Former government chief construction adviser Paul Morrell says the way forward for the government on building safety is clear.
So, after seven years, involving 300 days of evidence, over 300,000 documents, steady employment for far too many lawyers (no less than 160 are credited) and expenditure north of £170m, the final report of the public inquiry into the fire at Grenfell Tower has landed with all the gravity of its 1,700 pages.
Perhaps the first thing to say is that for anyone who has been paying attention there are no great surprises in the findings. Every intervention made by the chairman, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, during the hearings demonstrated that he was “on it”, and the report sets out the panel’s conclusions as to the facts clearly and convincingly, backed by the evidence and a weight of forensic detail. The panel has also been frank (and again convincing) as to who was believed and who was not, and as unforgiving as the evidence demanded.
Looking ahead (as we now must, while the wheels of justice grind slowly on), the report lays down challenges for everyone involved in designing, constructing and operating buildings, and everything that goes into them, with a view to prioritising safety.
The first challenge is how to summarise those 1,700 pages in one article. Fortunately the report is well organised thematically, and although one of the consistent faults demonstrated in the evidence is the failure to read documentation properly or at all, few people will choose or need to read the full report – and for those who do, I would caution those of a nervous disposition to steel themselves.
However, those who are genuinely interested in the necessary reform – not just in government and the regulators, but professional institutions, trade associations and individual companies – will be missing a lot if they rely on a skip through the executive summary and recommendations.
In particular, I would say that the conclusions of relevant volumes are essential reading, even where no specific recommendations follow. For example, in the conclusions of the volume dealing with the refurbishment contract itself the panel draw attention to a number of faults which they think “are likely to be repeated widely across the construction industry”, and I fear they are right. These include working without a clear contract between the parties or, where there is a contract, paying little attention to it – not just in observing its obligations, but even in understanding them. The panel described such a casual approach to contracts as “a recipe for disaster” – as it certainly was in this case; and however much argument there may be about the advisability of design and build contracts, for example, we must surely agree that designers, contractors and subcontractors should understand what design responsibility they actually do have, and what it means, under any arrangement.
Added to that are far-reaching issues of competence, or more a particularly its absence – including a failure to recognise that, whilst a main contractor might subcontract almost all of the work, it must have “sufficient knowledge and expertise to monitor their work…and to satisfy itself that their work complies with…its own obligations to the client”. How many contractors could confidently tick that one off the list, I wonder?
Thereafter, and turning to the report’s recommendations, every reader will look at these through the lens of their own day job, and in light of their own experience – so my focus, having led the independent review into construction product testing, is product regulation. In that context, there can be no question about the objective: buildings that are designed, constructed and operated so as to be safe, incorporating products manufactured and marketed with the same end in mind to the same cause.
I hope I might, however, raise questions about the means proposed in the inquiry report without that being perceived as either sympathy for those criticised or a lack of empathy for those who suffered as a consequence of the behaviour criticised. Both perceptions would be quite wrong. That said, many of the recommendations are uncontroversial, and quite a few align with recommendations made in the product testing review. There is certainly complete agreement as to both the need for reform and the over-arching objective.
Questions therefore relate to some of the proposals made in the service of that objective: sometimes to matters of principle, sometimes to practicality and sometimes to detail.
The detail can wait for another time, but much of it is set out in the report of the testing review – and it is worth adding that I would make no significant changes to the recommendations of that review after reading the inquiry report; and it is in the grinding detail, where both god and the devil reside, that much corrective action is required.
Reservations on just two matters of principle relate to the extent to which proposals involve a change of direction from the plans emanating from the Hackitt Review and the Building Safety Act, and the extent to which the answer lies in more centralisation of responsibility in government.
The new regime heralded by the Building Safety Act (BSA) has barely begun to settle down, and understanding its precepts (again let alone observing them) is still only beginning to penetrate. Further sweeping changes will therefore be disruptive, and that carries its own risks and postpones the adoption of new responsibilities. The question is therefore whether further reform can confidently be expected to secure benefits that cannot be secured in any other way, and which outweigh the disruption.
The second concern, which is closely related to the first, is the extent to which more dependency is placed upon a government department that also comes in for severe criticism in the Inquiry Report, and a regulator who is already overloaded (at a quiet time for the industry, but on the eve of an ambition to build1.5 million homes in the life of this Parliament) – with restructuring recommended for both.
In any organisational review there is a tendency to recommend devolution where the organisation is centralised, and centralisation where is it devolved; but however big the circle is drawn there will always be related issues that lie just outside it, and interfaces within it where problems can still arise. So, although we expressed concern in the testing review about a possible lack of continuity in the regulation of a product as it moves off the shelf and into construction, and from one regulator to another, I wonder if that cannot be addressed by a carefully constructed modus operandi between the two regulators and by effective communication between them. In other words, whether the solution might be operational rather than structural.
Given the evidence heard in the inquiry it is not surprising that the industry is distrusted, but how big a regulatory machine might we need to keep constant watch over an industry of more than two million people if its habits cannot be changed in any other way? Similarly, and quite apart from the many practical difficulties that it would pose, what kind of capacity would be needed by the regulator to adopt the recommendation that it “should be responsible for assessing the conformity of construction products … and issuing certificates”, and where might that capacity be found?
Instead, I think we need to follow the model set out in the Hackitt Review and legislated in the BSA and its secondary legislation which have laid down clear duties in respect of designers, contractors and those who own and operate buildings. But seven years after the fire and three years after the evidence that led to the commissioning of the independent review of testing, there has still been no sign of the promised government response to the review, and not so much as an indication of the direction of travel of policy thinking on the regulation of construction products, beyond the clearly inadequate Construction Product Regulations inherited from the EU. The review revealed the extraordinary complexity of the issue, but also sought to set out both a map and menu: the route through the maze, and the choices to be made along the way.
An article in The Times last week told the moving story of Gina Smith, who was twelve on the night she escaped from Grenfell Tower, losing her best friend in the fire and describing her life since as being “consumed by sadness and grief”. “I don’t”, she said “have to read a report to understand what’s going on. We get it. Now let’s do something”.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry report represents an invaluable, authoritative piece of work, but hereafter we don’t need to read another report either. Instead, government should set out clear duties; industry should set out in more detail what it believes represents the diligent observance of those duties, where that is not clear in statute, and organise itself to live up to them; and the regulators should enforce them; and the new building safety minister, Rushanara Ali MP, who has inherited a difficult brief, should break the deafening silence that has followed the publication of the testing review under her predecessors and make sure that those things happen. I have to believe that the part of the industry that knows how to behave is ready to help.
Paul Morrell was formerly senior partner of Davis Langdon (now part of Aecom) and subsequently the government’s first chief construction adviser. More recently, he led the independent review of the UK product testing regime commissioned by the government in 2021.
