UK’s Grenfell Tower fire victims say final report may still not bring justice

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By Catarina Demony and Will Russell

LONDON (Reuters) – Seven years on, Shah Aghlani still remembers clearly the call in the middle of the night from his distressed aunt who was trapped with his disabled mother in a 23-storey social housing block in west London that was on fire.

The two women in their late 50s and 60s both died, alongside 70 others, inside Grenfell Tower – Britain’s deadliest residential fire since World War Two and the subject of an inquiry that will publish its final report on Wednesday.

The rapid spread of the blaze was blamed on cheap flammable cladding, and the sight of the huge Grenfell Tower engulfed in flames, in one of the richest parts of London, in June 2017 came to symbolise the inequality that exists in Britain.

Survivors and the families of victims have since campaigned for the material to be stripped from tower blocks in Britain and across Europe, where similar fires have broken out, including in the Spanish city of Valencia this year.

They have focused on that while having to contend with a lack of justice, as the inquiry has delayed any criminal proceedings. Police said in May that any charges would not be announced until late 2026, and suspects might only face trial in 2027, a decade after the blaze.

“It’s very painful for us, who lost a loved one, to see their death going in vain. It actually stops us from coming to a closure,” Aghlani, 55, said, standing in front of a vivid mural near the tower bearing the message: “truth will not be hidden”.

Wednesday’s report is expected to provide answers on the choice of cladding materials used in the tower’s 2016 refurbishment carried out by the council of Kensington & Chelsea, the London borough where the building was located.

Witnesses included representatives of the architects, contractors and sub-contractors who carried out the refurbishment, and from the makers and sellers of the cladding.

The government has said the inquiry will get to the truth of what happened, and provide justice for the community.

‘NEVER AGAIN’

The fire triggered widespread outrage in Britain, and the cladding – highly flammable aluminium composite material (ACM) – is now banned. The former Conservative government also took action to remove and replace existing ACM panels, which use polyethylene in their core, but progress has been limited.

As of July 2024, 4,630 buildings standing at 11 metres or higher still had unsafe cladding, with remediation work yet to start on half of them, government data showed.

After a fire engulfed a multi-storey building in east London last week, Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister of the new Labour government, said officials had to move faster.

Guillermo Rein, fire science professor at Imperial College London, said the world needed to learn from Grenfell, as the UK was the only nation that has identified buildings that use ACM cladding, as many others don’t want to know.

The Grenfell Next of Kin group called for a global ban on unsafe cladding following the fire at a block of flats in Valencia, that killed 10 people.

Rein added that criminal prosecutions would send a warning to the construction sector.

Kimia Zabihyan, from the Grenfell Next of Kin group, said the inquiry would provide very valuable information, but it had delayed justice.

“It actually got in the way of criminal prosecution,” she said, noting that an inquiry looks into the facts and causes of an incident and often makes robust recommendations, but it is not a criminal court.

Aghlani said he was running out of energy to fight for justice for his mother and aunt but he still hoped authorities would not “water down the prosecution” when the time comes.

Local resident Marcia Robinson, who runs Hope Gardens, a community space that serves as a memorial site for Grenfell’s victims, echoed the concerns: “The first thing everyone cried out for still remains: accountability”.

But more than just seeing suspects in court she said she wanted to know that we: “are now in an area where that will never happen again”.