We should hunt down the companies responsible for Grenfell

I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath of the Grenfell report. Not a total failure, mind. It is all too easy to imagine how failures of regulation, of maintenance, of oversight, contributed to the Grenfell catastrophe. It’s easy to see how, here and there, and without malice, but with disastrous consequences, amid fraying budgets and overworked bureaucracies, the people and systems which should have ensured that the tenants of Grenfell Tower were safe did not. A cascading series of small failures, missed opportunities and rules honoured in the breach. That, we can all picture. 

What is nearly impossible to imagine is how, in pursuit of still more profit, the companies contracted at handsome fees to supply supposedly flame-retardant cladding draped that high tower with what might as well have been firelighters. That they did so knowingly; that they did so in defiance of regulations – simply lying about the materials they were using and cheating the safety tests; and that they laughed about it amongst themselves as they did so. 

The inquiry heard, for instance, that Kingspan’s employees – having got their insulation assessed as suitable for use on buildings more than 18 metres high by the simple expedient of submitting a different material for the test than they were actually selling – giggled over email: ‘LOL’; ‘We lied?’ ‘All lies mate.