A catastrophic fire happened because highly combustible materials were used to refurbish a 1970s residential tower by adding insulation and rainscreen cladding panels over the original reinforced concrete structure and external walls. But these materials remain in common use, continue to be specified by construction professionals, and continue to result in many fires around the world. The question is, How did the use of these materials happen? Was it a result of dishonesty, ignorance, or bureaucratic bungling?

Grenfell Tower is a twenty-four-story residential tower in North Kensington, an impoverished inner suburb of London. Designed by Clifford Wearden and Associates for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), it was completed in 1974 as public housing. Typical floors had six small apartments served by a single stairway and two elevators. In 2012, RBKC refurbished Grenfell Tower as part of a local area improvement scheme. The work included replacing the heating system and windows, upgrading the thermal insulation, and refreshing the exterior appearance.

‍The Human Context

Grenfell Tower mostly housed immigrants from Morocco. Neglectful management by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) led them to form the Grenfell Action Group (GAG). In 2016, GAG published an online article attacking KCTMO as an “evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia” and accusing the borough council of ignoring health and safety laws. In a blog post, GAG warned that “only a catastrophic event” would “expose [KCTMO’s] ineptitude and incompetence” and “bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation” at the building. “It won’t be long before the words of this blog come back to haunt the KCTMO management … They can’t say that they haven’t been warned!” Less than a year later, on June 14, 2017, GAG’s prophecy came true when a fire broke out that killed seventy-two of Grenfell’s residents. It was the deadliest residential fire since the Blitz in World War II. Started by an electrical fault in a refrigerator on the fourth floor, the fire quickly spread vertically and horizontally to engulf the entire tower, fueled by its highly flammable insulation and cladding material.

The Industrial Context

Efficient insulation and over-cladding materials are in great demand for new and older buildings. Climate change and sustainability led manufacturers to produce lightweight sheet materials that can be fixed on rails and brackets to provide rainscreens in front of the insulation. New materials like this, eventually written into design guidance and legislation, become part of ordinary practice. Companies like Saint Gobain and Arconic make and market their products at multiple locations around the world. Both construction products and materials today reflect globalization (Rabeneck, 2018). This means that the productive sector of the real economy is increasingly transformed through financialization by private equity investment funds with the goal of maximizing shareholder value. Success for the producers is measured in terms of market share and sales volume, with massive pressure to achieve targets for growth. Success for the investment is measured in higher valuations for the producers, achieved through share buybacks. As earnings per share rise, so too does executive compensation. This is the corporate machinery of late capitalism (Mazzucato, 2018).

The products at issue in the Grenfell catastrophe are the insulation, Saint Gobain’s Celotex RS5000, a rigid board of combustible polyisocyanurate foam insulation, and a small amount of Kingspan K15 rigid phenolic foam board. Both were imperfectly fixed to the geometry and texture of the tower’s original concrete exterior. Weather protection was provided by Arconic’s Reynobond 55 PE, an aluminium composite material (ACM) product—two thin sheets of aluminium coil laminated with a polyethylene core to provide stiffening, folded into hook-on rainscreen “cassette” panels as the outer finish. The companies making and promoting the materials are fully aware that they are combustible and dangerous, and have long marketed them into jurisdictions with weak or fragmented regulatory and testing regimes, such as the UK.

The Regulatory Context

Following both World Wars, Western democracies invested heavily in education and scientific research to support reconstruction. In Britain, this took the form of government construction research, construction demand management through the Ministry of Public Building and Works, and direct large-scale investment in public housing and infrastructure. In the mid-1970s, a world recession and raging inflation forced Western governments to cut back drastically on key elements of the welfare state as their costs rose. Public housing was seen as unaffordable. This was accompanied by a “rolling back the state” movement. The privatization of public assets after 1987 included, in 1997, the Building Research Establishment (BRE), a world-renowned center of construction knowledge founded in 1921 (Parker, 2012, p. 386). BRE’s scientific findings were used to inform general construction practice, building regulation, construction standards, and methods of testing materials and assemblies. With privatization, its work became contractual and its results proprietary, no longer contributing to general knowledge.¹  

At the same time, the evaluation of materials for regulatory compliance came increasingly to depend on performance tests. The relationship between performance in a test and performance in the real world is normally unspecified, so manufacturers and designers tend to focus on passing the test, while regulators, inexperienced in the detailed conditions of fire safety, make the same error (Branigan, 2008). This has led to large-scale markets in dangerous materials. Grenfell Tower is a fatal example of the consequence.

