A picture of an enormous corporate scandal has emerged at the Grenfell Tower inquiry to little fanfare over the last three weeks. The mammoth inquiry has been slowly going through the evidence surrounding the build-up to the fire, which killed 72 people in June 2017. Until November, it had been examining the fitting of the deadly cladding system to the walls of the building. What the inquiry revealed was dispiriting but predictable: pennies were pinched, no one in an enormous chain of construction professionals took responsibility for key safety decisions, and the external oversight of their actions was almost non-existent. In recent weeks though, the tone of the inquiry changed, and the revelations have become considerably more startling.
Officially, the inquiry has been examining the testing, marketing and sale of the combustible plastic materials which were attached to the walls of the tower, and which burnt with such devastating effect on that terrible summer night three years ago.
