Grenfell: does the law favour corporations over citizens? 

The night of June 14, 2017 in London was hot and humid. The capital was working itself up to a heat wave. On the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower in North Kensington a tenant woke a neighbour to say his flat was on fire. The first 999 call was made five minutes later. Within 20 minutes a tower of flame reaching heats of over 1000 degrees celsius (hot enough to buckle steel) had risen to the roof devouring everything and everyone in its path. 

The factor most responsible for the inferno, it was later determined, was unsafe external cladding wrapped around the building: this acted like a wind tunnel, generating powerful air currents. The flames were propelled up and then down the outside of the building at terrifying speed. Grenfell Tower was a purpose-built death trap. Seventy-two residents in the 24-storey high-rise — men, women and children —perished in the single most deadly fire in London since the Blitz. 

Grenfell ripped apart the lives of hundreds. It has also left millions more, who have discovered they live in similarly unsafe buildings across Britain, with properties they can no longer sell or insure, facing bills they can’t afford. 

To a layman the simple question that comes to mind is this: will anyone go to go to jail for this grotesque failure in their duty of care? Or will Grenfell join the long list of outrages in which negligent, white-collar executives get away scot-free because the law is just too complicated to pin the charge of corporate manslaughter on anyone in particular? Will the law once again favour the corporation over the citizen? 

It has been more than three-and-a-half years since the Grenfell calamity. The public inquiry, chaired by retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, is still sitting. The first part of the inquiry dealt with the question of what happened. The second part is looking into the question of how and why it happened. 

The horror of Grenfell has faded from public view, eclipsed by Brexit and now the pandemic. But it remains a defining event in England’s social history. It symbolised, for many, a country of enormous private wealth, protected by privilege, living cheek by jowl with public deprivation and neglect. 

The survivors seeking justice — as opposed to just monetary compensation — do not see much reason for optimism. Precedent suggests that we are unlikely to see executives led away in handcuffs. 

Companies take risks. But they also lead a charmed life. The law, like lawmakers, appears unable or unwilling to grasp the nettle of corporate blame. Large corporates accused of crimes of commission or omission — financial, environmental, fraud, homicide — are, it seems, not only too big to fail but too tricky to jail. 

When Theresa May, then Prime Minister, ordered the public inquiry now under way, she said “it would not be about finding blame but finding the causes and rectifying the situation”. To which the layman might ask “Why on earth not?” Will those seeking justice for Grenfell fare any better? 

Grenfell Tower, a typical brutalist building of the era, was thrown up by Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council in the 1970s to address the capital’s growing housing crisis. It was a cheap solution for a big problem. Its subsequent refurbishment, begun in 2014 at a cost of over £8 million in public funds, was catastrophically botched — with deadly consequences. 

Disasters like Grenfell are very rarely the result of a single failure. One view is that the fire brigade’s standard advice to residents to “stay put” was tragically flawed. A final reckoning awaits the outcome of the inquiry. What is not in doubt is that the panels fitted during the 2014-2016 refurbishment were the primary reason why the fire spread at deadly speed. On the night, nobody who mattered knew this. 

If the Crown Prosecution Service decides to charge anyone, the list of potential culprits is long: Kensington and Chelsea’s arm’s length management company, the contractors and sub-contractors who carried out the refurbishment, and the companies that made and supplied the cladding. At last week’s hearing, in a bombshell revelation, the manufacturers of the plastic-covered cladding, used on dozens of buildings around Britain, admitted they knew it was dangerous.  

Several residential towers in the Gulf emirates of Sharjah and Dubai, sheathed in the same flammable panels, had experienced similar raging fires. But customers, it seems, were only told of the risks if they asked. Did anybody ask? 

In a 2015 email, unearthed for the inquiry, a manager at the US industrial manufacturer, Arconic, states that Reynobond (the cladding in question) was “dangerous on facades and everything should be transferred to (FR) fire-resistant as a matter of urgency”. But when Debbie French, the UK sales manager for Arconic, asked if she could share a document about the risks of Reynobond with Arup, the British engineering and architectural firm and a prospective client, the technical manager replied: “OH MY LORD!!! Where did you get that from??? For sure you’re NOT allowed to diffuse to the customer those documents.”

The difficulty of pinning blame on companies, especially big ones, lies in the doctrine that a company is an abstraction without a mind or a will of its own. It is nothing without its moving parts, its people. You need someone to pin the blame on. A successful prosecution under the new Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act (2007) would have to identify the “directing minds” behind the fatal mistakes that led to the tragedy and then prove that their decisions led to the deaths. The complex management layers in big companies make this hard for the law and useful for their lawyers. 

Previous attempts to prosecute companies for big disasters have foundered on this rock. A prosecution against P&O Ferries, following the capsizing of the Herald of Free Enterprise in March 1987 off the Zeebrugge harbour — after it had left its bow doors open, resulting in the deaths of 192 people — failed. 

The Cullen Inquiry set up to investigate the Piper Alpha North Sea oil platform explosion in 1988, in which 167 workers died, found Occidental Oil guilty of “inadequate maintenance and safety procedures”. Yet no criminal charges were ever brought against the company. 

In 1989, the Hillsborough Stadium disaster resulted in the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans. The match-day police commander, David Duckenfield, was eventually charged in 2019, but was acquitted. There have been a paltry 26 convictions for corporate manslaughter since the Act came into force in 2007. Most convictions have been single-director companies where a single individual has been responsible for almost all of the company’s affairs – the “directing mind and will”. Easy targets. 

But Piper Alpha, Hillsborough and Zeebrugge were not, like Grenfell, catastrophes that obviously resulted from wilful negligence. The makers of the cladding, by their own admission, knew it was unsafe. They went to some lengths to avoid advertising the fact. They kept on selling. As a result, people died. 

And it’s not just the cladding. Three years on from Grenfell, dozens of buildings across Britain, both social housing and private, have failed safety inspections or been classified a high risk. 

Shortly after Grenfell, then Communities Secretary Sajid Javid told the National Housing Federation: “In one of the richest, most privileged corners of the UK – the world, even – would a fire like this have happened in a privately-owned block of luxury flats?  If the answer is no or even less likely, then we need a fundamental rethink of social housing in this country.”

The same can be said of the law. The law is not, any more than a company, in a meaningful sense an abstraction. It is made by people for people and is enforced by people. If it does not achieve its intended objective — if it can be manipulated by the rich and powerful to their advantage, but fails to deliver justice for the ordinary citizen, then it is less than useless. 

Successful prosecutions of the Grenfell culprits would be a real breakthrough in the survivors fight for justice and for the law. Another failed prosecution, or none at all, would expose the fact that the law is an ass and needs a thorough makeover.  

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