What is the value of a life? So far as God is concerned we are all infinitely precious. By contrast, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence puts the value of an extra quality-adjusted life-year at £36,000 maximum. Pretty brutal, but there it is. Not that I mean to imply any contradiction between the guidance of NICE and that from the Almighty. With finite resources, the NHS has to consider whether saving one life by spending a million pounds on some amazing but expensive new drug would cost more lives by tighter rationing of treatment to others.
That is the context when considering the decision by the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government to spend £340 million on maintaining the structure and delivering a memorial of the Grenfell Tower – after the fire in 2017 when 72 people died.
Kimia Zabihyan, a spokesman for Grenfell Next of Kin, says:
“Nothing is happening. Nothing is going on. It’s just sitting there, standing there wrapped in this kind of white cover with a big banner at the top. Everything is just static. It’s £340 million. How do you justify this? You, you’re keeping a building standing for £340 million that is not bringing closure to anyone. It is not helping anyone, neither the people that live below the tower nor the families for whom that site is a sacred site. It is where their loved ones died. They have not allowed the site to rest.”
Could we not have demolished the hideous tower by now? Could we not have built a crescent of beautiful, safe homes on the site? Of course, including a dignified memorial stone to the victims. But £340,000 would be reasonable for a memorial. Not £340 million.
Then last week we had the publication of the report from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. That cost another £200 million. It didn’t really tell us much new. It made a general point of blaming David Cameron’s Government for “pressure” to reduce the total amount of regulation with a “one in, one out.” But, of course, that overall policy allowed flexibility for new regulations – on building safety or anything else – if justified. (A more relevant “pressure” was EU climate change directives, such as the Construction Products Directive, revised by Regulation (EU) 305/2011, but it would have been a bit awkward for the Inquiry to have looked into that.)
As so often with a tragedy the cry goes up for more laws – when the real problem was a failure to enforce the laws we already had. The inquiry may well have made matters worse by causing a delay in the Crown Prosecution Service taking action against firms that broke the laws already in place.
Naturally, the cladding firms are fully signed up to the “corporate social responsibility agenda” with sanctimonious statements about how “ethical” they are in fighting global warming. Dominic Lawson, in the Sunday Times, writes:
“As one might expect from Arconic, it expresses its saintliness via the American corporate doctrine of diversity, equity and inclusion: “We believe that diversity in all areas, including cultural background, experience and thought, is essential to the foundation of a strong company.” These fine words were of no help to those culturally diverse tenants of Grenfell Tower whose lives were ended so violently, in Moore-Bick’s view, partly because Arconic had been “deliberately and dishonestly concealing … the true position in relation to Reynobond PE [the product used on Grenfell] in cassette form”.
“Anyway, in the “inclusive” spirit, in 2021 Arconic fired a 63-year-old it had employed for a decade, Daniel Snyder, after this part-time Iowa pastor had written on an internal company website that the use of a rainbow to symbolise Gay Pride was “an abomination to God”. Last month Snyder lost the appeal against his dismissal. So far as we know, not one Arconic employee has lost his job as a result of either what happened at Grenfell or Moore-Bick’s devastating analysis of it.”
These inquiries tend to go with the flow. They provide an incredibly expensive repository for consensus, groupthink. Thus we had the platitudinous citicisms of Kensington and Chealse Council – something an earlier more independent-minded investigation considered simplistic. Certainly, there should have been more transparency – with publication of Fire Risk Assessments online, but then this should be implemented across the social housing sector.
The most extraordinary oversight concerns sprinklers. Nobody has ever died in a fire, in the UK, in a property with a properly installed sprinkler system. Sprinklers would have put out the fire from the fridge freezer in the kitchen of the flat where it started. Those 72 lives would have been saved. Yet the cost of sprinklers is relatively modest. A report from a study of a retrofitting project in Sheffield suggested £1,150 per flat. £10 billion is being spent removing cladding – yet sprinklers would be a more effective method of ensuring safety at a much lower cost.
It’s not just the Grenfell Inquiry. The Covid inquiry – with all its preconceptions – has cost taxpayers £161 million – so far. William Atkinson wrote about it on this site last December. I suspect we will learn more from all those WhatsApp messages that Matt Hancock astonishingly passed on to Isabel Oakeshott and were published in the Daily Telegraph. A flaw in the debate about lockdown was that it was “lives versus livelihoods.” But economic growth saves lives. Life expectancy is a decade longer for the rich than the poor.
In 1966, the year I was born, 116 children and 28 adults died in Aberfan due to the collapse of a colliery spoil tip. A tribunal was established and sat for 76 days, the longest inquiry of its type in British history up to that time. It took evidence from 136 witnesses, examined 300 exhibits and heared two and half million words. But it published its report the following year. The National Coal Board was held responsible. There is a memorial garden. That was a necessary and dignified response.
We should be pleased that disasters happen less often this century. But that does not justify mawkish disaster inflation where the state seeks to salve its conscience by ever more lengthy and expensive inquiries and ever more lavishly mawkish memorials.
Quentin Letts, writing in the Daily Mail about the debate in the Commons on the Grenfell report, noted that on such occasions Parliamentarians “congratulate each other on ‘the tone’ of their remarks. By convention, one should join this circle of admiration and say it was ‘the Commons at its best’. ” Letts did not agree:
“Seven years on, the peril had passed. Don’t ring the emergency services. Ring for the pen-pushers and lawyers, the expert witnesses and the whole modern inquiry sector with its modules and hefty per diems. It’ll cost a few bob but they’ll manage the danger. They’ll wrap everything in enough sub-clauses to prevent anyone in club-class being savaged.”
Listening to Any Questions, I heard James Cook, the BBC presenter also strike a sceptical note:
“Is this not an industry of lawyers who have made millions of pounds that has grown up around these events? Isn’t there an incentive to make that continue as long as possible?”
There will be more disasters. Sometimes so serious and shocking that a public investigation will be justified. Let that be by a special select committee of MPs – to be concluded in months, not years, without extra cost to the taxpayers. Diverting public funds for years of grandstanding by lawyers does not save lives. It costs lives. The grotesque circus of exploiting these tragedies must end.