Grenfell Tower Fire Newsnight

The whole right side of the building was on fire,

the whole thing was engulfed in flames and you could

hear people screaming, "help me, help me, help me".

One of the firemen said get back up to your flat and his wife said no

It went up way quicker than it should do.

There are mothers that have come out and lost their children.

That cladding seemed to burn like paper.

You could see the fire going into the house and the last

There was a man who threw two of his children.

The block of flats had just been covered in cladding and it

Why did the escape routes get so quickly fire clogged?

Every floor, it was like, bang, bang.

I could see people screaming up at their window, banging,

"get us out, get us out" and the next thing

Any work that was done during the refurbishment

was completed and signed off and that is our position

and that is what we'll be able to show as we go

The poorest housing in one of the richest

It's been a day of utter horror and disbelief at the fire in west

London early this morning known to have killed, at the very least,

The individual stories that have been told today of death

I suspect most of us had complacently thought we'd overcome

the problem of huge scale fires of this kind through building

codes and regulations, alarms and fire drills.

We'll discuss some specific lessons later, but Newsnight has found

that the cladding used in the renovation of the building

was of a type that is less fire retardant than some others and has

been associated with fires elsewhere.

But the fact is that this fire occurred in a building occupied

Is this a case where the well-to-do in positions of power didn't care

enough about the lives of the less well-off because they don't

The potential that it is wilful carelessness of those in power plays

into the divisions and debates that this country has been having.

There is a lot to discuss but we'll start at the scene.

And Emily is there, and in fact has been all day.

20 hours later, the fire is still burning in the building behind me,

you can perhaps see the 21st at 24th floor is still ablaze, a big enough

orange in the night sky but, yes, this is my borough, where I live and

for many of us, the first instinct was to try to muck in, we have been

sorting through donations that have been coming to the various churches.

The Westway Sports Centre, where local kids play football. And that

includes the Beggan children and the camera and children, that has become

the community hub, the Rugby Portobello trust has played a

pivotal role in rehousing all of the residents into local hotels for the

night and they have had more than 200 people coming through their door

today and they have rehoused all except for around 40 and they are

missing relatives and they wanted to stay closer to home. There is a

large Muslim community in Grenfell Tower 's and we have seen

preparations for Ramadan, the breaking of the fast, one local

pizzeria is handing out free pizzas being dropped off by local residents

to some of those hotels. This has been a day powered by volunteers and

it has been an extraordinary response from the community. It has

been quite overwhelming, Rugby Portobello said they have had

hundreds of calls from people offering spare rooms for the night

to try to how was residents and donations have covered all ends of

the culinary spectrum. Everything from KFC to organic, you can see

some of the fire trucks still trying to get through to the scene behind

me. And there have been surreal elements also. I have been sorting

through banks of mismatched socks and ?500 designer Stella McCartney

James and those three wash bags at Wehrlein sometimes give out in

business class. That perhaps takes you to the heart of what you are

talking about and what you describe as a resounding thump of inequality

which exists in this borough. It has never felt more stark than on a day

like today. The image that we were left with was 24th floors of

London's poorest people burning in their homes in one of the wealthiest

places on earth and already, even when the tragedy is barely

one-day-old, there is an ill concealed anger at something like

this could happen right here in 2017. The Frost Report tonight comes

from David Grossman. -- first report.

The first call to the Fire Brigade was just before 1am.

Jodi Martin was there as the first fire engine arrived.

He and his friends filmed what they saw.

When I got there, one fire engine was just arriving

I could see people in there, I could see the flames on the other side.

I went into the second floor for a bridge and then

went into an apartment, into the corridors.

There was an elderly couple in there and I helped them

out, it was very smoky on the second floor.

And as I was coming out, the Fire Brigade were coming up

George Clark is an architect and TV presenter.

He lives 50 yards from the tower and was woken just after 1am.

I looked out the door and I honestly couldn't believe what I saw.

All the way to the top was on fire on that corner.

I had assumed the fire had started around the other side.

Sheets and sheets of cladding and stuff falling down and on fire

and then I walked around and I was screaming people, out now.

I have never seen a fire spread that quickly in a building in my life.

