Article by James Heartfield.

Excerpts:

Yesterday’s phase-two report from the inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, rightly highlights Rydon and Harley Facade’s evasion of basic safety oversight, and the complicity of both Kensington and Chelsea council and the UK government’s housing ministry. What it does not do is ask the obvious question – why was the cladding installed in the first place?

Grenfell Tower was part of this trend. In 2012, engineer Max Fordham wrote a report on renovating Grenfell for the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council with sustainability in mind. His aim was ‘to identify how, as part of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment scheme, the current energy and environmental-comfort problems can be addressed, and how the chosen solutions sit within the London Plan’s aim to bring existing housing stock up to the mayor’s standards on sustainable design and construction’. ‘The poor insulation levels and air tightness of both the walls and the windows at Grenfell Tower result in excessive heat loss during the winter months’, Fordham explained, and ‘the London Plan July 2011 aims to conserve energy’. Fordham argued that the council should have a ‘hierarchy’ of goals for the renovation. At the top of that list, it should: ‘Be lean: use less energy, in particular by adopting sustainable design and construction measures.’

After the overcladding was completed, the council boasted that it had clad ‘a high-rise block in the north of the borough’ – namely, Grenfell Tower – as part of a ‘greener housing’ strategy to ‘mitigate’ the causes of climate change. It admitted that because of the borough’s ‘limited capacity for new housing, we acknowledge the importance of seeking reasonable alterations to the existing building stock to mitigate the causes… of climate change’.

Since the Grenfell Tower fire, no new cladding has been put on to tower blocks to reduce climate change. Presumably, those CO2 targets were never quite as important as they seemed. Indeed, millions of pounds have since been spent removing dangerous cladding from these blocks. Billions more has been earmarked to complete the de-cladding of more than 500 buildings that are still considered dangerous.

There is no doubt that 72 lives were lost mainly because unscrupulous companies and legislators cut corners to slap cheap and dangerous materials on the sides of large working-class estates. But as wicked as the cost-cutting surely is, we cannot ignore why it was felt at the time that this cladding was necessary. This was a disaster fuelled by climate targets.