Policy Pulse 20: Grenfell

What evidence to the Grenfell Inquiry tells us about policy failure

Welcome to your weekly pulse of public policy. This week, we’re looking at policy formulation and implementation in government departments, courtesy of the Grenfell Inquiry. I’ve been following Inside Housing’s daily reporting on the inquiry for a while – although it’s a trade publication, it has done the great public service of keeping these reports outside its paywall for everyone to read – and following recent sessions particularly closely, as they have been hearing from ministers and senior officials.

The insight this testimony offers into the function and dysfunction of government departments over the last decade or so is grimly fascinating. It contains much that seasoned campaigners, lobbyists and policy wonks will be familiar with in terms of the stonewalling and dismissive attitudes of a government department that either has set its face stiffly against change or is too incompetent to recognise that there is a problem that risks causing grave consequences if not solved. (Not for nothing did I argue a few years ago that the smoking ruin of Grenfell Tower acted, tragically, as a symbol of our nation.) Often, we experience the governmental rejection of good sense only as an output from a black box: but here, the inquiry is lifting the lid on the black box, and showing what goes on inside. It’s every bit as awful as you’d imagine.

Definitive verdicts on the substantive issues at hand in the Grenfell tragedy are of course for the inquiry to make in its final report. It will surely face a difficult analytical task in deciding on the balance to strike between apportioning blame for individual failures and pointing to institutional factors that drove people to act (or not act) as they did. Though it does seem to me that avoidable failings by some individuals are being ruthlessly exposed by the inquiry, with some of the witnesses coming out of it so badly they must surely – and I don’t mean this at all as a joke – in some cases be at risk of suicide if not provided with some emotional support.

This article is intended to be about the insights the testimony offers about the working of government, rather than the points of substance for the inquiry. However, it will be helpful to outline a few key issues that were explored in the testimony. Central to much of the questioning of witnesses has been the matter of the coroner’s recommendations after the Lakanal House fire in 2009, in which six people died: the coroner had criticised Approved Document B, the crucial item of guidance covering what materials are acceptable to use for external cladding, calling it, “a most difficult document to use,” and recommending that it be reviewed with particular regard to the issue of external fire spread and cladding on both refurbishments and new builds. The Department for Communities and Local Government committed to doing this only as part of a scheduled review of the document overall, which then itself became subject to major delay and had not been started at the time of the Grenfell Tower fire. The nub of the need for a review appears to have been that loose wording and even looser enforcement left ambiguity over whether flammable cladding was permitted, with the Government even officially denying immediately after the Grenfell fire that such cladding was legal. However, on a technical reading of the guidance it was legal, and it was increasingly being used on buildings across the country, without government having full knowledge or appreciation of the problem, still less doing anything about it. (I defer to the future report for a truly authoritative summary, but that’s the issue as I understand it.)

However, in terms of how government policy operates, I want to unpick several inter-related themes emerging from the evidence. Let’s start with culture in government departments and agencies: it is very clear that there was a culture among officials in DCLG of dismissing concerns raised from outside as little more than nuisance. On one level this is the classic pitfall for civil servants, or policy professionals in any type of organisation: seeing the challenges as tasks to be completed or problems to be solved, but with insufficient connection to them to appreciate their real-world importance. Hand-in-hand with this goes a culture of dismissing or minimising the worth of input from people who are actually affected by policy decisions. The astounding lack of priority with which the Lakanal recommendations were treated cannot possibly be said to correspond with the safety critical nature of the problems they highlighted, and officials were regularly disparaging towards outsiders raising concerns, including the coroner, in internal emails.

(Almost as an aside, the way emails were used within the department is also extraordinary: many messages have been disclosed that were clearly not written with any thought that a third party might ever see them. This ought to be a useful mental check when writing any email – would this look OK if exposed in a public inquiry, or even by someone making a subject access request? If the writer could reflect that it wouldn’t, it would at least suggest they should reconsider their phrasing, and perhaps the substance of their decision-making. No such self-reflection is evident in the correspondence disclosed to the inquiry.)