The materials used at Grenfell were both compliant and noncompliant with UK safety requirements for high-rise cladding panels. The combustible insulation products were not approved in statutory guidance for use on a high-rise tower. The rainscreen cladding had obtained National Class 0 by testing in 1997 and was certified as Class 0 by the British Board of Agrément (BBA) in 2008. That classification had been fully established in law in the building regulations in 1976. However, following subsequent legislation, the Building Act of 1984, Class 0 was defined in statutory guidance in terms of a small oven test, whereby if molten or burning plastic was seen, the test was invalidated. Surface spread of flame was covered by British Standard 476, Part 7 (1987), in which samples were supported on a water-cooled frame. Neither test prevented ACM, among many other combustible products, from obtaining Class 0 certification. Indeed, the water-cooled frame made it possible for manufacturers to get their products to market. Yet, despite being warned by its own assessments of their limitations, the government continued to use BS 476 testing. Remarkably, it was only withdrawn on March 2, 2025.

The insulation manufacturers were given a way around the height restriction on their products. In 2002, BRE devised a full-scale test, BS 8414, for cladding systems to be used in refurbishing buildings over 18 meters high. As reported in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, both Celotex and Kingspan underwent this test from 2004 to secure ratings that they could use in marketing their products. Compliance with the performance criteria in the BRE report, Fire performance of external thermal insulation for walls of multi-storey buildings (BR 135), which included the BS 8414 test, signified regulatory compliance. But both companies engaged in deliberate and sustained efforts to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data, and mislead the market. Dishonest claims of BS 8414 compliance were used in both firms’ marketing materials. With its commercial outlook, BRE was directly complicit in this effort in the case of the main insulation product, Celotex RS5000. None of those involved in the design of the external wall or the choice of materials at Grenfell Tower acted responsibly. Not only did they not properly understand the relevant provisions of the building regulations, but they also took a cavalier attitude toward regulation itself. From 2011, Celotex RS5000 has been sold as having Class 0 fire performance “throughout,” a claim that was false and misleading. Celotex presented RS5000 to Harley Facades, bidding for the installation work, as suitable and safe for use on Grenfell Tower, although it knew this was not the case (Grenfell Tower Inquiry, 2024). 

The companies’ dishonest strategies succeeded partly because the British Board of Agrément (BBA) and Local Authority Building Control (LABC), whose certificates assured the market of their products’ quality and characteristics, failed to ensure that their product certificates were accurate and based on test evidence. The United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS), which oversees the certification process, relied too much on the cooperation of the organizations being assessed and, in any case, had no powers of enforcement. All of this was aggravated by the government, which lied about the suitability of materials granted Class 0 ratings in small-scale tests, in guidance issued immediately after the Grenfell fire, ostensibly to “clarify” requirements of the building regulations (Grenfell Tower Inquiry, 2024). Yet in February 2025, facing estimates of £50 billion to remediate other towers clad in thermoplastic materials, the government’s response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report failed to own up to the confusion caused by its misleading regulation.

The final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report, issued in September 2024, unambiguously condemned government bungling in the wake of the privatization of the BRE and the local authorities’ practice of contracting out inspections of construction:

“We conclude that the fire at Grenfell Tower was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high-rise residential buildings and to act on the information available to them.” (Grenfell Tower Inquiry, 2024)

 The Political Context

Daybreak on June 15, 2017, revealed a severe humanitarian tragedy. Those who fled the tower congregated around its base, desperate for news of loved ones lost in the fire. RBKC was slow to react, belatedly setting up “rest centers” in local churches, mosques, and youth centers, and failed to ask nearby boroughs for help, fearing this would make it look incompetent. The police acted roughly, and an atmosphere of chaos and recrimination persisted for several weeks.

Within a few days of the fire, social landlords frantically checked the cladding on their high-rise buildings. Camden Borough found that five towers were refurbished by the same contractors used at Grenfell, employing the same materials. The government set up a service to test cladding samples, and within a few weeks, more than thirty buildings were identified. When experts noted that UK standards were laxer than Europe’s, the Class 0 standard came under scrutiny, as did the government’s failure to act on an earlier fire that claimed six lives. The day after the Grenfell fire, Prime Minister Theresa May announced a public inquiry. While it ultimately uncovered the shocking facts, “We must wait for the outcome of the inquiry” became the annoying refrain of ministers facing difficult questions in the fire’s wake (Apps, 2022, p. 283). Behind the scenes, the government prepared its defense. It could not publicly admit that its regulations were defective and that warnings were missed, so it claimed that ACM cladding was “effectively banned.” This ignored the fact that performance-based regulation does not prescriptively ban anything. It simply requires materials to “adequately resist” the spread of flame. It was the reference to the Class 0 standard achieved by some Arconic, Kingspan, and Celotex products that endorsed their use on high-rise buildings, despite their deadly combustibility. The post-fire Advice Note rushed out by the government publicly claimed that combustible cladding was banned when this was patently not the case (Apps, 2022, p. 283). The note was withdrawn two years later, without any admission of error.

