My Grenfell week

I wrote last week about my morning view of Grenfell, watching through the eyes of the media on June 14th. This article shares my experience of the days that followed. It's a longer read and a very personal view.

It has been the most momentous week in fire in a generation. When fire is never off the front pages, it’s good to reflect on what Grenfell means for the fire sector. Etched in our minds forever more is the name Grenfell Tower and the image of the burning building will be hard to erase.

I have been involved with the fire sector since 2003, joining the policy team that put in place the UK’s response to 9/11. In the 14 years since then, I have found my way through home fire safety, regulatory fire safety, narrowly missing being involved in the government’s response to Lakanal while spending a bit of time in planning policy. I then took a leap out of the civil service into a few years at London Fire Brigade before landing into the freelance world that I now inhabit.

I could not comprehend what catastrophic failure of fire safety regulations could have led to such a large fire in a tower block. I know fire doesn’t behave like that normally. Compartmentation. That’s what I thought. Compartmentation.

I used to sit near the guy who was (and still is) an expert on AD B – the Applied Document B, the fire safety bit of Building Regulations. I liked him. I admired his nerdy knowledge and learnt a lot from him and others but stayed firmly in my fire safety space, wary of fire engineering.

I wondered about him. What was he thinking now? How does he feel? I’m sure he dealt with Lakanal as well. I remember attempts to get AD B updated and had a hazy memory from 2009 when I left that bit of DCLG that it was fractious and difficult to make the business case stack up for greater burdens on business in favour of increased fire protections.

My successor in fire safety policy is still there. She worked on the response to Lakanal. I thought about her and how she must be thinking how could this be possible after what we learnt from Lakanal.

Officials provide the advice for Ministers and no more so do Ministers need officials than when they’ve been in the job for five minutes. Nick Hurd is the new Policing and Fire Minister, taking over from Brandon Lewis who was on his second stint and has a background in local government. Not so Nick Hurd. He was understandably low-key in his media, tweeting occasionally about his visit to Grenfell and his discussions with officials and the emergency services. I’ve been trying to get an interview with him for a special edition of FIRE magazine, to capture some of this experience and share that with the fire sector as we slowly try to understand what has taken place in the last week. 

My years at London Fire Brigade exposed me to a wide range of operational staff. I used to sit in meetings with Dany Cotton, we were peers (me without the uniform) and now she’s Commissioner. She’s lovely, so open and easy to talk to. I watched her awestruck as she relayed the detail of the fire and the operational response. I admired the way she got the balance right of dignity, detail and sheer humility in the face of something so enormous that she was big enough to say she’d never seen anything like it.

While it’s early to say or think such things, Dany has proven and shown to the world how she leads the largest fire service in the UK, giving inspiration to other women that they too can get to the top: this is no longer just a man’s world.

I came across Ronnie King in the press. I’ve known of Ronnie for many years, he’s an ex Chief Fire Officer and works in his retirement with a small group of MPs who have interests in fire. The All Party Parliamentary Group on Fire and Rescue includes two ex Fire Ministers and has a long-standing interest in fire protection. I’d never seen him in the news before; more people know about this group than ever before and Grenfell has exposed a normally niche part of the fire sector to the wider world.

A fundamental part of my work now is to track the media and curate a view of fire. I have a treatable addiction to Twitter and I frequently scan news outlets looking for fire interests. The last week has made this job incredibly difficult for all the wrong reasons: there is too much noise, too much oxygen and too much misinformation in pursuit of a good headline.

I’ll confess I’m a Guardian reader; it’s probably obvious. But I’m also aware of the need to look across the whole spectrum and none more so after a major incident. Tracking the Daily Mail and Telegraph with a bit of Spectator and Conservative Home provides a sobering antidote to Owen Jones, Dawn Foster and the rest of the left wing press. The Guardian has taken centre stage in the aftermath. Its journalists have dug in great depth around the social and moral issues and have raised awareness about building regulations to a whole new level.  

On Monday I watched Panorama and cried.

On Wednesday I listened to the Moral Maze discuss Grenfell on Radio 4 and felt befuddled.

On Thursday I watched the video of the Grenfell charity single on my iPhone after ITV tweeted it and tears ran down my face as I headed out the door on the school run.

And here I am on Friday evening, just over a week after at least 79 people lost their lives needlessly and hundreds displaced with no more than the clothes on their backs.

In a world where I thought I understood fire, that my ability to bore people about my work was endless; I enjoyed being in my fire cocoon, wrapped safe in all my knowledge, content in my niche.

But now I’m not so sure. The Grenfell Tower fire has given me so much pause for thought about what we are doing in the fire sector. It feels like we need to do some soul searching about the direction we are heading, what we are doing to prevent fires and we have to admit we aren’t doing enough.

We can’t rest on our laurels, knowing that fire deaths have gone down massively, that house fires are less likely than ever because Grenfell tells us otherwise. Grenfell tells us that we must continue to seek out better policy, better solutions and know that only when we in fire work with others will we understand why Grenfell was possible and put in place the measures we need for us all to sleep safer in our beds tonight.