There is a refusal to acknowledge the role green policy played in this tragedy.
Source - Spiked 05/09/24
Seventy-two people died from the fire that started in a kitchen in Grenfell Tower in west London, shortly before 1am on 14 June 2017. They died because the fire was spread by cladding that the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) ordered from the company Rydon, and was put up by Harley Facades. ‘The original facade of Grenfell Tower, comprising exposed concrete and, given its age, likely timber or metal frame windows, would not have provided a medium for fire spread up the external surface’, noted a report by the Building Research Establishment to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which was leaked in 2018.
Yesterday’s phase-two report from the inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, rightly highlights Rydon and Harley Facade’s evasion of basic safety oversight, and the complicity of both Kensington and Chelsea council and the UK government’s housing ministry. What it does not do is ask the obvious question – why was the cladding installed in the first place?
In December 2021, Stephanie Barwise QC, acting for the survivors and relatives of those who died in the disaster at the public inquiry, said that the fire was the ‘predictable yet unintended consequence’ of a ‘laudable desire to reduce carbon emissions’, coupled with the cost-cutting greed of the building industry.
What she meant was that the decision to put the flammable cladding around the Grenfell Tower in 2012 was taken to meet the targets of the Climate Change Act 2008, which committed local authorities to take action to reduce carbon emissions. In 2010, then minister for climate change Ed Miliband published the document, Warm homes, greener homes. That document identified social housing as critical to saving energy and reducing carbon emissions. ‘Social housing has the potential to make a big contribution in reducing carbon emissions from homes’, he wrote. Here, he set out his aim to ‘kick-start the installation of more ambitious eco-upgrades, with social housing providing particular leadership to stimulate the industry and reduce costs’.
As well as the Climate Change Act, London councils also have to follow the mayor’s London Plan. This development strategy, first published in 2004, is updated at semi-regular intervals, with each new iteration focussed on making London greener, more energy efficient and ‘resilient’ to climate change.
A great many local authorities undertook refurbishment plans to meet their green obligations. Camden Council’s Chalcot Estate in Swiss Cottage was a model. In 2008, in the journal, Building, technology editor Stephen Kennett explained that the Chalcot Estate’s 717 flats could, according to the council, ‘deliver a 30 per cent cut in CO2 emissions’, thanks to the application of aluminium cladding.
In 2009, Hounslow Council committed itself to reducing its ‘CO2 emissions from its activities by 40 per cent from the 2007/08 baseline by 2017’. As part of this effort, Clements Court in Cranford, a 13-storey council-owned tower block, was re-clad in 2008 with aluminium compound panels, although these were removed after the Grenfell fire.
Islington Council’s planning committee set out to put new cladding on four council blocks – Arlington House in Angel, Gambier House in Finsbury, Haliday House in Mildmay and Ilex House in Finsbury Park (although the latter was put on hold). The council’s report of 18 September 2014 said that ‘the proposed work is considered to comply with policy CS10 which seeks to minimise Islington’s contribution to climate change’.
Grenfell Tower was part of this trend. In 2012, engineer Max Fordham wrote a report on renovating Grenfell for the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council with sustainability in mind. His aim was ‘to identify how, as part of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment scheme, the current energy and environmental-comfort problems can be addressed, and how the chosen solutions sit within the London Plan’s aim to bring existing housing stock up to the mayor’s standards on sustainable design and construction’. ‘The poor insulation levels and air tightness of both the walls and the windows at Grenfell Tower result in excessive heat loss during the winter months’, Fordham explained, and ‘the London Plan July 2011 aims to conserve energy’. Fordham argued that the council should have a ‘hierarchy’ of goals for the renovation. At the top of that list, it should: ‘Be lean: use less energy, in particular by adopting sustainable design and construction measures.’
The council’s planning application for the Grenfell Tower refurbishment also makes it clear that the principal point of the overcladding was sustainability, as it would lead to ‘a dramatic improvement in heat loss with new insulation and air sealing which will generate significant energy savings’.
After the overcladding was completed, the council boasted that it had clad ‘a high-rise block in the north of the borough’ – namely, Grenfell Tower – as part of a ‘greener housing’ strategy to ‘mitigate’ the causes of climate change. It admitted that because of the borough’s ‘limited capacity for new housing, we acknowledge the importance of seeking reasonable alterations to the existing building stock to mitigate the causes… of climate change’.
Since the Grenfell Tower fire, no new cladding has been put on to tower blocks to reduce climate change. Presumably, those CO2 targets were never quite as important as they seemed. Indeed, millions of pounds have since been spent removing dangerous cladding from these blocks. Billions more has been earmarked to complete the de-cladding of more than 500 buildings that are still considered dangerous.
There is no doubt that 72 lives were lost mainly because unscrupulous companies and legislators cut corners to slap cheap and dangerous materials on the sides of large working-class estates. But as wicked as the cost-cutting surely is, we cannot ignore why it was felt at the time that this cladding was necessary. This was a disaster fuelled by climate targets.
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