While it soon became clear that there was widespread use of combustible cladding across Britain, with thousands of buildings identified, the phase 1 report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Building a safer future, did not demand a moratorium on the use of ACM cladding. Concluding that the building industry suffered from systemic failures due to ignorance about regulation and guidance, an emphasis on speed and cheapness, lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities, and inadequate regulatory oversight and enforcement tools, the report called for a radical overhaul of regulation (Hackett, 2018).

April 2022 saw a new Building Safety Act, promising new regulators for building safety and building products and some protections for homeowners affected by the flammable cladding. An independent review of construction product testing was commissioned by Industry Grandee Paul Morrell and Barrister Annaliese Day. Their report reveals the murk and muddle of British testing and regulation in detail, as well as the destructive self-harm of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (Morrell & Day, 2023). In early 2022, a government minister, Michael Gove, promised that homeowners would not have to pay for replacing faulty cladding and urged Construction Products Association (CPA) members to assume financial responsibility. Although CPA made reassuring noises, for seven years after the disaster no cash was forthcoming, nor were legal cases brought against Arconic, Saint Gobain, or Kingspan. Excuses for the delay were rendered moot with the publication of the inquiry report.

Tragically, the recent government response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has been feeble and evasive. Yes, there will be a single construction regulator, but one without direct responsibility for testing and certification—that will be farmed out to private sector bodies, despite strong criticism in the report. It is the privatization of testing and certification and the evident decline in scientific standards at the privatized BRE that lie at the center of the scandal exposed by the inquiry (Apps, 2025). The response also leaves unclear whether “redress” for residents will be retrospective. If they live in a building clad with a product mis-sold in 2012, will they be able to get compensation or must they suffer astronomical service charges and insurance premiums forever, unable to sell their property? That ball has been batted back to Parliament.

 Privatization and Its Discontents

Scientific knowledge about construction is quite recent, dating from the early twentieth century. Growing industrialization soon made it indispensable for the state to keep its citizens safe, a basic obligation. This led to the establishment in 1921 of the UK’s Building Research Station (Lea, 1971, p. 9). After the first World War, reconstruction was seen to require much more than the craft empiricism that traditionally underpinned construction. Government involvement could protect people from its industrialization, and benefit from it, and the knowledge required to do this led to government-sponsored research.  

The authority conferred on the knowledge that public institutions generate is clearly needed. Protected from commercial interests and political pressures, these institutions operate in the public interest. Their research findings are reflected in codes, standards, and procedures. This was the accepted model in advanced economies in the trente glorieuses, the postwar decades up until the oil price shocks of 1973. France had its Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, Germany its Deutsches Institut für Bautechnik, and even America had its Institute for Applied Technology within the National Bureau of Standards.² Only the BRE privatized, testing now being a paid service with proprietary findings and research in support of government initiatives being greatly reduced. In parallel, industrialized building product and materials producers such as Saint Gobain and Arconic have increased their grip on global markets, massively aided by the deregulation of the capital markets around 1986. The resulting mobility of capital and its instruments of distribution revolutionized the political economy of construction: the extraction of raw materials; the manufacture and distribution of building materials, products, and systems of construction; the organization and execution of construction; the management of the construction workforce; and, of course, the position of architects and engineers (Rabeneck, 2016). In this new landscape, direct control over construction knowledge has moved increasingly to the supply side of construction, while the social and cultural context of its use, construction practice, is changing. The professional system is being replaced by a bureaucratic one in which the rules are driven by the demands of large clients and the behaviors of major industrial firms. When a product manufacturer offers architects and engineers “free” downloadable BIM templates and CAD details, the knowledge and assumptions embedded within them eclipse and replace the professional function.

The design team, the construction companies, the cladding subcontractors, the building inspectors, and the certification bodies involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower were all caught up in this flawed new world of construction practice, a tragic but natural outcome of recent neoliberal economics.

 What’s to Be Done?

