David Gillon

Disturbing* report from Inside Housing that I only came across via disabled twitter, with the government's Minister of State for Building Safety and Fire (only qualification, he's run a few medical businesses) U-turning on a promise to implement the Grenfell Inquiry recommendation that disabled residents in tower blocks should have Personal Emergency Evac Plans (PEEPs). And it's the way he justified that that makes it far, far worse: 

"“On practicality, how can you evacuate a mobility-impaired person from a tall building before the professionals from the fire and rescue service arrive? 

“On proportionality, how much is it reasonable to spend to do this at the same time as we seek to protect residents and taxpayers from excessive costs? 

“On safety, how can you ensure that an evacuation of mobility-impaired people is carried out in a way that does not hinder others in evacuating or the fire service in fighting the fire.”

So that's "it might be hard", "it might cost money", and besides "they're only crips, not real people". And apparently it's more important to fight the fire than save disabled people - typical Tory, "never mind the bodies, think of the property damage!"

His whole argument falls apart because I've had a (unofficial**) PEEP that said "If the alarm goes, David should wait 'til last to go down the stairs" - so zero costs to implement and no chance I'd 'hinder' anyone. That's possibly something of an extreme and not really what you'd want in a PEEP (though consistent with existing PEEP guidance), but a very sizeable percentage of the people who might need help evacuating probably don't need much more help than someone walking down with them to ensure they don't get knocked over on the stairs, which is also going to be true of a sizeable chunk of non-disabled but elderly residents. (And most of the rest could be covered by spending £200 on an evac chair and training volunteers from their neighbours to use it).

Note also that his argument distinguishes between able people / taxpayers (worth protecting) and disabled people (not worth protecting), effectively creating two classes of residents. Of course disabled people also being taxpayers is clearly too difficult a point for his delicate Tory sensibilities.

Another article from Inside Housing I noticed while reading that one covers the Grenfell Inquiry's cross-examination of the senior Civil Servant responsible for the fire safety regs for builders, mostly focusing on why he did bugger all after the Lakanal House fire (six dead) showed the risk of cladding fires.

Gems from his email history include "We only have to respond to the coroner, not kiss her backside" (after the Lakanal House coroner raised it through the mechanism intended to let coroners flag systematic risks to government and which legally requires a response) and over concerns from MPs via a fire safety All Party Political Group "he will not listen to reason, so I just ignore him".

But the creme de la creme has to be him telling an architect who had raised the risk of a cladding fire causing ten times the deaths of Lakanal House "Show me the bodies". That would be the six dead at Lakanal House then? And now the 71 dead of Grenfell Tower.

And it turns out the government's insistence immediately post-Grenfell that combustible cladding was already banned results from him telling the minister the regs said that, which relies on you interpreting "filler material", a phrase he'd put into the regs, as meaning that, even though he'd never told anyone else that that was what he meant it to mean, and industry bodies had told him they didn't know what it meant and he'd agreed it should be changed.

I have a horrible feeling he's just granted the defendants in any post-Grenfell trial the perfect get-out-of-jail-free card.

When asked what he might have done differently he commented "What I will say is that the approach the government − the successive governments had to regulation had had an impact on the way we worked, the resources that we had available, and perhaps the mindset that we’d adopted as a team, and myself in particular."

Which is effectively an admission that the government's demands for a bonfire of regulation meant that no fire-safety change could be adopted unless it resulted in lower costs to industry. It's like the regulatory capture that happens when industry gains charge of a regulator through a revolving door recruitment policy, but in this case industry didn't need to exert itself because the Tories were executing an ideological capture and gutting of the fire safety regs on their behalf.

Which the former minister for fire safety, Brandon Lewis effectively admitted in his evidence, which the Guardian did cover.

* Also disturbing that the major papers such as the Guardian, which has otherwise been doing good coverage of the Grenfell Inquiry, didn't seem to think this was worth reporting, not even when it involves yet another a government u-turn, and that after an explicit promise to the Grenfell victims. I tagged the reporter who's been doing their Grenfell coverage in a tweet about it in the hope it might prompt them to mention it (or let him convince his editor it's worth reporting in the event he already tried).

** Thinking about it recently, I realised the reason it was unofficial was probably because they didn't want any documentation to lead to the Fire Brigade asking about it in their fire safety inspections.