Grenfell Tower Inquiry Criticises Senior Officals

Will MHCLG be charged with Corporate Manslaughter?

I have already published a lengthy summary and analysis of civil servants' evidence to the Grenfell Inquiry.  Here are some brief extracts followed by the Inquiry's conclusions, reported last week, and a commentary.

I said:

[Grade 7] Brian Martin made serious mistakes but he was a relatively junior specialist.  He and his boss, Richard Harral, were working under huge pressure, knew that both ministers and senior staff had very little interest in their work, and knew that their fellow officials would oppose any changes to building regulation. 

·      Senior officials' working practices seem also to have been sub-optimal, to put it mildly.

·      There was little evidence that the Senior Civil Service (SCS) 'walked the corridors' so as to be informed about developing issues.

·      I saw no evidence that any member of the SCS had made any attempt to meet or otherwise communicate with Brian Martin's outside stakeholders such as local authority building control, the certification bodies or building regulation experts in the construction industry. 

·      The result was that Brian Martin had become a single point of information.  And the industry continued down its unethical and dangerous path.

·      Senior officials in Brian Martin's reporting line should have reacted with real concern to what they heard about the Lakanal House fire - a major news story - and to the coroner's letter - and to what they were told by MPs in the APPG. In the event, though, they showed no interest in learning about the cause of the Lakanal House deaths, or in the concerns of the coroner or our elected representatives.

I was not therefore surprised that the recent Grenfell Inquiry report was equally critical of the civil servants in the Ministry of Housing (MHCLG). 

The Inquiry concluded that the Policy Profession in MHCLG was anything but professional. 

1.  Its analysis was flawed:

Another weakness affecting the project was the existence of a belief on the part of the department and the Building Research establishment (BRE) that the findings from any particular investigation could not be of general significance.  That was a very naïve approach, both on the part of BRE and the department. Although the identification of patterns or common occurrences was no doubt an important part of BRE’s work, it failed to accord sufficient recognition to the fact that a single rare but significant incident [such as a deadly fire at Lakanal House] might well have important implications for the effectiveness of the regulatory regime.

2.  Submissions etc. were equally flawed:

On 11 April 2013 a submission signed by [technical specialist] Brian Martin was put up to the then junior Housing Minister, containing advice on how to respond to the [Lakanal House] coroner’s letter in so far as it concerned the Building Regulations. Although her letter was annexed to it, the coroner’s three recommendations were not summarised in the body of the submission itself. ...  the recommended response did not properly respond to her recommendations in some important respects.

Mr Ledsome [a Senior Civil Servant] agreed with the approach taken in the submission. He should have ensured that the submission summarised the coroner’s recommendations accurately and offered suggestions for a response supported by appropriate explanations.

[A] literature review was, in our view, a poor piece of work, as the uncertainty surrounding its conclusions demonstrates. It was superficial at best, even as a reference point, and contained at least one significant inaccuracy.

3.  As was correspondence:

In the days immediately after the Grenfell Tower fire, Simon Ridley, the department’s Director General for Decentralisation and Growth, was instructed by Helen MacNamara to review the correspondence between the department and the All-Party Parliamentary Group. ... He was scathing in his criticism of the department, describing the correspondence as “appalling – delayed, partial and … chaotic”.

4.  Officials lacked common sense.  After the National House-Building Council (NHBC) had drawn attention to the dangerous use of flammable cladding...

Mr Ledsome’s confidence that the NHBC had got a grip on the issue was wholly unjustified and we cannot accept that Mr Harral (Mr Ledsome's deputy and Mr Martin's boss) was right in thinking that the department had done all it could. Despite the fact that all three of them appeared to acknowledge that the matter was, at least potentially, a serious safety issue, none of them referred it to anyone more senior. They did not ask for advice or speak to anyone else about it. They took no steps to alert the industry to what they had learnt. Mr Ledsome, who also managed a separate policy team that had oversight of the building control system, did not notify it that building control officers had been accepting a combustible insulation material as generally suitable for use on buildings over 18 metres in height for some considerable time.

Deregulation

The Inquiry also criticised ministers:

Before us, Lord Pickles expressed dismay at the suggestion that officials had included in the submission an assertion that a full review of the Approved Document would have had a disruptive effect on the construction industry in order to make it more appealing to him. However, there was a wealth of material that showed both that he was personally an ardent supporter of the government’s deregulation policy and that the pressure within the department to reduce red tape was so strong that civil servants felt the need to put it at the forefront of every decision.

The differences of recollection between officials and successive ministers about the effect of the government’s deregulatory policies on the work of the department in the years after the Lakanal House inquests is striking, but the contemporaneous documents support the evidence of the officials from whom we heard that those policies were a dominant influence in the department at the time. We saw a significant number of documents that showed that [MHCLG] saw itself as a deregulating department, and indeed it described itself in that way in a Star Chamber internal briefing pack in May 2012.1199

The Inquiry's summary said that ...

