Speaking up for Grenfell
As the Grenfell Inquiry publishes its report, director Adam Christopher reflect on the events that led to the disaster and the importance of speaking up in the workplace.
With the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster due to present its final report on 4 September, I’ve been listening to the excellent BBC Radio 4 series, Grenfell: Building a Disaster. Over 11 episodes, journalist and presenter Kate Lamble, examines the factors, the people and the organisations involved in the chain of events which led to the catastrophic fire in 2017 and the deaths of 72 people.
Much of what was discussed and revealed in interviews resonated with me and eerily echoed scenarios which ATT use to explore behaviours in our safety leadership programmes. We talk about the Swiss cheese model of risk management and how holes in these layers of defence can align to sometime devastating effect.
In the case of the Grenfell Tower disaster, these weaknesses – the holes – were many and developed over several years. The cladding manufacturers’ deceit about the safety of their products; Government deregulation of health and safety legislation; the local Council’s failure to act on fire-safety recommendations. Multiple factors collectively which weakened the brittle defences in place.
Speaking out
What struck me was that while we can’t attribute culpability to a single individual, people’s actions – or inaction – can have far-reaching implications. The cladding manufacturer manipulated fire testing of its product in order to secure approval for use in high-rise buildings.
One employee of the company Kingspan, Ivor Meredith, speaks of how, as a junior member of staff, he felt unable to raise his concerns about the application of compromised testing techniques used to get the cladding approved.
Ivor describes how, as a young man at the beginning of his career 10 years ago, he had been ‘criticised for being very negative’ when he had raised concerns and was discouraged from speaking up. He said, ‘you get embroiled in the culture of a business.’
Kingspan’s success in marketing its insulating foam as safe to use on high-rise buildings based on highly engineered tests, encouraged other manufacturers to do the same.
Another junior employee at the company Celotex, which manufactured the foam used to insulate some parts of Grenfell Tower, described his inability to speak up as a ‘failure of courage.’
Deborah Berger, a product manager at Celotex, told the inquiry that she was so alarmed that the fire tests had been conducted using fire-resistant magnesium oxide panels to disguise the flammability of the material, that she had written ‘WTF’ in the margin of the fire test report
The company claimed its product was safe, purely for commercial gain. Berger said, ‘I agree it was untrue…I don’t think I knew at the time how to challenge it. I was going along with things.’
It echoes a scene from the narrative of ATT’s safety leadership programme, Your Choice. A manager attends a meeting of senior leaders and feels unable to voice health and safety concerns, so scribbles his thoughts on paper.
In our Right From the Start programme, an engineer leaves her job because when she raises safety concern she is branded a ‘naysayer’ for being too negative. The subsequent fatality in our narrative shows that she was right to be cautious.
“igniting the deregulatory bonfire”*
What so many of the people who gave testimony to the Grenfell Inquiry had in common was that they were working in a culture which saw challenging something unsafe as negative. It reflected a national agenda which prevailed through successive governments that perceived ‘health and safety’ had ‘gone mad’ with excessive and needless rules.
In 2012, then Prime Minister David Cameron declared the coalition’s new year resolution was to “kill off the health and safety culture for good.” The theory was that deregulation would liberate the British economy from the stranglehold of burdensome health and safety red tape.
When he opened the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, lead counsel Richard Millet KC, said it hoped the process would not be a “merry-go-round of buck passing.” At its close, he displayed a “web of blame” diagram to illustrate how firms involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell had done exactly that.
At ATT, we say that we are all leaders when it comes to safety and are each responsible for the safety of ourselves and colleagues. Sadly, there seemed to have been little leadership amongst the companies and individuals who have played some role in this tragedy.
The ‘errors’ – the holes in the cheese – are not a result of technical incompetence or ignorance; not for lack of training, qualifications or experience. The young man’s ‘failure of courage’ speaks to the culture of his employers, the wider industry and the UK workplace.
It is our attitudes and beliefs which inform our decisions as to whether to speak up or take action or not; not training certificates. Procedures and rules are vital, but we need the skills and confidence to be able to speak up and communicate effectively, when we believe those rules have been breached or broken.
*Jacob Rees-Mogg