But the biggest problem was the outside.

That building was re-clad last summer.

In 2016 they spent ?10 million on it.

I don't care what anyone says, there is no way that fire

should spread that quickly on a newly refurbished building.

I saw those cladding panels, the cladding on the outside

and the installation was just peeling off like

There is a new cladding system that has been put on the outside,

like a new skim and there is an air gap, and installation behind that.

To me, it just looked like that was a fantastic chimney

And we were hearing the people screaming, you could see a lady

holding her baby out the window, her toddler out the window.

Specifically, that second from the top flat, the top one

and the one underneath that, I could see a family of three

in there and the smoke just got worse and worse

And then they were not there any more.

My partner saw someone jump and over that side I know this

from what the officers were doing, someone had jumped.

I did not see them jump but I saw the aftermath,

I saw people hanging out the windows.

Banging something against the outside of the building

The kid was thrown out of the window from the eighth floor

and the guy just caught him, it was amazing.

Frances Dean has been looking for his sister,

She called him from inside the tower.

When I got here I was like, this is big.

I phoned her again, I said Zeinab, you need to come

The fire marshal said it was smoky, said I'm not

I don't think she did. She had her slippers on. It is really painful to

imagine, today, where is she? Many witnesses told us people were being

told to stay put in their flats and not risk leaving the building. Some

undoubtedly owe their survival to not hearing the advice. I just

grabbed my children and my husband and we ran through the fire exit. We

saw a woman jump, we saw people wrapped in bed sheets trying to get

down and police telling them not to. Everybody was panicking, it was

chaotic. That man sitting over there on the right hand side, he has spent

eight hours in that building. And the look in his eyes... Hell. The

stories that I have heard today from the guys who have been in that

building. There is a lot of people who have died. And from what I sold

watching this through the entire night, trying to help, I could not

do anything... Anybody who was in that building above the 14th

floor... I don't think they got out. What would have helped is there was

a fire alarm, when I was in the building it was silent, I was

shocked there was no fire alarm or sprinklers. I think people would

have got out if there was alarm. There are plenty of questions for

the council and the tenant management organisation that Brandon

Block on their behalf, particularly since fire safety was raised by

residents on many occasions. My understanding is concerns were

looked at and officers in the TMO or the council made enquiries and felt

that we had done what was necessary. The government has ordered a check

on the fire safety of all similar blocks. The official death toll is

12. Nobody expects it to stay there. One of the first people on the site

at 3:30am was Dr Shatha Hadhram and she joins me along with Pilgrim

Tucker along from the Grenfell Action Group. You could see the

flames driving back from Manchester? That is correct. I basically parked

my car at Paddington and I had to walk all the way from Paddington

because all the roads were closed and blocked. There were a lot of

paramedics trying to help evacuate the building. They opened a lot of

rescue centres, six or seven rescue centres, but we only had a fewer

nurses on site and I was the only doctor on site until 1030 PM. --

10:30am bus stop the majority of cases were people with high blood

pressure, diabetes, panic attacks. People who had come out safely? Gone

to the rescue centres and were left without medicine? They left that

behind so we had to call some hospitals and Saint Charles was one

of the first and they came with medication and doctors and nurses

and were offering help and at half past ten a lot of doctors started

flowing into the place, voluntary admen and coordinators, everything

was done on a voluntary basis. And you were still working when I find

you at 938 and? We still have some casualties and we need to take them

to evacuation centres. We heard a little bit about the Grenfell Action

Group and that has been going for seven years so inevitably... We have

the noise of the emergency services. Tell us what the goal was? I worked

with the Grenfell Action Group and residents from Grenfell Tower over a

period of many months, mainly during the summer of 2015 and they wanted

to get their voices and concerns about the building heard, they were

really worried about the potential fire hazard is here and there were

borders being put in by the contractors, blocking doorways was

the proposal, so I worked with them to help them get organised. With a

contract is asking residents... The contractors and the Tenant

Management Organisation said they had done a consultation and the

consultation was rubbish. They had designed show flats and had shown

them to the tenants and when the work started happening in the flats,

the actual properties, it was nothing like the show flat. The

residents asked the TMO to listen, they wrote to senior managers in the

TMO and the TMO did not respond. I wrote to them on behalf of the

organisation and the residents and they did not respond to us,

meanwhile the residents knew... The only time they got listened to was

when they shut their doors and put signs on the doors, refusing access

to the flats in the contractors and protested outside the housing

management offices. They signed petitions. We will hear in the

coming days from the TMO and the contractors, these are allegations

and obviously we will give them the right to respond to this. But your

sense tonight, you have got members of your own group missing?