Given the new political economy of construction, with most product categories dominated by highly financialized global oligopolies, and with greatly weakened demand-side professionals, what can governments do to protect their citizens from future tragedies like the Grenfell fire?

Continuing to pretend that current relationships among research, testing, regulation, and public administration are workable is not an option. Along with the Grenfell tragedy, the lack of a satisfactory response to the Grenfell findings by the British government makes that clear. Nor can we expect the industry to suddenly work to make buildings safe; the industry just wants to sell more stuff and preserve its margins. Indeed, protecting citizens from the predations of the construction industry will be a struggle, but it’s an important one because the cost of failure is huge, as Grenfell and its aftermath have shown us. 

My suggestion is for the British government to take back control of construction knowledge as it informs regulation. Put the BRE back into public ownership, give it authority over product testing and certification, and publicly commit to accepting its recommendations. This is a global battle, so it is necessary to strengthen BRE’s ties to other national construction research institutions.

In terms of testing criteria for life-critical products, we should retreat from the regime of performance tests that has grown in force since the 1980s. Governments adopted the performance concept eagerly, at a time when they were desperate for innovation to overcome urban decay and poor housing. It didn’t work. When we certify products for use in dangerous conditions over-cladding existing buildings, we should apply straightforward prescriptive criteria. Only materials certified as incombustible should be used. As exterior wall systems become increasingly complex and dependent on innovative materials, we have to eliminate any and all opportunities for industry to game the testing and approvals process. 

These points also apply to America, where conditions are similar to those that led to the Grenfell disaster. Under the US constitution, the regulation of construction is a state right, but there are three main national model codes, coordinated by the International Codes Council (ICC). Its mission is to keep building occupants safe. To the ICC’s credit, it has published valuable position papers in the wake of Grenfell (ICC, 2020). Whether lessons can be learned, however, is another matter. Despite enormous efforts, we persistently fail to learn from catastrophic events. Gill Kernick, a risk consultant who lived in Grenfell Tower, uses the details of the tragedy as a case study in her 2021 book Catastrophe and Systemic Change. She makes it clear how difficult it is to achieve systemic change, as the Grenfell tragedy demands, but she insists that we must not give up hope. Neoliberalism is under pressure in America and parts of Europe. There’s a growing sense, DOGE and RFK Jr. notwithstanding, that the new global order neoliberalism engenders works against ordinary people and undermines the public institutions meant to protect them. As the British government comes to grips with the Grenfell tragedy’s implications, we must not let it give in to complacency. Systemic change is needed, urgently.

Notes

1. A special issue of Building Research and Information, 25(5), 1997, published opinions on BRE’s privatization from within the research community. BRE Director Roger Courtney made the case for the government’s position. Others were more circumspect, wary of the client/customer framework proposed.

2. Now the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), US Department of Commerce.

References

Apps, P. (2022). Show me the bodies: How we let Grenfell happen. Oneworld.

Apps, P. (2025, February 26). Government response to Grenfell Tower Inquiry recommendations: Steps forward, but not systematic change. Substack.

Branigan, V. (2008).The regulation of technological innovation: The special problem of fire safety standards. In R. Carvel (Ed.), Fire and building safety in the single European market. University of Edinburgh Press.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry. (2024). Phase 2 report. Overview, Chaps. 2.31 and 2.4; Vol. 4, Part 6, Chap. 48. HMSO.

Hackett, J. (2018), Building a safer future: Independent review of building regulations and fire safety. HMSO.

International Codes Council. (2020). Combustible exterior wall “cladding” systems: An ICC perspective. 

Kernick, G. (2021). Catastrophe and systemic change. London Publishing Partnership.

Lane, B. (2018). Report of Dr. Barbara Lane, FREng CEng. Grenfell Tower Inquiry, April 12, 2018.

Lea, F. (1971). A history of the Building Research Station. HMSO.

Mazzucato, M. (2018). The value of everything: Making and taking in the global economy. Allen Lane.

Morrell, P., & Day, A. (2023). Testing for a safer future: An independent review of the construction products testing regime. HMSO

Parker, D. (2012). The official history of privatisation: Popular capitalism 1987–97. Routledge.

Rabeneck, A. (2016). The place of knowledge in construction. In J. Campbell (Ed.), Further studies in the history of construction. CHS.

Rabeneck, A. (2018). Recent geopolitics of construction—origins and consequences. In Building knowledge, constructing history: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress on Construction History. Routledge.

Dr. Barbara Lane’s report to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, April 12, 2018.