Who will they blame for the Grenfell Tower disaster?

Someone has to take the fall for this, and I have my suspicions about who they will go after.

There always has to be a fall guy. Just watch the Maltese Falcon to understand.

The Daily Mail headline asks “Will they ever get justice?” It picks up on the recent Phase II report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, noting “it blasts “decades of failure by ministers and “dishonesty” of “unscrupulous” building firms, But there will be NO criminal charges until end of 2026- at earliest.”

There is no mention in the report or the Mail of who they blamed three days after the fire: “an obsession with green targets.” Nor do I expect that an apology will be forthcoming.

There is little in the report that we didn’t already know, and I covered much of it in my review of Peter Apps’ book, Everyone in the building industry must read "Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen." But a very short summary might be:

• A tired and ugly building in a rich part of town needed recladding to look better and be more energy efficient.

• The client, the municipality, hired a young architect who was already working on a related project in the area. They hammered him on fees. He proposed a noncombustible zinc cladding.

• The quotes came in too high, the contractor was changed, and the architect was told he was now working for the new contractor, Rydon, not the municipality.

• The façade subcontractor, Harley, was buddies with Arconic, which made an aluminum and polyethylene sandwich. A “cassette” made from this was proposed as an alternative to zinc. Arconic lied about whether the product could burn. “Following further testing in 2013, Arconic decided that Reynobond 55 PE would be certified as Class E only, whether used in riveted or cassette form. However, it did not pass that information to its customers in the UK or to the BBA. That was not an oversight. It reflected a deliberate strategy to continue selling Reynobond 55 PE in the UK based on a statement about its fire performance that it knew to be false.”

• The insulation behind the cladding was from Celotex or Kingspan, who both lied about whether it would burn. “RS5000 had previously been marketed as FR5000. From 2011 it had been sold as having Class 0 fire performance “throughout”, a claim which was false and misleading. Celotex presented RS5000 to Harley as suitable and safe for use on Grenfell Tower, although it knew that was not the case.”

• “Kingspan knowingly created a false market in insulation for use on buildings over 18 metres in height by claiming that K15 had been part of a system successfully tested under BS 8414 and could therefore be used in the external wall of any building over 18 metres in height regardless of its design or other components. That was a false claim, as it well knew, because BS 8414 is a method for testing complete wall systems and its results apply only to the particular system tested.”

• The Building Research Establishment, the testing and approval agency which was privatized in 1997, saw the manufacturers as their customer and was incompetent so assemblies that were approved had acutally never been tested. “Senior BRE staff gave advice to customers such as Kingspan and Celotex on the best way to satisfy the criteria for a system to be considered safe, thereby compromising its integrity and independence.”

• The Local Building Authority, which provides support to building departments, “must take its share of the blame for the acceptance by the market of Celotex RS5000 and Kingspan K15 for use on buildings over 18 metres in height. There was a complete failure on the part of the LABC over a number of years to take basic steps to ensure that the certificates it issued in respect of them were technically accurate.”

And then we have the architect, Bruce Soune of Studio E, no longer working for the Tenant Management Organization (TMO) but for the contractor. He was all consultanted up, with a fire consultant paid for by the TMO who never completed his work.

“As architect Studio E was responsible for the design of the external wall and for the choice of the materials used in its construction. Although the TMO as the client wanted to reduce the cost by using ACM rainscreen panels, it was the responsibility of Studio E to determine whether the use of such material would enable the building to comply with functional requirement B4(1) of the Building Regulations and advise the TMO accordingly. Its failure to recognise that ACM was dangerous and to warn the TMO against its use represented a failure to act in accordance with the standard of a reasonably competent architect. It also failed to recognise that Celotex insulation was combustible and not suitable for use on a building over 18 metres in height in accordance with the statutory guidance. Studio E therefore bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster.”

REALLY? How is he supposed to recognize that ACM is dangerous when all the paperwork says it isn’t? Set it on fire himself?

According to an article in Building Design, an expert witness to the inquiry thought “it might have been reasonable for an architect to assume the material was compliant based on a cursory reading of the BBA certificate," but changed his mind.

“A reasonably competent architect would not read the statements on the first page in isolation from the rest of the document,” Hyett concluded, acknowledging that Studio E should have understood that the panels used at Grenfell Tower were not covered by the certificate because they were not the same colour or finish as those described.”

REALLY? Colour and finish?

Now, I was once a young architect who cut his fees to get a big important job (I even used the same cladding!) I was not greedy or dishonest. Later, I was Vice President of our architectural regulatory organization, the Ontario Association of Architects, and served for three years on the Complaints Committee that judged the competence of dishonesty of our members. I have seen this movie before.

Oliver Wainwright writes in the Guardian that “the excoriating Grenfell report was right to damn architects.”

“Pointing to systematic incompetence, the report concludes that Studio E’s failings are symptomatic of a “widespread failure among the profession” to properly understand the nature of the materials they are using. In short, architects have become so detached from the reality of construction, they simply don’t know what they’re building with any more. It has become a roulette game of choosing products from catalogues, within ever-tightening budgets, and hoping for the best.”

I have spent the last few years in the company of architects doing high performance buildings, and they know their materials, they live and breathe them. Ollie is painting with too broad a brush. But I also recall being in the same position as Bruce Soune of Studio E, trying to do my best under huge pressure and relying on the expertise of consultants.

180 police personnel are now doing a “line by line” examination of the inquiry and after another two years of doing this, will look for someone to charge. I will never understand why it takes 180 people two years to see the obvious, but I don’t understand the police. The giant greedy and dishonest building materials companies will have expensive lawyers and might at worst get a slap on the wrist because nobody who was involved is around anymore. Former Prime Minister David Cameron won’t pay any price for his “bonfire of the building regulations.”

I do not believe that an architect who relied on fraudulent information from greedy and dishonest suppliers should be blamed for this. But I bet he is the only one who takes the fall here, and that’s not justice.

It’s like a scene from The Maltese Falcon, everybody needs a fall guy, and it is always the one with the least power and the fewest lawyers.