what they should and shouldn't do.
We want to get out of your way by deregulating, by cutting your taxes.
Excessive rules have given the impression that we have a right to a risk-free life.
So, effectively, what he'd done was ban
new fire safety regulations being introduced,
even if they were necessary.
As the prime minister said, we're going to release
some of our brightest, most intelligent civil servants
to kick the living daylights out of bureaucracy.
...there is new legislation, then perhaps micro...
Eric Pickles was the most senior politician
with responsibility for housing, for planning, for building regulations,
and, for a time, some fire policy as well.
By dismantling interfering, intrusive laws and regulations,
we can do even more for less.
- It's great to be here. - Mr. Pickles.
He wanted less regulation on business.
So what the coroner was asking them to do was increase regulation.
And internally, a civil servant wrote,
"Well, the law requires us to respond to the coroner,
but we don't actually have to do what she says."
And the way he phrased that was actually,
"We only need to respond to the coroner. We don't need to kiss her backside."
And that civil servant was Brian Martin.
Uh, good afternoon, everybody. Um, it was interesting...
He was certainly a character.
He did have an interesting manner to him.
He had a bit of a reputation for being very difficult.
I joined the Civil Service not 'cause I wanted to work hard.
And so it came as a...
came as a bit of a shock when, um, pretty much,
that's what we've been doing ever since.
Brian Martin had more power than most MPs.
We all had to go to him,
and he was the gateway through to government.
He was tasked with the building regulations
with respect to fire safety.
Got the strategy division at the top.
I'd like to tell you what they do. I haven't worked it out yet.
Um, but they're very busy being strategic.
In terms of pushing Brian Martin to effect change,
we asked him what needed to happen.
And he did say to me
that government won't do anything until there are deaths.
And he allegedly said to colleagues of mine,
"Show me the bodies."
The LFB are overwhelmed in the call center.
The volume of calls is unlike anything
these call handlers have ever experienced before.
They're overflowing now to other control rooms around the country.
That's what happens if so many 999 calls are coming in at once.
But all of these call handlers give the orthodox advice
to residents of tower block fires, which is, "Stay put."
We know that, from the Lakanal House,
they could have realized
that this was the wrong call for a high-rise building.
And what they don't have is a television.
There's a plasma screen TV in the room, but it's not working.
So what they don't see at any point
is a visual image of what's happening at Grenfell Tower.
All they have on their screen is a line of information,
which says, "Fourth floor kitchen, partially alight."
I can't remember the exact road where I first saw the tower.
But it was over to my left,
and fire coming up one side of the building.
How is that possible?
I don't ever remember being in Grenfell Tower before,
so I didn't understand, I didn't know the layout.
I was really focused on just getting inside and doing what we could do.
We were struck by how narrow the stairs were.
Firefighters were coming down with casualties, people.
They'd call out, "Casualty!"
Every time we heard that, you're moving into the corner of the stairwell
with your cylinder on your back, trying to give as much space as you can.
And people are coming down crying, coughing, spluttering.
Some conscious, some unconscious.
It felt chaotic.
It felt... like everybody was caught a little bit off guard by this.
After waiting, the firefighters arrived.
So we're like, "Okay. Uh, are we leaving now?"
He was like, "No, you need to move all
to the apartment next to you, and we're gonna come back to you."
I remember, like, as soon as I entered that apartment,
seeing a lot of people there,
including the resident of the flat and his family.
I've seen Zainab
and her son.
Denis.
And then there was my brother and me.
Mohammad brought a Quran from our apartment.
For some time, he was reading Quran.
He was like, "This is gonna help." And it kept him, like, strong as well.
But we didn't understand what's gonna happen next.
All I wanted, really, was to be rescued.
Andreia was seven months pregnant.
She's also asthmatic, and so is Megan.
Just wanted an air tank, some kind of mask,
so that we can... we can go.
I remember my dad, um, filling up the bathtub with water
and, uh, literally just putting in so many towels,
making sure they're drenched.
Each moment, things was getting worse and worse,
to the point when I opened the door to see what was going on,
it was just smoke.
Why are you crying?
You are crying.
The smoke was extremely thick, black.
Every time I opened the door and... and tried to breathe,
it was just a gagging sensation.
Uh, couldn't... It was, like, chemically-infused.
Smoke from plastics is particularly toxic. It's asphyxiating.
You breathe something that will make you cough.
It will make you sick instantly.
It will quickly... make you faint.
You start to lose consciousness.
And you don't even realize that you're losing consciousness.
The smoke was starting to get thicker.
It was dirty smoke. This was very dirty smoke.
Couldn't see a hand in front of your face. Torches weren't making no difference.
