The publication of the Grenfell Inquiry report exposed the deadly web of deceit, incompetence and corruption that brought about the fire that caused the deaths of 54 adults and 18 children, according to the parish priest of St Francis Assisi in Notting Hill.
This was one of the three parishes close to the Grenfell Tower where a fire killed 72 people in 2017, with the cladding on the building found to be the “principal” reason for the blaze’s rapid spread.
Fr Gerard Skinner told The Tablet this week, “It is clear that the laws and bodies that regulate the construction industry must be reformed. It is atrocious beyond belief that, over seven years later, residential and other buildings remain potential death traps, clad as they are with inflammable materials.”
The final report, following a six-year public inquiry, set out how a chain of failures across governments, local authorities and industry manufacturers led to Grenfell Tower becoming a death trap.
Fr Skinner described the length of the inquiry as “agonising” but it “demonstrated the complexity of discovering the individuals, the companies and the decisions of government, both national and local, that led to the fire”. He said, “I can only hope and pray that all the recommendations of the final report are accepted and enacted.”
Giving evidence to the inquiry was deeply distressing for the families of those who died and for survivors but they did so to pay tribute to their loved ones, Fr Skinner said. The sister of a parishioner who died told him, “I don’t want people to be burdened by Grenfell but to learn from it and stop it happening again.”
“Now the bereaved and survivors continue their painfully long wait for justice, with the first charges expected in 2026, nine years after the fire,” Fr Skinner said.
Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister and housing secretary, said last week that work to fix unsafe buildings must be speeded up in the light of the report into the Grenfell fire. She said she was “absolutely astonished” to learn how many buildings still have unsafe cladding. Of 4,630 identified buildings in England, 29 per cent have been fixed, and work has not begun on half the buildings.
The Anglican Bishop of Kensington, Dr Emma Ineson, called for the report’s recommendations to be implemented, “to ensure that never again will we see such dereliction of duty from those who should have kept people safe”.
She added: “We will never forget those who died as a result and must continue to remember the hundreds of survivors and loved ones who live in the shadow of the disaster every day.”
St Francis of Assisi Catholic Primary School has named a new building after a pupil who died in the fire. Five-year-old Isaac Paulos, a child in the school’s reception class, lived on the eighteenth floor of the Grenfell Tower. Opened in 2022, on the fifth anniversary of the disaster, the Isaac Paulos centre for education and wellbeing aims to help pupils and the local community recover from the tragedy.
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