Related to this is the question of “stakeholders”: who the Government hears from. It’s not one of the most celebrated sequences in Yes, Minister, but there is an episode where Sir Humphrey explains to Hacker that the real clients of the Department for Education are the teaching unions: they are permanent, whereas the children come and go. While government departments do not approach stakeholder relations anything like as cynically as this would suggest, it points to a truth: there is certainly an imbalance in who government hears from. In the case of fire safety regulations, evidence to the inquiry clearly shows DCLG tacking away from any suggestion of more stringent regulation post-Lakanal on the explicit basis that “business” would not like it: the building industry is something that the department interacts with on an ongoing basis, so it accords weight to its views and preference. By contrast, the department does not hear regularly from the residents whose safety is put at risk by poor regulation and lax compliance. The same is true across pretty much all areas of policy in one way or another: doctors and hospitals have a bigger institutional presence than patients; teaching unions and schools more than pupils and parents; energy companies more than consumers; and so on. There are representative bodies for consumers and service users across all these sectors, but they are generally smaller and less well resourced, plus they lack any firm levers (they cannot withdraw their labour, cease their business activity or refuse to comply with instructions at scale). In principle, democratic mechanisms should redress this imbalance, and to an extent they do – but only on issues where MPs or political parties fear taking electoral damage if they are seen to do badly. But knotty, technical policy issues such as fire safety do not number among those.

A particular mechanism brought into the spotlight by evidence to the inquiry is the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). APPGs are informal groups of parliamentarians: they do not have the status of select committees, who can oblige witnesses to attend their hearings and government departments to respond to their reports. However, they are regulated: they must follow certain requirements for their composition and the frequency at which they hold AGMs and file reports; their work, and how they are funded, is published in a regularly updated register. This register shows that the APPG on Fire Safety and Rescue was chaired throughout the period of interest to the inquiry by the late Sir David Amess MP, and that it occasionally took funding to cover its overheads, which were not large, from two industry trade bodies, the Fire Protection Association and Fire Sector Federation. Its secretariat appears to have been provided, or at least headed, by Ronnie King, a former regional fire service chief.

The dynamics and workings of APPGs can vary greatly: the nature of the organisation that provides the secretariat can often be crucial to how the group operates. While it wouldn’t be true to say that APPGs are a Westminster branch of their sponsor organisation – just ask anyone who has ever provided secretariat support to an APPG, and they will tell you that the group remains very much of and by the parliamentarians – nonetheless the group’s work is often shaped by the ongoing relationship between its secretariat and its lead parliamentarians: certainly this will mean the Chair, and some groups might have very active Vice Chairs as well.

So it is not entirely clear what the balance was between David Amess and Ronnie King, and whether the letters from the APPG shown in evidence to the inquiry were written by one or the other (although they were sent in Sir David’s name, and it seems fair to presume he was happy with them – though more of this later in another context…). What is clear is that the long correspondence between the APPG and DCLG reflects very badly on the ministers and officials at the latter: the APPG persistently wrote to the department calling for an urgent review of two issues: the cost effectiveness of sprinklers and the ongoing presence of “Class 0” as the standard for external wall panels, as defined in Approved Document B. The department’s replies, sent by a succession of ministers, were regularly brief and dismissive, refusing both meetings and any suggestion of acting quickly. Replies sent back by the group expressed “unanimous dejection” among its members about one ministerial letter, and in a later letter Sir David professed himself “at a loss” as to why the issue was not being addressed urgently, and added with a chilling prescience: “should a major fire tragedy with loss of life occur between now and 2017, in for example… a purpose built block of flats, [we would be] bound to bring this to others’ attention.” The department’s conduct has indeed now been brought to others’ attention.