We were burning. We were feeling extreme heat then.
None of it made sense, why it was so extremely hot in there.
None of it made sense to me.
This tower was redecorated from the outside recently
as part of a council initiative.
They've covered it with, like, a kind of plastic paneling
to make it look neater, make it look better.
They suspect that that might not have been a safe construction.
It's all right. They've been warned. Just make sure no one else ducks under.
My brother, Raymond, aka Moses,
he lived on the 23rd floor in Flat 201.
He was a real cheeky, cheeky person.
He had a beautiful smile.
When he smiled at you, you kind of melted into his smile.
Sitting...
Ray grew up in Trinidad.
He came to the UK when he was 16 years old.
You know, calypso was part of his thing.
So, yeah, he was big in the carnival
until age, I guess, with his arthritis, took hold
and he can't jump around anymore.
He lived in Grenfell Tower for over 30 years.
Sitting in the park...
I did most of Ray's admin,
so I would either write or call the tenant management organization,
known as the TMO.
If I had to sum up my relationship on behalf of my brother
with the council slash TMO, I would say it was appalling.
After all, he was paying to live there.
It wasn't a gift. He wasn't living there free of charge.
We were kind of just being treated as if we didn't matter.
Almost seen as, you know, we're working class or poor.
But that was far from the truth.
You had IT consultants. You had people that worked in NHS.
You had teachers. You had architects.
It wasn't a poor tower. It was a working tower.
Grenfell Tower was in Kensington,
which, even in the context of London, is an unusual place.
Kensington is both one of the wealthiest areas of London
and one of the poorest.
The tower was an eyesore for the affluent who lived in the area.
And I think it just kept property prices down.
Grenfell Tower was built in the 1970s,
but it had not been well looked after by the council.
There'd never been a major refurbishment.
This new, glossy school and leisure center complex was being built
but it had this tower block next to it, which didn't look quite so good.
And so they said, in internal emails, that maybe overcladding Grenfell Tower
would be a good idea
because it would help the tower appear less of a "poor cousin."
They were gonna overclad the building.
They were gonna put new windows into the tower.
The windows really weren't fit for purpose anymore.
The cladding came as a kind of... like, a bit of a shock to us all.
I didn't even know it was called cladding.
- I don't even think I'd heard that word. - No. Yeah.
So when the architects first designed the cladding system,
they specified a zinc cladding panel.
Um... and that would be completely non-combustible.
It's just made of metal.
I attended pretty much every single consultation meeting.
We were never, ever shown
hard, you know, copies of what the cladding was gonna look like.
The council went out to the market to try and find the cheapest contractor.
In the end, the organization they found was a company called Rydon.
During the refurb, Ray and I often spoke,
and he often said to me, "The workmanship is really poor."
Myself and others who stood up and questioned,
we were labeled rebels.
We raised concerns
with one of the senior managers from Rydon's at that point
and said, you know, "How would you like it if this was being done in your home?"
And he turned round to us and he said,
"If I was getting it for nothing, I wouldn't mind."
That comment sums up the whole way that we were treated
by Rydon's, TMO, RBKC.
We were scroungers. We were getting something for nothing.
We didn't deserve anything,
"So just shut up and let us get on with the work."
South Kensington, change for the Piccadilly line.
During the refurbishment,
the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization
would hold conversations with Rydon
about ways they could strip even more money out of the job.
"How can we save every penny?"
And one of the first things they did to save that money
was switch that zinc cladding panel
for the cheapest cladding product they could find.
And the cheapest cladding product they could find
was aluminium composite material with a pure polyethylene core.
And Arconic sold the cladding for use on Grenfell Tower.
And I found out that, in 2009,
there was a fire at an office block in Bucharest.
And this alarmed Technical Manager Claude Wehrle,
because it was a building with ACM on it.
He found images of that fire online and sent them to his seniors.
The fire in Bucharest wasn't the last time these warnings were raised.
The industry were concerned about the number of building fires
because a number of them had this type of cladding.
There was another fire, this time in France.
And this one was, sadly, a fatal fire.
It killed a disabled woman inside the building.
There were changes in France which meant
that the more combustible type of this cladding
could no longer be sold there.
And there were other countries around Europe
that brought similar changes in.
But Claude Wehrle's view was,
"We can still work in markets which are not as restrictive."
And, unfortunately,
the UK was a market that was not restrictive.
There were internal emails where Arconic said,
"You can do anything in England with this combustible product."
At the time of the Grenfell renovation,
the technology was PE.
And then you had the FR material, which was, uh, flame retardant.
In North America, there were certain projects that called for the FR.