Yes. There are women who I have tried to contact today and phone is

dead, and they have not been found yet. A lot of people will remember

the peace written in 2015 predicting loss of life. Just explain to us

what you meant that piece. Well, Ed, the guy who wrote that piece, he was

very aware, not professionally, but it was obvious that the standard of

work was really shoddy and really poor. Boilers in front of front

doors. Pipework, sticking inches outside the walls. There were power

surges that were not looked at. When the lights in the building went

dead, the fire, the emergency lighting didn't come on. And these

residents asked again and again and again and they were threatened with

legal action. When they said that they wanted this work to take place.

And you have a cost-cutting council that isn't listening to its

residents. It is a partly privatised organisation. You have a big

building company that is getting a lot of money from a lot of contracts

across London and doing shoddy work and it is not just here, it is in

other parts of London as well. And it is very distressing and, like you

said, this is a very unequal area. These are permanent residents or

ordinary residents, not the wealthy. They are not the cameras, they

cannot afford lawyers and private schools. They try to get lawyers but

because of the legal aid cuts, they could not get lawyers. We will be

putting all of those allegations and points that you raise over the

coming days to the parties at which you point the finger. So thank you

very much for that. Can I raise one more important thinking that we have

received a lot of calls asking about people's families. Our main concern

first is to give medical treatment for people at the rescue centre and

people at the hospitals. People asking for their families, the right

people to talk to our the cattle to bureau, through the police, because

they will have the full information. Each centre has a list but also,

because once they said that a family is missing, that does not mean they

could be dead. They might be at a hospital. You are with the relatives

who have missing people, what are you saying to them? We have had

missing people in the morning who have been found. A lot of people,

when they left the building, I had a man separated from his wife and a

family separated from their kids, but they found them. Some of them

went in different directions. We have six rescue centres and more

than eight hospitals that have casualties. It is just a matter of

time until they are found to stop thank you for giving us that note of

help. We really appreciate that. Thank you both very much indeed.

As you have been hearing, there have been frantic searches by frantic

relatives who have been on-site Alde, anxious to hear news about

those they cannot find. Katie Razzall has been following one man

through the day as he went in search of his relative who lived within the

town. -- within the tower. He said, I am in the building but I cannot

leave because of the smog. We're not leaving, that is what he said.

The waiting is torture. Chris Jones' brother-in-law lived with his wife

and children on the 21st door to the next floor of the tower. He spoke

with his relatives as the fire was spreading. The phone just kept

ringing. No-one answered the phone, so we called his son and the once.

We are stuck in this situation and it is difficult. Just the family, in

one place, that is difficult, because they have to make life

changing decisions. I am hoping, in my mind, that his phone has been

left on the floor, and that there was enough here to go around. I

don't know. Chris had other relatives in the block, too. A

brother and sister-in-law on the ninth floor. She was on the lower

floors and there was no problem. It was the upper floors who had the

problem. I was there at about half two and within 20 minutes the whole

estate was engulfed, but all of it. -- the whole of it. I have a lot of

hope but my god, how are they going to get out? We are just hoping.

Hours and hours of waiting. His wife was inside the centre for worried

families. Chris was in the car outside, leading news of any kind.

At least six people have died following a huge fire which engulfed

a tower block in West London. This doesn't look good. Six people? That

would be very, very lucky if just six people... We expect it to be

worse. It will be worse. How is the family bearing up, your family?