The problematic departmental culture noted above is particularly apparent in respect of how it dealt with the APPG, with internal emails suggesting Ronnie King might be something of a bête noire for Brian Martin, the most senior official in the department with responsibility for fire safety. Referencing a letter sent under Mr King’s own name, Martin described King as, “very annoying,” and, “miffed that we made some de-regulatory changes in 2013 so why can’t we do a quick change to the [Approved Document] now and require sprinklers wherever they can go. Ronnie will not listen to reason, so I just ignore him.” In evidence, questioned about the email, Mr Martin described this as, “an informal email between colleagues,” and claimed: “we didn’t ignore him.” He was asked further: “Do you agree, looking back on it now, that the concerns of the APPG were met by you, and certainly by the department… with unjustified hostility and derision?” Mr Martin answered simply: “No.” However, former junior minister Stephen Williams agreed when asked directly that one of the replies sent in his name to the APPG showed, “barely concealed irritation,” and implied the irritation was Martin’s not his: “[there] clearly was [irritation]... but it wasn’t necessarily mine.” When Mr Williams eventually met with the APPG, accompanied by Mr Martin, internal briefing emails within the department described, “Brian batting the APPG away.”

Perhaps surprisingly however, I would argue this evidence shows the value of APPGs. Firstly, this is an example of an APPG funded (albeit to a modest extent) by industry groups, but not simply putting an industry perspective: as events have shown, the group’s arguments were well justified, based both on expertise and a sincere commitment to preventing the worst consequences of a policy failure. Furthermore, this shows that persistence can pay off: the long delays to the review of Approved Document B and poor responses to correspondence can be attributed at least in part to incompetent ministers (as we shall see). And in fact the APPG did succeed in getting a commitment of a further meeting with a minister: Gavin Barwell, perhaps the only former minister to emerge from their evidence with at least a modicum of credit, had agreed to a meeting and had given the APPG the details of his private office to make the arrangements, when the 2017 general election was called. (In the event, Barwell then had to devote his time to campaigning in his ultra-marginal seat, which he lost; the Grenfell Tower fire happened six days later.)

And finally, Barwell’s evidence points towards other ways of getting an issue up an agenda: he did not recall answering parliamentary questions or questions from journalists about fire safety, and implied that if he had picked up a greater sense of urgency about the issue he would have acted accordingly. In fact other evidence showed he had received some such questions… but evidently not many, which overall supports his point: ministers will act on an issue if there is enough noise around it, so anyone working with an APPG might reflect that its work can be part of an effective mix in securing action on an issue, but a sufficient amount of pressure must be raised through other channels (PQs, media coverage, pressure from other MPs, and so on) as well.

So much, then, for how departments deal with stakeholders. We need to look now at purely internal dynamics within departments: the relationship between ministers and officials, their respective responsibilities and, bluntly, the quality of each.

The testimony of some ministers certainly suggests a Yes, Minister style relationship of officials with their own institutional agendas using a range of tactics to limit and dictate what ministers knew and could do (and the evidence noted above of a strong institutional culture in which officials knew best supports this). More than one of the former junior ministers recounted being advised by officials not to meet the APPG for instance, and Stephen Williams was quietly told when he did so that his officials were unhappy with him about it. James Wharton pointed a more direct, accusing finger: “Everything happens slowly in the civil service and the likelihood is that nothing I could have done would have speeded the review up.” That said, even this statement allows that he might have done more to try to speed things up than he did, and it was in his private office that a research report necessary to commence the review of Approved Document B got lost for a prolonged period, with Wharton testifying that he was never made aware of its existence.

