Peter Apps

The scandal of the government’s cladding cover-up

(Photo: Getty)

The Number 10 Christmas parties during lockdown have dominated the news agenda in recent days – and for good reason. But there has arguably been an even bigger government scandal brewing, one which has largely been overlooked in Westminster.

On Tuesday the government told the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that it was ‘deeply sorry’ for the ‘past failures’ which contributed to the devastating 2017 fire which killed 72 people.

Apologies always come in varying forms of breadth and sincerity and this one (as is often the case when delivered by an expensive QC) was carefully limited. The government said that it had assumed fire regulations were being monitored ‘at a local level’ and that it had failed to oversee properly the town halls responsible for enforcing the rules. It also said it had a ‘misplaced trust’ in product suppliers and contractors and this faith was ‘abused’.

It did not take a particularly exacting legal mind to realise that this particular framing of the Grenfell disaster seems to relieve government of any direct responsibility. The government has failed, in this reading, only to stop the failures of others.

Indeed, the government’s lawyer asserted that ‘had the building regulations, British standards and statutory guidance been followed, a large-scale cladding fire could not have happened.’

This claim and limited apology simply do not match the staggering scale of state failure which has emerged since the fire and was drawn out in detail by lawyers acting for the survivors this week.

This limited apology simply does not match the staggering scale of state failure which has emerged since the fire

The allegation is not that the government innocently sat back and trusted local councils to enforce a perfectly good set of rules, but that it knew the risks of dangerous cladding for three decades, deliberately covered them up and reduced the existing protections in the name of deregulation.

In 1991, a fire ripped through a cladding system at a Merseyside tower block.

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