Well, they are coping. The van is going to have to roll, someone is

going to have to roll. What do you mean that? The management of the

block so big, they should have fired Stinger shares, not just barracks

tinctures but they should have fire points, something to let the tenants

know that something has gone wrong. But there was nothing, no alert,

that is not good enough, not in 2017. The father missing from the

21st floor is a hospital porter in the NHS. His three children range

from 20 down to just a few years old. There are so many people still

unaccounted for. Chris's other relatives were lucky to escape and

this afternoon he helped them take some donated belongings to the hotel

that they will sleep on tonight, paid for by the local authority. His

brother-in-law was damning about the block's fire safety. Everything was

wrong with that. No alarm, no shower water. No security. It is health and

safety, a hazard. Last night, when did you know there was a fire? What

happened? Around two o'clock, ice melt plastic burn. I woke up and I

went to the kitchen, I thought that maybe someone had left something in

the kitchen. I went into the kitchen and I saw flames, just behind the

windows. I thought, that is wrong, the ninth floor? So I opened the

window, and there was all the smoke. I said, it's serious. I went to my

wife, and I said, look, we cup, there is a fire. We woke up and took

the children and we went straight out. He has lived in the block from

19 years and he spoke to a missing relative as the fire spread. We

spoke to him at the beginning and we said get out, get out. He said OK,

and then he said no, I need to stay, it will be more safe than leaving.

Chris ferried the homeless family off to get some sleep. On social

media... But this evening on his return, dreadful rumours started to

appear online. My little cousin opened his phone, looked at it on

social media and it said, rest in peace, blah blah blah. And it was

the family. So I said, what does that mean? He said, someone says...

And I said, have they got any evidence, had they seen the person

themselves? Because if you have not seen or done anything, it is a bit

premature to send out a message like that. And he came back, well, that

is what I have been hearing. Unofficially they have said the

family is dead, all of them are dead but however, we would like to make

sure. The only time I will see it is when I can actually look at a body.

Otherwise I will not recognise anything. Because that is when I

start to Morton. -- I start to mourn.

For every story with unhappy endings, there are some happy

endings. A 13-year-old girl, missing presumed dead. Her parents had left

in the apartment as they worked on a night shift, and she has just been

reported alive and well, rescued by a neighbour. Thank you. Let's spend

the rest of the programme thinking about the root causes for some of

the mistakes that have been made that could lead to these things.

Fires will happen, obviously, and in tall buildings

without sprinkler systems, the idea is that they should be

contained in a smallish portion of the structure.

For residents, the advice is to stay put in their flats

where they are behind fire-resistant doors and then the Fire Brigade can

get the contained fire out and remove the people within,

That's the plan - but in this case the fire was not contained,

it ripped through the building, which meant the generic advice

to residents to stay put was not necessarily right.

The building cladding is an issue here.

It has been in other fires and we have ascertained that a less

fire retardant form was used in this case.

Chris Cook looks at some of the early evidence on what happened.

How can we begin to understand the scale of the disaster that began

What went wrong, and might it happen again?

First, it's worth knowing that buildings like this

The idea is that if a fire breaks out, the fire brigade

will have the time to combat it before it spreads.

That's why the building had a so-called 'stay put' policy.

People were supposed to stay in their flats

In this case, the tragic situation seems to be that the stay put

strategy which was in place has led to people being in the building

as smoke and flames penetrated right the way through the property.

The normal strategy, particularly with a tall

building, is that some people may be less able than others

to be able to escape down staircases, through 20 or 24

storeys of a building, and therefore stay put

where people may be less able to rapidly escape down a staircase.

The issue is that the fire did not stay contained.

It raced through the building, so that stay put system broke down.

The prime candidate for allowing the fire to spread

The insulation applied to the exterior of the building.

I think the attention on the cladding is because we have

seen in reports of the photographs, the burning exterior of the building

and we have seen enormous areas where the exterior is destroyed.

And of course the system that we have used, and we use it

widely in this country, and it is an accepted system,

is an aluminium composite panel system, and that system

effectively is a thin panel, probably six millimetres

thick or so, and typically it is made of two

sheets of aluminium with a core in between.