Particularly if it was over two stories high,
you were gonna go for FR.
The refurbishment finally finished in 2016,
and the council were pleased with the work they'd done.
A press release went out saying that it was remarkable to see firsthand
how the cladding had lifted the external appearance of the building.
But you now had 120 homes covered in highly combustible plastic.
I didn't think the building needed any doing up.
It was just a concrete tower.
I mean, I felt safe in that concrete tower.
So, you know,
I would think they would have put safety in front of prettiness.
Based on how I saw Arconic operate,
I would find it very difficult to believe that anybody didn't know
that this was going on that particular building.
It would have cost two pounds per square meter more.
Across the whole building, that works out to about £5,000.
If you split it per flat, it's about £40 per flat
to use the safer version.
But because there was such a focus on saving money
and using the cheapest product, it wasn't even considered.
It's about £40 per flat.
The first phone call I received was actually from a friend.
She said, "There's a fire in the block."
"Where is Ray?"
We have no word on the number of people
who are in that building...
So I went downstairs, turned the TV on,
and that's when I realized what was going on.
I tried calling his phone, and there was no response.
And all I can remember thinking at the time was,
"Hopefully, Ray's apartment is not affected."
"Hopefully, Ray will be okay."
I made my way down to Ladbroke Grove.
It was just a...
an inferno.
But I honestly believed it would be dealt with.
Because...
it's the United Kingdom.
With regards to residents still in the block, their advice is,
if there's anyone on the phone to someone who's still in a flat,
is to please try and escape or get out by any other means they can.
Stay Put was revoked in the control room at 2:35,
um, on the incident ground at 2:47am.
By this point, there are over 100 people still inside Grenfell Tower.
I remember a senior officer giving a speech to firefighters.
It sounded like a rallying cry.
"Listen, this is like nothing you're ever gonna face,
but there's still savable life in there,
and we're gonna have to put you in very dangerous situations."
We didn't have a clue where we were.
We were shouting out for people,
and there was nothing coming back.
There was flashes of torches
as people were walking around, running around.
And all of a sudden,
a firefighter appeared with... with a... with a lady who was unconscious.
He was on his own with her. He was visibly... distressed.
So we grabbed her.
We were, like, falling all over the place with her as well.
It was so difficult to get your footing.
We got her back down to the ground floor, and we passed her to paramedic section.
There was nothing to wait around for.
It was a case of getting back inside and trying to help save people.
Every time we breathed the smoke, you're kind of breathing death.
Some of us used to open the door to try to see if we can escape.
I remember my neighbor was worried about his family,
so he started to put sheets together.
He's made a rope from his blankets,
and he's sent it down.
- Oi. There's another guy there as well. - Just been catching.
- Bruv. - Just catching a dog.
He... he... he wanted to escape using the sheets from the window.
He actually tried.
We're very scared, me and my brother, Muhammed.
Straight away, we pulled him in again.
Kids were crying, screaming.
And I remember Zainab crying, and...
and just, people were very...
Running around in the apartment, scared, not knowing what to do.
But the hope was that the firefighters will come back.
I was told that the fire was so intense on some of the other floors,
residents had started to move up.
Some residents rang Ray's doorbell...
...and at that point, his flat wasn't really consumed with a lot of smoke.
He let quite a few people into his flat. It was women and children.
Ray was registered as disabled,
but there was no plan in place to evacuate disabled residents of Grenfell Tower.
He could see all that black smoke, I think, every time he opened his door.
But he still let them in. He still gave them refuge.
It's my belief that Jessica probably accompanied the other adults
into Ray's apartment.
Jessica and my granddaughter attended the same school.
She knew Ray,
and she knew she'd be safe with Ray.
I phoned LFB again to find out what's happening with the rescue unit.
Where's the firefighters that are coming to rescue us?
That time, they said, "Yeah, I've spoken to you. You called before."
And I said, "Yeah, I've spoken to LFB four times before."
At some point, maybe a minute or two into that... that call,
I kinda just looked into my bedroom, and all of a sudden, my window was alight,
and it just raced towards me.
- Okay, okay. - Okay. All hold hands.
And get as much wet clothes...
So everything was, like...
everything was kinda in a rush. Um...
We covered ourselves with the blanket that my dad had put in the bathtub, and...
I grabbed my dog.
And we just dashed it for the stairwell.
The conditions in the stairwell were horrific.
Go through. Go down...
I was coughing. Gagging a lot.
Let's go now!
Just listen to...
I didn't have any idea where they were. My expectation was they're in front of me.
...on their way up.
Keep going. They're on their way up.
My dad was behind me.
I kept hearing his voice, like, behind me, you know.
