Just before 01:00 on 14 June 2017 a fridge-freezer on the fourth floor of a 1950s-style council block in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs caught alight. Within minutes the fire broke out through the kitchen window and ripped through the exterior of the building, quickly spreading into the homes of residents on higher floors. As a result, 72 people, including 18 children, died. The chair of a public inquiry into the disaster would later describe the deaths as ‘avoidable’.

Human rights impacts do not explicitly feature in the limited scope Moore-Bick chose for the public inquiry, yet the report tells a story of decades of government indifference towards fire safety and a social housing system that ignored repeated complaints from residents about fire risks and ‘lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home and the privacy and dignity that a home should provide’.

Aoife Nolan, an international human rights academic at the University of Nottingham, says that despite the report not engaging with the language of human rights directly, breaches of the right to life, adequate housing and equality in the events surrounding the fire are obvious. ‘The human rights impacts are wide ranging […] you can take the report findings and map them straight on to a human rights framework and identify clear problems there,’ she says.

In 2018 the then-UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Leilani Farha, visited the UK to meet the Grenfell community. She expressed concerns that the government may have breached international human rights standards on housing safety, and this could have been a factor in the outbreak of the fire. She asked the government to formally participate in the inquiry but was rejected.

Farha says it’s unfortunate that the UK government decided against using a human rights framework for the inquiry because it fits ‘squarely’ with understanding the events surrounding the fire and how to prevent similar horrors from occurring. ‘The final report is a thorough exposé of what happens when a system fails to take seriously the human right to housing,’ she says.

Mark Stephens CBE, co-chair of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute, says that historically public and commercial landlords haven’t thought about the human rights of residents when providing homes. He says the report may change behaviour but that the cost of raising standards will ultimately be passed down to the consumer.

In the report Moore-Bick describes the council’s immediate response to the fire as ‘muddled, slow’ with certain aspects demonstrating a ‘lack of respect for human decency and dignity’ with many feeling ‘abandoned by authority and utterly helpless.’ People with particular social or religious needs suffered ‘a significant degree of discrimination’, Moore-Bick says. The inquiry, blaming time pressures, did not examine questions of potential discrimination in social housing, however, despite submissions from lawyers acting for survivors and the bereaved that racism may have had a role in why a disproportionate amount of people who lived and therefore died at Grenfell Tower were from ethnic minority groups. 

Imran Khan KC, who made such submissions, believes the inquiry let victims down by failing to examine whether prejudice towards race, class or disability caused residents to be placed in inadequate homes and impacted their treatment on the night of the fire. ‘When the inquiry started what we wanted them to look at is, how it came to be that in this rich country, this rich borough, there appeared to be a systemic problem in terms of discrimination,’ he says.

The inquiry report also paints a damning picture of a fraudulent and irresponsible construction industry, inadequately policed and enabled by a government that prioritised commercial interests over public safety. Moore-Bick says the companies that manufactured the deadly cladding and insulation used to refurbish Grenfell Tower engaged in ‘deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing process, misrepresent test data and mislead the market’.

Michael Mansfield KC, a human rights barrister who represents bereaved families affected by the fire, says that the anti-red tape agenda between 2010 and 2016 created an environment where corporate wrongdoing could flourish. ‘It was a situation in which respect of basic human rights were lost in a quagmire of profit before people,’ he says.

Grenfell United, an advocacy group made up of the families of victims and survivors of the fire, said in a statement that the report is ‘a significant chapter in the journey to truth, justice and change’ but justice has not yet been delivered. ‘The inquiry report reveals that whenever there’s a clash between corporate interest and public safety, governments have done everything they can to avoid their responsibilities to keep people safe,’ the group said. ‘The system isn’t broken, it was built this way’.

Seven years on the CPS is yet to make any charging decisions, and any trials are not expected until 2027.

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