And that core, it's critical as to what it is made of,

because if we look at some of the fires elsewhere around

the world and we look at some of the fires in China

or the Middle East, for example, that have been quite devastating,

the core frequently has been a combustible type

Newsnight has learned that the specific cladding in use

in Kensington was a product called Reynobond and there are two

The first is very fireproof and the second, which has

a polyethylene core, is a bit less fireproof, and we have

established it is the second, less fireproof version

There have been questions about polyethylene core

cladding from abroad, for example following fires

Watch this polyethylene fire from France in 2012.

It starts small and then quickly jumps up floors

And within minutes, it's racing up the exterior.

But the contractors who fitted the cladding in Kensington insist

that their materials and work met the required standards.

All modern British cladding is supposed to be of

Whether our fire regulation in the right placed, though,

has been an open question since a small disaster

Since then, though, not much has happened.

That led to a very detailed coroners inquest and report and part of that,

they said that there should be a review of part

B of the regulations which govern high-rise buildings.

At the end of last year, Kevin Barwell, the Housing Minister,

said that it would be but the secretary is still waiting

for that and it was only in March this year when

the members of the all-party group on fire safety

were warning that lives would be at risk if there wasn't.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which owns the building

The government response deserves probing, too.

We need a response to make sure that other places don't

Theresa May says lessons will be learned and actions taken.

But there was a fatal fire in Camberwell in London in 2009

at a building called Lakanal House and some have drawn comparison

Jeremy Corbyn made reference to that in his response today.

A review took place after the fire in Camberwell

I believe we need to ask questions about what facilities and resources

have been given to every local authority that has tower

blocks within their area and, frankly, most do.

We need to deal with this, we need people to be safe living

Sir David Amess is the Conservative MP for Southend West and chair

of the all-Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group.

It was they who commissioned the report into that earlier

fire which Mr Corbyn was talking about there.

Matt Wrack is the General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union.

Thank you for coming in. Where any lessons learned after the Campbell

will fire? I immediately say, there are no adequate words to express my

sorrow for the affected families and it is very frustrating that we are

not being wise after the event, our voice is being heard once that has

been a disaster, we have said over and over again, sprinklers stopped

lives being lost and in 2013 the coroner, after the disaster,

recommended that sprinklers in these 4000 old tower blocks could be

fitted and that is what we have been asking for all along the school

asked for building regulations and we have been waiting 11 years. What

response have you heard? Have you been told it is too expensive? We

want to do it... Maybe another commission? This fire should not

have happened. Who are you blaming? That sounds like a central

government policy decision, your party... I am not blaming anyone, I

am very frustrated that we are not wise after the event. The all party

Parliamentary pointed out to Parliament consistently that these

things should be acted on, it is crazy that all new buildings do not

have sprinklers immediately fitted. You cannot put a price on any

person's life, that is the bottom line. Matt Wrack, what have you

taken out of this? The cladding issue? The sprinkler Bessie? I would

also like, on behalf of firefighters, to say just how

horrifying this incident is and our thoughts are with the residents and

those bereaved tonight and it sounds like that will get worse and to pay

tribute to the firefighters and emergency service workers who have

undoubtedly saved lives. The starting point is needs to be an

thorough investigation, the truth is they should not be happening in the

UK. One of the wealthiest countries in the world. After like in our

house, we have provided support, technical support from our own fire

safety experts, and clearly action has not been taken as a result. Very

serious questions have to be examined. Did either of you know

that polyethylene, partly flammable material, was used for cladding and

current renovations? And was creating this chimney effect? A

small fire races up? Those pictures from France... I woke up this

morning to see that and I have attended fires in tower blocks

before and I have never seen anything like that before in the UK.

