Is Matt Hancock a guilty man? (Isabel Infantes/Getty)

Of all the trite statements routinely rolled out by political figures in the aftermath of an atrocity, there is one which is particularly grating: “Lessons will be learned.” It is objectionable not just for its passivity and vagueness, but its lack of truth. We live in an age of inquiries, of ostensible public accountability. The names of otherwise faceless inquisitor-bureaucrats are immortalised in the collective memory: Chilcot, Leveson, Hutton. But all the questions and paperwork don’t change the fact that most lessons are not learned. They are forgotten, some deliberately.
This is worth remembering as the Covid Inquiry embarks on its mammoth investigation. Former prime ministers, chancellors, and, yesterday, the Covid-era health secretary Matt Hancock have taken their oaths of honesty, promising to help us understand what happened and why. As an exercise in modern lesson-learning, it sits on the same shelf as the The Grenfell Tower Inquiry, The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, The Undercover Police Inquiry and The Infected Blood Inquiry, all of which have been rumbling away for years now. All have, at times, shown the strength of a statutory public inquiry — its ability to force uncomfortable evidence into the public domain. But all have also demonstrated the fatal weakness of the process. Whatever findings emerge, we still lack the powers to force politicians to do anything to ameliorate their terrible mistakes.
I have spent much of the last four years reporting on the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which is a perfect illustration of this shortcoming, being in part an investigation into why so many of the inquiries before it were ignored. Parts of the Grenfell tragedy are now fixed in the national-political consciousness, from the cladding which turned the building into a deathtrap, to the governmental bungling of building regulations which allowed its wide use. And so, as our Covid reckoning creaks into action, the appalling chain of state failure over Grenfell provides a painful but useful warning of how far responsible actors can deviate from proper practice — and how difficult it is to force reform.
The story of missed warnings starts in 1999, when the Government was warned of the risks of dangerous cladding on social-housing high rises. Following the death of a pensioner in a cladding fire in Scotland, a select committee of MPs presented a report which said there were potentially hundreds of other buildings around the UK with similar systems. “We do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks,” it said. They called for a rule change to make all cladding systems either entirely non-combustible or proved fire safe by a large-scale test. They also suggested regular monitoring by social housing providers, to ensure the safety of systems already installed was understood.
Neither recommendation was implemented. Behind the scenes, it is now clear there was lobbying against higher standards for cladding — with an industry body warning of “economic consequences for the building industry and the UK as a whole” if tighter standards were imposed. This concern appears to have taken precedence. This is all the more alarming, when you consider that, after the 1999 report, the Government commissioned tests on cladding materials in 2001. In the event, one test had to be stopped after five minutes because it risked setting the laboratory alight. But nothing was done about it. The precise cladding product tested would later find its way onto the walls of Grenfell Tower.
After another fire in 2009, which killed six residents (three of them children), concerns were raised about the advice conveyed by 999 handlers. The residents of Lakanal House, a tower block in south London, had been told to stay put, as a result of the logic that a blaze in a block of flats would stay in the compartment it started in. After the coroner’s inquest in 2013, the fire service promised better training of its call handlers to prevent a repeat tragedy. But this was downgraded amid budgetary pressure and the call centre would go on to repeat the exact same mistake on a much larger scale at Grenfell Tower in 2017.
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