He kept shouting, you know, "Go on. Just keep going. Keep going."
Just keep going, all right?
Girls?
And I just remember...
I just remember stepping on so many bodies.
And then it got to a point where
I couldn't hear my dad anymore behind me.
He sounded like he was, like,
far in front of me.
Like, down the stairwell.
You know, I didn't hear nobody speak or... or say anything back to me,
until that moment I heard Luana say,
"Dad!"
But at that moment, I realized they're not in front of me.
They were behind me.
I just remember saying, "I can't do it anymore."
Like, I... I can't carry on.
And I just remember... placing my dog down on the stairwell,
'cause I couldn't cope.
That was it. That's... all that I can remember, 'cause...
apparently I had collapsed.
Everything just went pitch-black.
I need to look for 'em.
Oh my God.
They've allowed people to die, for fuck's sake.
Suddenly, our front door was opened.
So the first thing I saw is, like, a firefighter.
And the second thing I saw is our neighbor and his family just leaving.
And then I... I remember someone pulling me from my neck
or from my T-shirt, taking me out.
I could feel at that time the stair.
Someone was pushing me, telling me to move again.
But I didn't want to move, because I was looking for my brother
and for... for everyone else, and I couldn't see nothing.
On the third floor, I started to see a light again.
The first thing I did is to look around me to see, like, "Where's my brother?"
And I couldn't see him.
I just called him. I was like, "Where are you, Mohammad?"
He was like, "Omar, where are you?"
"Mohammad, like, they came to us. They take me out."
"So I thought they are taking you as well."
He was like, "No, I couldn't see anyone. No one came to us."
"And I'm still here with Zainab, her son."
I said, like, "All of you still there?" He said, "Yes."
I went straight to the firefighters, I told them, like,
"My brother, Zainab, they're all still there."
"Please, are you going upstairs?" Everyone's telling me, like "Yes, yes."
I walked back down to the base of the tower.
And there's a guy there, and he's on the phone.
And he's shouting. He's very animated.
"My girl's in there! My girl's in there," he says.
"My girl's in there! I'm on the phone to her now!"
I took the phone off him, and I said, "Hi, my name's Chris."
She tells me, "I'm on the 14th floor, and I'm with my two-year-old son."
"My name's Zainab. My name's Zainab, and my son's Jeremiah."
I said, "Okay."
"We're coming to get you."
"You can't get out that building. We will come and get you."
I can hear Jeremiah crying.
I go over to the Fire Survival Guidance.
And I said, "Look, the 14th floor?" Um...
And he says to me, "At the moment...
at the moment, we can't go past the 12th."
I was on the phone to Zainab for about 25, 30 minutes.
Jeremiah, he's not crying anymore.
There was a point when...
she told me that, um,
Jeremiah's dead.
There was a point when she told me, "Jeremiah's dead."
"I don't wanna be here no more. I wanna be with him, with my boy."
I said, "Come on, Zainab. You stay with me, girl."
"There's people that love you, that are waiting for you, you know?"
"You need to get out of this building. We're co..."
I'm still telling her, "We're coming to get you."
I thought I heard her scream.
Just completely out of nowhere.
And then silence.
I kept the phone on for about five minutes more,
just in case.
I was on the phone with my brother. He's praying and... and speaking to me.
The last conversation we had, uh, was like,
"Omar, I'm... I'm... I'm dying."
"I'm dying here. That's it."
"I could see Zainab dying in front of my face, and her son,
and Denis as well."
"And I'm dying, Omar."
My brother was kind of saying bye to me.
Come down from the...
At that moment, I figured out that Luana,
um, she'd passed out.
I looked down in-between the rails on the stairwell, and I could see a light.
Very faint, but I could see a light.
And I kinda thought, "God, that must be a firefighter."
I quickly ran down, and I shouted, I said, "My daughter's upstairs."
Gotta get them out.
I've gone to go up with them,
and then I've had another firefighter grab me from behind.
They went, "No, you need to go. Keep going down."
I saw Luana being carried out,
but...
I didn't know where... where my wife was.
Didn't know where Megan was.
I know Helen and Lulya were able to get out.
They handed me over to the police.
They said, "No, can't promise anything, but there's a pregnant woman up there."
"She's with another kid."
Without even seeing her, I kind of went...
Like, relieved.
Um...
Then I quickly turned and saw, um, Andreia was sitting... sitting by the tree,
and Megan was... was next to her.
Andreia asked, "Where's Luana?" Of course, I knew where Luana was.
She was to our side.
Um...
They were resuscitating her.
And then we got put in one ambulance, all together.
Next thing I know, I woke up, and I was in the ambulance...
...and I was the only one on the bed.
