By Professor John Robertson OBA

In the Guardian today:

Grenfell campaigners have called on Tony Blair to apologise and take responsibility for decisions made by his government that contributed to the fire that killed 72 people.

The former prime minister said on Thursday that tragedies such as the west London fire, which came after years of missed opportunities to regulate combustible cladding, were a result of unavoidable mistakes.

The final report of the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire was published this week and included several criticisms of decisions made under Blair’s premiership.

Stephen Mackenzie, a fire security consultant, said of Blair’s remarks: “It’s incredibly arrogant from an experienced statesman and politician. The problems with the legislation and guidance stems from his government. Much of the cladding was installed during his government’s tenure and Gordon Brown’s follow-on.”

At the same time as Blair and Brown were taking local authority building control officers out of the loop in new building, overseeing a massive reduction in inspections and promoting PFI contracts where builders did their own checks, Scottish Labour, until 2007, were following orders from London to do the same.

Only months before Grenfell:

Nine tonnes of masonry fell at Oxgangs Primary School (Edinburgh) built 2001, in January 2016 during a storm. Ten primaries, five secondaries and two additional support needs schools were shut because of concerns over the standard of construction in the city. About 7,600 pupils were affected by the closures.

City of Edinburgh Council asked John Cole, an experienced architect from Northern Ireland, to investigate the closure of the 17 Edinburgh schools built under the PPP1 project.

In his report, he said: “The fact that no injuries or fatalities to children resulted from the collapse of the gable wall at Oxgangs School was a matter of timing and luck. He concluded:

The report said: “It is the view of the inquiry that the primary cause of the collapse of the wall at Oxgangs school was poor quality construction in the building of the wall, which failed to achieve the required minimum embedment of 50mm for the wall ties, particularly in the outer leaf of the cavity wall. The poor quality relates to all three of the following aspects:

• the direct laying of the bricks and the positioning of the wall ties
• the direct supervision of the laying of the bricks and the positioning of the wall ties
• the quality assurance processes used by the sub-contractor and main contractor to confirm the quality of the construction of the walls.

The last point is key. The local authority building control officers were not allowed to monitor the construction and ensure the proper placing of wall ties. The contract, a form which Edinburgh City Council’s Labour administration were bullied into adopting by the UK Labour Government, deliberately took the local authority’s dedicated staff out of the loop so as to preventing them slowing construction progress.

In 2007, the SNP Government put an end to Labour PFI schemes.

There have since been 4 tower block fires with no inferno and no loss of life.

Finally, from statistics around the time of Grenfell:

In Scotland 2015/16, 9 827 safety audits were carried out. England has 10 times the population and so, all things being equal, might have been expected to have seen 98 270 fire safety audits. However, in 2017/18, England saw only 49 423 fire safety audits, just over half the number. Fire safety audits in Scotland are thus almost twice as common, per head of population, in Scotland as in England.

Why? Cost-cutting Tory local authorities? Cost-cutting Tory central government?

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/06/tony-blair-told-to-take-responsibility-grenfell

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-38907714

The OBA – https://scotsindependent.scot/?page_id=116