That will shock firefighters to see the entire building engulfed. What

about this stay put advice, but is always the advice in a tall

building, it was not the right advice? I think the advice and even

in that clip, if you own flat is not affected... The logic of the

construction of tower blocks is to compartmentalise the fire, the fire

should be restricted to the flat or floor of origin, there should be

smug resistant, Smoke safe doors on every floor so that firefighters and

residents can get out if they need to and firefighters can enter the

building, but what in the bottom, get what out the top and put it onto

the fire. That is the logic but if during the course of renovations,

I'm saying this happened, if the fire resistant walls, doors,

ceilings have been compromised, then clearly the whole basis upon bad

advice is based falls apart. That is why the advice is there, in this

incident it was not clearly adequate for those people. David, hence have

to roll over this? Who will it be? -- head. It sounds like people much

higher up, fire chiefs and council chiefs, it sounds like policy

decisions? Today is the wrong day for that. Every incident, there is

somebody to blame, but I hope the new Minister, Nick Hurd, will

immediately tell all local authorities and housing associations

who have tower blocks to do an immediate review of their fire

safety precautions. Forget Parliament, this has to be done

immediately and I hope that our All Party Parliamentary Group 's, their

advice will be acted upon. Buildings renovated with polyethylene

cladding, tall buildings, we cannot call them safe? There are probably

quite a few of them around? We do not know the case -- the scale, we

had a case with six people who died, fire protection was compromised by

alterations, firefighters could not do their job in that situation and

the coroner recommended action to be taken and it has not been taken and

people living in those blocks have the right to ask those questions are

answered the point... This should not be happening. That is a horrible

aspect to this event. Thank you both very much.

What does all this say about Britain today?

A building with a population the size of a village,

Now of course, building regulations are not discriminatory,

they are not more lax for the poor than the rich.

Was renovation work done on the cheap?

Were there budget constraints in housing departments?

The building was run by a so-called TMO -

In this case, the Kensington and Chelsea one..

These are companies that look after council housing on contract.

They were created with the purported aim of giving residents power over

what happens on their estates; but the Grenfell Action Group had

That all speaks to the way the country is run -

but remember, too, that we live in an era of undocumented workers,

casual housing arrangements, friends sleeping on floors and sofas

because it's too expensive to find a place to live.

That may add poignancy to the story of the dead and missing.

Well, I'm joined by Times writer David Aaronovitch, Shaun Bailey -

Conservative member of the London Assembly

and Anna Minton, an academic who writes about housing

Good evening. Some have said this is like hurricane Katrina? Exactly

right, this is an iconic moment for British housing in a similar way to

Ronan point, which collapsed in 1968, killing four people and that

signalled the end of mass system building and all those problems, the

end of that era of tower block building. This is another symbolic

moment, this signals the end of any lack of accountability because it is

that lack of accountability that we have seen here by residents'

concerns, repeated warnings, the management organisation has failed

to listen to them and one key point- this is not a tenants management

organisation, this is an arms length management organisation, which is a

different sort of private company. It is not profit-making, it is

designed to help the residents of console stock? This is an

unaccountable quango. It has elected members? Manages 10,000 properties

in the borough, it has half of its board members, they are residents,

the rest of them are a mixture of... Residents of the borough or council

housing? I believe there are residents from those 10,000 homes,

we have a handful of residents from those 10,000 homes on that board but

it is quite clear, the report made this abundantly clear. That board

has repeatedly failed to respond... We will let them answer that when

they have collected themselves. Shaun Bailey, does this play to an

issue around power and accountability? Is that the

underlying story? The underlying story is local people, I come from

that area and my mother lives close by and there is a lot of terror

because close to Grenfell Tower, there are blocks of a similar

vintage and people are sitting in those... Have they been renovated?

People are worried, I am not sure, one person is terrified, this could

happen to us. Was it the regulations that went wrong was negligence

around how this block is managed? Those are different things and that

is what the investigation is to look at and however any building is run,

we need to see an audit of their fire risk assessments so they can be

held to account by an outside body, this is very important because once

we get past the pain of this tragic incident, we will have to look at

preventing it again and one of the key things is, who manages and how?

Currently that has not been answered properly. I will come to David...

