From cladding firms to government, inquiry report on 2017 London fire outlines roles of those involved in ill-fated refit
The Grenfell Tower public inquiry report features a cast of companies, authorities and people who were involved in the disastrous refurbishment. Here, we look at some of the key players.Arconic is the multibillion-dollar US company whose French subsidiary made the combustible cladding panels on Grenfell Tower.
In 2009 a senior executive, Claude Wehrle, showed colleagues pictures of an aluminium composite material fire in Romania to demonstrate how dangerous the polyethylene-filled sheets could be when it came to architecture.
Wehrle was one of three Arconic executives who refused to be cross-examined, citing an arcane French law. “It is regrettable that in the face of a disaster in which so many people died they were willing to put the debatable requirements of French law above the interests of the survivors in discovering the true cause of their terrible experience,” Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the inquiry, said.
The inquiry found that such emails “expose a casual disregard for public safety at a senior level in Kingspan, a determination to defend K15’s position in the market at all costs and a keen awareness on Kingspan’s part that it needed to find a way out of a situation that it had created through its own mendacity”.
Celotex’s product, RS5000, was tested and marketed in a “dishonest and cynical way”, which “reflected a culture within Celotex stretching back to at least 2009”. The company had been acquired by Saint-Gobain in 2015, which aimed to boost profits from new products, of which RS5000 was one. By 2012, after cladding fires around the world, the government knew the building regulations guidance on fire was “unclear and not properly understood” by many in the building industry.
The council landlord and its tenant management arm were behind the £10m refurbishment plan for Grenfell Tower. For years there had been “distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger” between officials at the tenant management organisation and tenants. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the TMO showed a “persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people” and the council’s oversight of the TMO was “weak”. The inquiry found that Robert Black, the TMO chief executive, had “an entrenched reluctance” to inform his overseers about fire safety matters – a “serious failure”.
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