You know, I just kept thinking, you know, "Why am I on this bed?"
Like, "I'm not the priority here. If anyone's the priority..."
"...it's my mum."
Because, obviously, she was pregnant at the time.
And then I just... I fell back asleep again.
And, yeah.
Police confirmed a number of people have been injured,
and an evacuation is continuing.
So far, 12 people have died. More than 70 others are injured.
We've now been here for five-and-a-half, nearly six hours,
and not a single policeman,
not a single representative from our landlord
or from the council has turned up to speak to us.
There are people here who don't know whether their relatives are alive or dead.
621, where are you?
If we get all the missing people up on the same window...
I came down to Ladbroke Grove,
I think, the, um, evening of the 14th.
And we had photographs, and we were putting them up.
It was desperation,
because there was no information on where to go
to try and find your brother, your sister, your mother, your cousin, whoever.
Where are the children?
A week on since the Grenfell Tower fire
and many residents are still complaining of a lack of support from the authorities.
Many are still sleeping in the local sports center,
and some, reportedly, even in their cars.
We haven't met anyone from the council who's actually come here.
We want someone to actually tell the families
what has happened to their loved ones that have gone missing.
Out! Out! Out!
I think immediately there was a desire to see justice done.
Out! Out!
I think it was obvious to the people who lived in Grenfell Tower
and had lost relatives that... there was responsibility.
This wasn't an accident.
- What do we want? - Justice!
- When do we want it? - Now!
We want answers!
What people needed was clarity from the local authority and support.
The basic human rights that we all take for granted every day.
Food, shelter, clothing.
People sitting out there with no food, no houses, the lot.
People walking around lost in the streets,
sticking their kids' pictures to their top.
No one's out here helping.
Many are livid at the government's response
to the tragedy.
The convoy sped past, carrying the prime minister.
Theresa May spoke to emergency workers, but made no public appearance.
Theresa May steps down here and don't come and see none of us.
May must go!
Why didn't you meet the community straightaway?
My decision not to go immediately
to meet members of the community
was because, I always felt, had been to make sure
that those emergency services had the resources that they needed,
had everything they needed to do their job.
I realize now that, actually, one of the issues for the community
and the survivors of Grenfell Tower
was the way in which authority had failed to listen to them.
And I merely exacerbated that in... in...
by not going to see them first off.
What began here in London today
is a public inquiry into the Grenfell tragedy
that claimed 72 lives.
I called the public inquiry so quickly
because I thought it was important, given the scale of this tragedy,
it was important that we really dug into what had happened.
My role as lead counsel to the inquiry was to be the public.
A curious member of the public who sees there's been a terrible fire
and wants to know what happened and why it happened.
The public inquiry will look at the events of the night itself,
including the response of the emergency services.
I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly...
The problem with the inquiry was the emotional difficulty
and what one might call the forensic difficulty.
The whole truth.
- ...truth. - ...the whole truth.
- ...and nothing but the truth. - ...and nothing but the truth.
The emotional difficulty one came very early on
when I examined the early arrival firefighters
all about what happened on the night.
I decided to go up
and, uh, try and get to the 20th floor to get her little sister.
There is some context here
which I just need to show you based on your statement.
Could you please be shown page seven of your statement?
"I found what I thought was Flat 176, but had to use my torch
and put my face right up close to the door."
"I moved on to the next door and saw that it was 175."
Did you... uh... knock on the door
or shout to anybody who might be inside Flat 175?
- Um, can I just say... - Yes, of course.
Um... to the... to the family of the people in Flat 175, I'm...
I was... I was, um... looking for another girl,
and I didn't know there was anyone in there.
- That's... that's all right. - Thanks. Thank you.
There was a lot of failure,
um, at an institutional level from London Fire Brigade.
There was failure, um... on the ground as well, you know.
This operation didn't go well. Um...
But I think you've got to remember, as well, the... the...
the pain that must come from being the one who is tasked with saving people,
but not being able to.
That's a really hard thing.
Just that alone, a really hard thing to have to live with.
Welcome to today's hearing,
at which we're going to hear evidence from the commissioner.
I swear by Almighty God...
Before the inquiry, one of the questions I had
about the London Fire Brigade was
why didn't they learn the lessons from Lakanal House?
...and nothing but the truth.
I learned that there was warnings to the London Fire Brigade.
We knew that buildings had cladding. We had no training on cladding fires.
And from all the training I've had,
we still, um... relied totally on that Stay Put policy up until Grenfell.
And we... didn't really have a plan B.
Now, this is a... um, a slideshow produced by the LFB.