The department’s response to the Lakanal House fire in the four years leading up to the inquests was complacent and short-sighted. Regrettably, its approach to the coroner’s recommendations was little better. No one treated them with any sense of urgency, despite the fact that they had arisen out of an incident in which six people had died and the coroner had seen fit to make a number of recommendations with a view to preventing future deaths.

Officials produced submissions to ministers which failed to describe accurately the points on which decisions were required or the courses of action open to them and significantly understated the importance of the criticisms of the existing guidance made by the coroner.

Even worse, some officials within the department appeared to treat the coroner with disdain. In particular, Mr Martin displayed an arrogance and a lack of respect that was quite contrary to his assertion that recommendations from coroners were always treated seriously and accorded a high priority.  It was an attitude that should have had no place in any government department.

The department was poorly run, in as much as the official with day-to-day responsibility for the Building Regulations and Approved Document B was allowed too much freedom of action without adequate oversight. He failed to bring to the attention of more senior officials the serious risks of which he had become aware, and they in turn failed to supervise him properly or to satisfy themselves that his response to matters affecting the safety of people’s lives was appropriate. It was a serious failure to allow such an important area of activity to remain in the hands of one relatively junior official.

[Senior officials] ought also to have realised that the deference paid to Brian Martin by those around him in relation to technical aspects of the Approved Documents, his sense of ownership of Approved Document B and the absence of any proper peer review of his work all stood in the way of critical thinking and were obstacles to progress. Senior officials should have taken a closer interest in the working of a small, but important, part of the department that was responsible for significant matters affecting the safety of life.

 All that strongly suggests a failure of leadership within the department at the highest levels stretching back over some years.  The fact that some of the most senior officials were not aware how demoralised and demotivated the Building Regulations team were is indicative of serious structural defects. Although Mr Ledsome must bear considerable responsibility for failing to communicate effectively with those above him, the most senior officials in the department ought to have been aware of the failure of the more junior officials to take effective action in response to the coroner’s recommendations within the time indicated by the Secretary of State in May 2013.

Comment

My attitude to Brian Martin has hardened, if anything.  The Inquiry's catalogue of his failings is deeply depressing.  But this also reinforces the Inquiry's (and my) criticisms of his managers.  Indeed I see no need to do anything now other than to repeat my previous analysis:

This is not a picture of a civil service setting out to obstruct ministers' policies.  It is at best a picture of excessive willingness to accept staff cuts and other HR policies which left the department, at all levels, incapable of doing its proper job.  It is a picture (to quote Nick Hardwick) of 'people who ... can write a good minute which gets the minister out of trouble.  Not those who can run things so they don't get into trouble in the first place'. 

Permanent Secretaries seem to believe that they have no option but to live with the modern 'streamlined' civil service that they and ministers have created.  They do not see themselves as the stewards of an important part of the constitution.  Maybe - as suggested by the IfG's Alex Thomas - this should change? :-

"Their job description means that Permanent Secretaries [themselves on five year contracts] do not focus on long range planning, including for catastrophic risks, to the same extent that they focus on the policies of the day.  And it is in their job description that a Cabinet Secretary is limited from stepping in if a Prime Minister over-reaches on propriety or legality issues. This should change.  Stewardship is a responsibility all civil servants should be able to exercise with more confidence - but, for now, that is not really how our civil service works."

The Grenfell tragedy is important, therefore, not just because it killed 72 people.  It is important because it highlights deficiencies within the highest levels of the civil service.

MHCLG is not an isolated example of a poorly performing department.  Similar pressures are almost certainly found in most other departments.  MHCLG civil servants responded to current pressures by degrading their working practices until they became unrecognisable to those who worked in government 20 or 30 years ago.  It seems likely that their opposite numbers in other large departments are even now working in similar ways. 

Manslaughter? 

As an aside ...

I am not a lawyer but I am worried that the Grenfell victims' relatives, the survivors and the media are too optimistic about the chances of their getting (much delayed) closure from a successful manslaughter prosecution. 

Even if the large companies are convicted, the only penalty can be a fine.  Is this going to satisfy anyone?    

What about MHCLG - and its staff?  Did their failings make 'more than a minimal' contribution to the 72 deaths?

Will it be possible to convict any one individual when so many were grievously at fault?  I was particularly struck by one legal text which pointed out that 'the conduct of a builder who is accused of the [manslaughter] offence is assessed by comparison with what the competent builder would have done in the same position and circumstances as the defendant'.  

But how would the courts define 'a competent builder' when we know that the government, represented by Brian Martin, was warned by the Lakanal Coroner, by the APPG, and specifically by cladding expert Nick Mr Jenkins and by the NHBC, that dangerous cladding was in widespread use on high-rise buildings, including blocks of flats.   Could the whole industry be legally defined as 'incompetent'?

Cladding fires - and deaths - could have occurred anywhere - and cladding fires are still happening.   Would a jury convict someone from the Grenfell supply chain who could with some justice claim that almost anyone in their industry could have been in the dock in their place - and that the government allowed this situation to continue?

Martin Stanley