There is another possible explanation, however: rather than civil servants scheming to further their own agenda, or at least maintain their own preferred approaches, could it be the case that they simply weren’t very good? Did a succession of ministers fail to appreciate the urgency of improving fire safety regulations because their officials, through ineptitude, failed to appreciate the urgency and then failed to brief ministers accordingly? Gavin Barwell’s induction as a minister, for instance, addressed fire safety as the very last topic included, several weeks after he came into post, and in a brief presentation that did not mention the Lakanal House fire or coroner’s recommendations at all. Stephen Williams, in his testimony, similarly reported not having been made aware of the recommendations – indeed, he made a mistake in summarising them and was surprised when the actual recommendations were outlined to him during his evidence. On this point, I actually have little sympathy with the implication in the questioning faced by the former ministers (and echoed by the Inside Housing reports) that these ministers were at fault for not directly reading the coroner’s letter themselves: producing a summary of the key points of documents of that sort is exactly what even a junior civil servant should be able to do competently, to save ministers having to read every document in full. Clearly DCLG officials serially omitted to do this – but was this deliberately for reasons of their own, or simply through incompetence? And there is a third possibility: Brian Martin and others outlined in their testimony how limited capacity in the department was: did the failures simply arise from a lack of capacity to deal with every issue, meaning that even if this one had been dealt with, another safety-critical issue would have been neglected instead, potentially with similar consequences?

However, it is not only the role of the civil service that is illuminated by the inquiry’s evidence sessions, but also that of ministers. Eric Pickles emerged particularly badly from his session. He appeared to approach it in a combative, political manner, and at one point reminded the inquiry that his time with it was limited as he had other meetings that afternoon (he later apologised for the comment and cancelled his other engagements). In response to a suggestion that he was putting a retrospective gloss on his actions, he purported to be affronted, protesting that he had sworn on the Bible and as a Christian took the matter seriously – though it is hard not to wonder if this apparent outrage was confected. Perhaps most tellingly, he attempted to strike a more responsible, even moral, note by reflecting that what really mattered was the 96 “nameless” victims of the tragedy: in fact 72 people died in the fire, and Pickles might have been recalling the total of victims of the Hillsborough disaster (this had initially been 95 and has since gone up to 97, but was 96 for many years). Nor were any of them nameless – although his words could be taken to imply that Eric Pickles can manage to think of them only as an anonymous collective, not real, individual people like him.

While the Inside Housing reports rightly picked up on Pickles’ extraordinary gaffe, I was less sure it was fair to hang a rather smaller mistake around the neck of former Coalition minister Stephen Williams, who in passing described the fire as happening in July rather than June. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe that to a momentary mix-up late on in quite a stressful experience, rather than something that gives any deeper indication of Mr Williams’ knowledge or attitude. That said, there we more telling moments in Mr Williams’ evidence that suggest his performance might nonetheless have been at issue. Excusing the poor tone of the dismissive replies to the APPG, he observed that he might well have signed them in a hurry and quickly returned them to an official, on the basis that, “these aren’t personal letters[.]” (Not really true: they are official letters, officially from the minister who signs them; of course ministers do sign things without reading them properly, but it’s poor practice, pure and simple.) He insisted he was an, “intellectually curious and critical,” minister, but evidence of this did not emerge from his testimony.

Ultimately, if ministers and officials point fingers at each other, there is no ambiguity over who is responsible: the ministers are. And to be fair, there are certainly ministers in the current government who I would not expect to offer some of the lame excuses provided by those who gave testimony at the inquiry: can you imagine any of the above quotes coming out of Michael Gove’s mouth, for instance? But there is very limited accountability for ministers when public policy has failed with such terrible consequences. The report of the People’s Covid Inquiry suggested that failures in the pandemic response amounted to misconduct in public office, but that is a notoriously difficult offence on which to secure a conviction (which is probably just as well for some of the former ministers quizzed by the inquiry). The Law Commission has completed a report recommending that it be replaced with two much clearer offences – but if this ever happens it will not, of course, be retrospective.

However, there is a substantive point on which the former ministers consistently sought to deny responsibility: their deregulation agenda, they insisted, was not a cause of the inaction over fire safety. But evidence from officials stated explicitly that they had not advanced or pursued reform because they knew ministers would not welcome it: Pickles and others insisted that would not have been their reaction and purported to express disbelief that officials should have second-guessed them in this way; but even if we take that line at face value, if ministers’ messaging has given their officials a misleading impression of their policy requirements, that still represents a failure of leadership.