There were a lot of revelations about the London Fire Brigade
at the Grenfell Tower inquiry, um, and particularly about how much they knew.
And I think the most startling example of that was a PowerPoint presentation
which went into a lot of detail about the risks of cladding fires.
Did you see this slideshow at the time it was produced?
No.
Can you explain why this presentation was kept to a limited coterie
of LFB specialists so that even you didn't see it, Commissioner?
No, I've no idea.
This key document had not been seen
by any of the frontline firefighters.
Suddenly, people realized that this was an institutional problem.
This is not going to be the case of individual firefighters
making mistakes on the night.
If we had turned up to that fire and had the knowledge to recognize,
"That is a cladding fire. We can't stop that."
"So let's not try, and let's evacuate the building,"
if we had that knowledge... things could've looked a lot different.
People probably still would have died. Would as many have died? I don't know.
From an early stage,
some of the witnesses that I was most keen to see
were those who worked for Arconic...
who had made the decision to keep this product on the market,
despite the testing, despite the warnings.
I wanted to see them asked, "Why did you do this?"
Arconic is a huge global American company,
but three of its employees are refusing to give evidence.
I think we've seen that the Arconic witnesses
that have chosen not to appear at the public inquiry are, in my opinion,
nothing better than gutless cowards.
A UK public inquiry has the power to compel UK citizens to attend,
but it has no power to do that for non-UK citizens.
We didn't hear from people like Claude Wehrle,
who did and do have a lot of questions to answer.
But there were emails that got released in a kind of huge package of emails
that came from Arconic,
which included Claude Wehrle using a phrase to the effect of,
"Oh my Lord. Don't release that testing information to the client."
- Oh my gosh! - How will someone help them?
Senior people in the company telling staff
to keep the true fire performance of the product very confidential.
- There's babies in that block! - Where are the people?
The emails sent by Claude Wehrle saying, "We are not clean."
Get out of the tower!
What was being revealed was just this huge corporate scandal.
They knew that if this information made it into the public domain,
people wouldn't buy their product anymore.
While investigating this, we discovered that during the Grenfell deal,
a senior executive requested a fire safety report on cladding products.
She learned that PE cladding was unsuitable for buildings over 12 meters,
and that the product even carried a risk of flaming droplets in a fire.
She was clearly told,
"The higher the building, the stronger the fire resistance must be."
She was informed the company had sold thousands of square meters of PE
for Grenfell Tower, earning 115,000 euros.
But there were no questions around safety.
This is the dark heart of,
sort of, corporate multinational culture,
you know, where profit becomes so important
that everything else is forgotten.
They're the companies behind Grenfell.
Arconic.
Celotex, makers of the flammable insulation.
Together with another firm, Kingspan.
All these manufacturers heavily criticized for their materials
used on the construction of Grenfell Tower.
So in the inquiry, I was asked to be shadow expert
for the victims and bereaved.
My role was to help the lawyers.
And I was called to go through the documents in an intense process.
It emerged that Kingspan tested a product called K15 back in 2005.
But the product it subsequently sold on the market was not the same.
You have Arconic doing this,
you have Celotex doing that, and you have Kingspan doing that.
Show me a good example, no?
Show me a good person doing the right decision,
appearing as the hero of the story.
There is no hero in the story.
The overwhelming cause of the rapid fire spread across the tower
was the presence of the PE ACM cladding.
I thought, "Gosh. Everyone is blaming each other."
The external fire was driven, to an overwhelming extent,
by Arconic's polyethylene-cored Reynobond ACM cladding panels.
If all these people are right, then no one was to blame.
And that's the problem.
The conduct of Celotex and Kingspan
in assuring the market
that their products could be used at height
was the critical causative failure in the case of the Grenfell fire.
I would not put all of the blame on any one company or any one individual.
Uh, it's... it's a systemic problem.
Why wasn't there one person who stood up and said,
"We don't do this"?
You know, "This is not who we are."
I think the inquiry revealed
that public safety was not as interesting
as the individual pursuit of private profit.
My question was,
is it right that the TMO was looking
for the cheapest cladding it could get
in order to reduce the overall budget?
We weren't looking for the cheapest.
We were looking for something that would achieve planning permission.
It's certainly true that the relationship between the...
the residents of Grenfell Tower
and the TMO was not a good one.
This is a report of an investigation report
on long-standing complaints of the Kensington and Chelsea TMO.
"There are a number of tenants, leaseholders, and freeholders
who feel aggrieved that their problems have not been resolved by the TMO,
despite several years of complaining."
Is this a document that you've ever seen before?
I don't remember it being sent to me.
And if it was sent to me,
I don't remember, um, reading it in any detail.
You could see an inability to read the situation.
