Grenfell inquiry slams Lord Pickles and the Tory deregulation agenda

The final report into the Grenfell tragedy published yesterday was highly critical of Eric (Lord) Pickles the communities secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) between 2013 and May 2015. Lord Pickles had told the inquiry into the appalling fire which took 72 lives in West London in 2017, that he was “genuinely amazed” that civil servants weren’t aware that his government’s deregulation drive didn’t include fire safety.

Pickles claimed that it was “ludicrous” that officials in the Building Regulations and Standards Division should have thought that Part B of the regulations dealing with fire safety matters in and around buildings in England, was subject to the Conservative’s deregulation policy. He said that would have been “wholly disproportionate” and “utterly inexplicable” and blamed his staff for making “political assumptions”.

However, the inquiry found that the evidence given by officials inside the DCLG was “strikingly different” from his.

Only Lord Pickles thought fire safety was outside the deregulation policy

The Rt Hon Sir Martin Moore-Bick, who has chaired the inquiry, said he was “unable to accept his [Lord Pickles’] evidence on that question”. Moore-Bick said none of the documents or any of the witnesses, other than Lord Pickles, supported the conclusion that the fire safety regulations were “exempt” from the policy.

While Lord Pickles was communities secretary the report says, “deregulatory considerations appear to have permeated every aspect of the department’s development, assessment and implementation of policy. Far from its being inexplicable that officials were under the impression that the Building Regulations and Approved Document B were subject to the various demands of the policy, the documents demonstrated in clear terms that their understanding was correct”.

The report concluded there was a “wealth of material that showed both that he was personally an ardent supporter of the government’s deregulation policy and that the pressure within the department to reduce red tape was so strong that civil servants felt the need to put it at the forefront of every decision”.

Officials spent ‘inordinate’ amount of time on deregulation

Anthony Burd, principal fire safety professional at the DCLG told the inquiry that officials “spent an inordinate amount of time looking at how they could deregulate”. The “one [regulation] in, one out” rule was introduced by the coalition in January 2011 and extended to “one in, two out” in January 2013. By March 2016 it had become “one in, three out” as ministers sought desperately to slash more and more ‘red tape’.

Burd said it became increasingly difficult to oversee the building regulations because of the reduction in the number of staff and the changes involved in deregulation.

In his report, Moore-Bick said although ministers had excluded the regulatory reform (fire safety) order 2005 from the ‘red tape challenge’ in 2012, a point Pickles made in his evidence, it only served to “reveal the limits of his understanding of the distinction between fire safety regulations on the one hand and the Building Regulations and Approved Documents as they related to fire safety on the other.”

While Moore-Bick mentioned the “one in, one out” policy and the “red tape challenge” which ran from 2011 until 2014, he could have referred to twenty other initiatives and challenges to reduce red tape and the regulatory burden that Yorkshire Bylines listed in 2022, seven of which came after the Grenfell fire.