In fact, it is very clear that the deregulation agenda was at least a factor in hindering reforms. Pickles tried to argue the toss over whether fire safety rules were in the scope of the Coalition’s “one in, one out” rule on regulation, although ultimately was unable to point to any documentary evidence that showed it was out of scope, while numerous other documents stated that it was included (including at least one press release, which Pickles seemed to suggest had no formal status – so presumably, he took it for granted that his department’s press releases were not true or accurate statements of its policies!).

The mania for “deregulation” among a certain type of middle aged white men probably requires an article in its own right. James Wharton’s evidence provided an inadvertent insight into the psychology of it. He asserted that reducing the burden of “red tape” on business is, “generally a good thing to do,” but also that he, “never felt that reducing the [regulatory] burden was going to prevent us from doing anything that we have to do.” On this logic, a divide exists between regulation that is there for a reason, and “red tape” that is nothing other than a burden. This is a bizarre perception, but widely held: it does not consider that regulation, while it might not always be as proportionate, effective or as easy to administer as it should be, has usually been put there to prevent a harm of some sort. (It also speaks to the regular Policy Pulse theme of government measuring only cost, but not benefit: if the benefit in terms of lives saved was taken into account, the Coalition’s Red Tape Challenge would have had enormous headroom for introducing new regulation!) The general complaint from business is often the cumulative burden: it is incredibly hard to get anyone who is moaning about “regulation” to identify specific regulations that should be cut – I’ve worked in a trade association and asked exactly that question of members, only to be met with the answer “all of it”. Wharton’s answers encapsulate this bizarre way of thinking with unwitting brilliance.

For all the depressing testimony, did the inquiry’s evidence sessions point towards any solutions? Perhaps only implicitly. On one level, the problem was clearly one of institutional culture. One solution would be improved democratic accountability, to counter the bias in which views officials have to take regard of: this needs to mean greater accountability locally, and to users of services. Equally, I’ve never been convinced by people who unthinkingly trot out the cliché that culture eats strategy for breakfast: while it may well be true that a bad culture can stymie an otherwise sound strategy, the best culture in the world won’t prevent failure if strategy is bad or non-existent. And British government is heroically un-strategic: nowhere in the evidence given to the inquiry was there any hint of a strategy on health and safety that interfaced sensibly with other considerations; rather, safety considerations were bulldozed by a vague agenda of protecting business from inconvenience, not out of any deliberate strategy but from carelessness and stupidity.

Then again, that stupidity was mandated by the policies imposed by ministers: fundamentally, is there a way to overcome bad policy, driven by blinkered ideological preferences? To an extent, developments in other policy arenas suggest that there may be - but it is slow, and only possible once a policy failure has become catastrophic. Some policy approaches have failed so egregiously that even a government of the same political stripe that first introduced them has had to recognise the problems and roll them back: the internal market in the NHS is being quietly dismantled; ways are being opened up for local authorities to regain a meaningful role in local bus provision after the disaster of deregulation; the 1990s rail privatisation model has been scrapped and a reimagined British Rail is being developed; and finally, a building safety regime that actually has some teeth is being introduced – yes, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Does this offer some hope that British government isn’t entirely broken after all? Well, possibly. But another way of asking the question is whether the policy failures that led to Grenfell were of an extraordinary nature. Unfortunately, they tally so well with experience of British policymaking in other areas that they almost certainly weren’t exceptional, but instead much like the failures that blight many other policy areas. Of course, most policy failures do not have their consequences spelled onto the night sky in hundred-foot flames, although some do have even more appalling death tolls than the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Overall, to anyone who’s worked in public policy for any length of time, the most striking thing about the recent testimony is how very unsurprising it all seems.