A kind of numbness,
a blindness evolved.
I want to ask you about a complaint now by Mr. Daffarn about fire safety.
We wrote this blog in, uh, November 2016.
"KCTMO: Playing with Fire."
"It is a truly terrifying thought
but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe
that only a catastrophic event
that results in serious loss of life
will shine a light on the practices
that characterize this malign governance of this non-functioning organization."
Yeah, and we wrote that six months before the fire.
And your response is on page one.
"I think Mr. Daffarn's blog is scaremongering
and could be quite frightening to residents."
We found out that our blog, the Grenfell Action Group blog,
was being blocked on both the council and the KCTMO's servers
so that staff couldn't see what we were writing.
I did ask the head of IT to remove the block.
I felt it was unhelpful.
Members of the community were people to be managed,
rather than individuals with homes.
And I can well imagine that many of them must have thought,
"What was the point?"
"What was it all for?"
When the inquiry first started,
I'd been very frustrated, personally,
by the government's refusal to answer any real questions about this.
The inquiry called Brian Martin.
He was the civil servant responsible for fire safety
for almost 20 years before Grenfell.
"I put to him, 'If it happened in the middle of the night,
the death toll was likely..."
"...to be ten to 12 times
the six people who died in the Lakanal House fire.'"
"Brian Martin's reply to me was,
'Where's the evidence? Show me the bodies.'"
Did you say to him, "Where's the evidence? Show me the bodies"?
I wouldn't have said that.
Brian Martin could have taken a more decisive stance on fire safety,
especially after the Lakanal House fire.
Mr. Martin, we're now going to go to the Rule 43 recommendations
that the coroner sent, making recommendations...
But he perhaps took a more, um, passive approach.
The private comment
that you only have a duty to respond to the coroner,
not kiss her backside,
discloses your attitude to the coroner's recommendations,
which would not tend to indicate that they were being taken seriously.
- Um... - Do you agree?
Clearly, it's... it's an informal comment.
We tried, and we couldn't... we couldn't effect change quicker.
For me personally, feeling like I couldn't do enough beforehand
to prevent such a tragedy,
yeah, it's something that I... I... I've been living with.
They didn't want to listen at the time.
Over the last few months, I've been looking through the evidence.
Um...
It became clear to me that there were a number of occasions
where I could have potentially prevented this happening.
As a result of that, I ended up being the single point of failure
in the department.
That's... that's...
why I think we failed to stop this happening.
For that's something I'm bitterly sorry.
Do you agree with Brian Martin
calling himself "the single point of failure"?
Hmm. Interesting.
Um, not necessarily.
There are others to blame, from my perspective.
I swear by Almighty God that...
Eric Pickles was secretary of state
responsible for fire safety before Grenfell.
...and nothing but the truth.
I think it's important
for everybody who's giving evidence in a public inquiry
to realize that the purpose is to get to the truth.
And in giving evidence, I think people also need to recognize that,
at the end of the day, this inquiry is being held because people died.
Feel free to ask me as many questions as you like,
but could I respectfully remind you
that you did promise that we would be away this morning?
And I have changed my schedules to... to fit this in.
I do have an extremely busy day meeting, uh, people.
But this is more important than anything.
But I would urge you to use your time wisely.
Right.
Lord Pickles was repeatedly asked
about the Conservative Party's drive to deregulate
and get rid of health and safety rules in the years before Grenfell.
The government at the time,
before I became prime minister, was very keen on ensuring
that they, as far as possible, were reducing the number of regulations.
I think what we see from the inquiry
was that too many people just weren't looking at those regulations
perhaps with a sense of recognizing the importance of them
in terms of keeping people safe.
In fact, your department was always subject
to the deregulatory agenda,
which led to a complete absence of proper checks and balances
so far as concerns life safety.
Again, I think that would be unkind.
And I have to say, um, you know, without getting too emotional,
I swore on the bloody Bi... Oh!
I swore on the Bible.
I'm a Christian.
And what happened in Grenfell is there was regulation there,
but, sadly, it wasn't up to the purpose.
It wasn't able to do its job
because companies were able to find a way around it.
But we should never lose sight that this is not about...
...deregulation, "one in, one out."
Ultimately, it comes... uh, it...
it comes down to the nameless,
I think it was 96 people, who... who were...
who were killed in... in... in the Grenfell fire.
It's... it's them we should think about.
As everybody knows, 72 residents of Grenfell Tower died.
Ninety-six was the number of victims of the Hillsborough disaster.
That number 72 should sit with everybody,
if it's important to you.
If it's not important to you, then, yeah, sure, it's something you'll forget.