Anna, who is a particular problem which is the cladding problem,

probably not what the tenants were complaining about, they probably did

not know this was polyethylene? They might have been aware. If it turns

out to be that, why would you focus on accountability and power issues

as opposed to a problem with the building? What I have heard is the

tenants management organisation received eight reports of a fire

risk in recent years from that tower and other towers in the borough. It

is quite clear that there are much wider issues there. David, what do

you think about the argument that this speaks to a kind of

dysfunctional relationship between the rich and the rest, the many and

the few and all these issues? This is 2017. And we should be so ashamed

that this has happened in our capital city, a disaster of this

scale. What will happen, as with what happened in the 1980s,

Bradford, Hillsborough... We will discover that the causes of this

fire, like those, were things that were easily known about and could

properly, with a fair amount of money and foresight and attention,

being dealt with. We have had an assault on the idea that the cost

and attention required from health and safety legislation and health

and safety practices... Whether or not this is a matter about poor or

rich people, we can imagine there are mansion blocks, old mansion

blocks, equally not fitted with sprinklers which equally might go up

but where the complaints would be better heard. But we do not need to

have disasters to be able to build preventative strategies into our

mindset, we just need to spend the money and pay the attention. That it

is on the board is important, I have been on many organisations and have

lived in similar blocks and if you put a lot of tenants on, it looks

good but what are you doing about the level of expertise? I would not

have known about cladding, or any risks, you cannot just build a board

and to the cosmetic thing, you have to give people access to

information. You are right but we know that external cladding was

responsible for the fire at the large to my hotel which everybody

saw on YouTube on New Year's Day 2016 and if this is true that

outside cladding can compromise every single major factor required

for safety in our tower blocks, it is beyond copper hedging by this

would not be known and acted upon. But if the All Party Parliamentary

Group's actions had been followed and there was a review of

regulations and we took regulations seriously, then that cladding would

probably have not got through. We are not very good at low probability

events that are probably not going to happen to us. That is a human

failing, I will not worry about it. But we do have people who worry an

awful lot about fire, we have fire briefings at the beginning of every

meeting in Hotel, somebody will tell us about the exits, we about this,

the criticism from David is interesting- how come we did not

know that cladding was a terrible risk and we needed sprinklers? The

cladding issue speaks to regulation but this was not a low probability

event. There were eight repeated warnings. Thousands of tenants you

that this was going to happen, they wrote about it. And the key thing is

the mix of information, stay or go? Somebody needs to be clear because

that would have saved lives. We do not know if that was wrong or right

but we need a deeper investigation by the Fire Brigade and police

because I know that tonight there are tenants worrying that if this

happened in my blog, what would I do? All disasters are low

probability events, the King's Cross fire had never happened before the

King's Cross fire but when it did happen it was obvious that at some

point it would and if it did it would happen with those

consequences. The big accountability issue about how you give people in

positions of responsibility incentives to make sure they take

the requisite precautions and spend the right amount of money? How do we

do that? You can say that as a person who was entirely responsible,

often it is just at non-decision or the decision to think about things a

little bit longer. What do we do? Do we want a culture that finds a

culprit and blames them and scares the wits off other administrators?

When you have no unaccountable quangos in charge who are not

democratically elected and will not be answerable, you're opening the

door to thing. People who say, who set budgets and regulations, we put

sprinklers into tall buildings? You are right, accountability is just

one issue because the people who might be accountable do not

necessarily know what the problems will be so what you have to build in

this culture of prevention at almost all costs, at this point. You have

to stop complaining about the health and safety culture when you have got

it, you have to prioritise it and say this is important and it might

be difficult for us and it might have us doing things we don't quite

like all the time but actually, it is a fairly essential part of seeing

this time of thing not happening. It is about mitigating the risk, you

cannot do 100% of mitigation but there is definitely something

glaringly wrong here and although this might be a low probability

event, fire is not and we understand that what starts fires and we can

fight fires, the London Fire Brigade have been very successful but this

is a very particular thing that is scaring London, there are many

buildings of this vintage in London and somebody needs to look at how we

can empower residents to look after themselves and the building because

that will mainly save lives. If those residents were confident about

what to do, more people would be alive tonight. It is not about

empowering residents, it is about the fact we have a government that

does not believe in regulation. We need to live there.

And for obvious reasons, we have not even mentioned

the resignation of Tim Farron - he stepped down as leader

of the Lib Dems, referring to the struggle of reconciling his

christianity and his leadership of a progressive party.

We couldn't do justice to the politics or the principles

of that today, so we'll get back to it tomorrow.

And I'm sure, the repercussions of this fire, as we learn more

about its causes and consequences will also be preoccupying us.