You'll just mix it up with another disaster
where a lot of working-class people died.
Each and every one had a life and an expectation of life.
This was a fire which had come into their homes from outside.
And that, to me, was an intrusion of universal horror.
I think there are a number of things that we all need to learn.
One of the key issues, for me, was this question of a country
that... that felt that there were a group of people
whose very housing that they were living in
meant that they were, in some sense, second class to others.
And we've seen that time and time again.
Authorities have treated people like second-class citizens.
And I hope that, coming out of the Grenfell tragedy,
we can erase that sense.
312 days and 300,000 documents later,
the inquiry is over.
The chairman's report will give recommendations.
For now, though, all families can do is wait.
There started to be small gatherings of the community
on the 14th of every month outside the tower.
And then it went to one march every year on the anniversary.
It is a protest, as well, from the community
that says we're still here, we're still waiting for justice.
I started looking at, um, social media.
I noticed a message from a friend of mine who I hadn't spoken to in a long time.
And then...
...the realization was that I was...
I was looking for their niece.
But I think it slowly became apparent that, um... that instead of going down,
she had gone up to escape the smoke.
And she'd gone to the top of the tower...
...and died, um, on the 23rd floor.
My whole world just fell apart.
He laid the women and children on the bed.
And he would have been the last to have died.
And his body was found at the foot of the bed
where he was sitting on the floor.
Um, so we know,
and that's why we say he was their comforter.
He was a...
decent human being.
He would have looked after them
to the end.
I think about them a lot.
You actually... you actually found out about the people we lost and we couldn't save.
Never done that before.
And that... and that was hard.
He was left with no options, just to try to escape from the window.
He tried to use the sheets that were tied together.
However, I don't think he... he made it all the way down,
so... he did fall from the window.
If you try to jump from the window, it means you lost hope.
And I'm very angry with everyone who was responsible for his death.
After the fire, we were taken to King's College Hospital.
The doctors came and said they... they needed to speak to me.
They said that they were gonna need to make a call
between Andreia and the baby.
- I've ordered it online. - Oh.
They said, "In these circumstances,
we take the mother's side."
And I said, "Yeah, I understand that's what you need to do."
That's when they said, um, Logan had passed away.
Seventy-two people died.
Eighteen of them were children,
including my son, who was the youngest victim.
Um...
You know, they were all robbed... of whatever they could have become.
Once upon a time, there was
a boy on a boat.
He lived happily ever after.
I wanna sing, I wanna shout
I wanna scream till the words dry out
So put it in all of the papers
I'm not afraid
They can read all about it
Read all about it
You feel guilty, in a way.
I feel guilty that
I'm here living, doing my life...
and they're not.
Seven years after the Grenfell Tower fire,
the final report into what caused the disaster is due to be published.
The inquiry has no power to punish or compensate.
There's likely to be separate criminal trials to do that.
We are just about to hear from the chair.
Not all of them bear the same degree of responsibility,
but all contributed to it in one way or another,
in most cases through incompetence,
but in some cases, through dishonesty and greed.
A damning final report into the Grenfell disaster.
A catalog of negligence so complete that it's almost unimaginable.
And it's that word "avoidable" that really strikes you.
What families want is criminal prosecutions,
but they've been told that's not gonna happen for years.
Their lives are on hold, while those responsible walk free.
The inquiry made 58 recommendations.
Top of the list, a change to building regulations.
I'd now like to introduce Pete Apps,
a journalist who has supported the fight and call for justice in this community
ever since the fire, seven years ago today.
Please give him a warm welcome.
Like many of the people here, I've been coming to these silent walks
for seven years.
During each march, 72 names are always read.
But today I want to give you another list of names.
They are the names many want us to forget, but we will not.
So remember RBKC.
Remember the London Fire Brigade.
To be honest, I'm sure this could happen again.
But we still don't know who's the people who's gonna be in prison,
so they're just kind of making me lost now.
Remember KCTMO.
So much time has passed and so little has changed.
That's what Grenfell's about.
It's a story of heartbreaking, unbelievable cruelty
to citizens in a country where I'm sure we don't think we behave that way.
Remember Kingspan.
Remember Celotex.
Until human life means more than profit,
things are never going to change.
There are thousands of buildings
that still have the combustible cladding on those buildings.
Remember Arconic.
Justice is not only the removal of all of the dangerous cladding
that's on the other buildings,
but also that decision-makers of those organizations
are held to account
for the death of my brother and the other 71 victims.
Do not think you have gotten away with it.
We will keep your names in our minds and on our lips
until we see justice for the 72 names we hold in our hearts.
Thank you very much.
We just want justice, you know?
I don't think that's too much to ask.