James Riding
speaker
30 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 3 Jun
James Riding’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
UK battered by markets as Labour chaos takes hold.
Pleasure to be here, Coco.
Well, you're right. It's an absolute beast. It's about 1700 pages and the scope it had to cover was enormous compared to the first report, which only looked at the night of the fire itself. This one has had to trace 30 years worth of decisions, shortcomings, failures from all of the public bodies, institutions and actors involved and what led to the catastrophic 2017 fire. So it's a total beast.
And I think there's nothing in the conclusions that people who have been following the story and the inquiry over the past few years would be surprised by necessarily. Nothing that the families would be particularly shocked by who've traced the process of this inquiry. But I think what the inquiry set out to do is to at least try and weigh the failures of each of the actors involved.
And I think it does do that. So there's very strong language for particular actors like the government, the product manufacturers who built the cladding and insulation used on the Grenfell Tower and Grenfell's social housing provider as well.
And the other thing that the report does is it lists 59 recommendations mainly around the construction industry, which if the government chooses to enact them, could have really sweeping changes in the way that we manage our built environment.
Well, I think it's clear that that was a very significant error. And one of the reasons why that's been made so clear is the fact that the new government, which is also a Labour government, has tried to get in ahead of the publication of the report. And they've come out and said, that they are moving to the European fire safety classes for construction products.
Because for the last few years, we've amazingly been having these two regimes running in parallel. And so the fact that the building safety minister, Rushinara Ali, came out and said that before the report was even published, suggests that the government really wants to get ahead of this.
And this is going to be a huge aspect of the way that the government deals with it now to rectify the situation.
I think James Cleverley should take a look at the report's conclusions because it does point out a link between the government's drive for deregulation and the fire. And I think that in particular, it flatly rejects what Lord Pickles, who was previously housing secretary, said to the inquiry where he claimed that building regulations were exempt from the government's drive for deregulation.
The inquiry says, no, that's not the case at all, and that it was something that civil servants were encouraged to look at and to cut back on. And so I think politicians of all stripes need to understand that while companies and businesses will forever complain about the cumbersome weight of regulations and they might have a point about their combined impact.
I think that they're all in there in place for a reason and you strip them away at your peril. Absolutely. And, um, As for whether they're still in place now, I think things have changed drastically since the original Grenfell report came out in terms of the combustible cladding products have been banned. However, there's still a lot more that could be done.
And this is where the new recommendations come into play. So one of the things that the report recommends is a single construction regulator to take control of the whole industry.
um it wants an urgent review into the definition of what makes a higher risk building currently that's only defined by the height of the building and this uh the inquiry wants it to take into account vulnerable residents as well and it wants fire safety functions carried out by different government departments at the moment to be brought in under one department so
There are still many, many areas which really need root and branch reform. And I think the inquiry makes some sensible recommendations on that front.
I think it will be really interesting to see how the government decides to respond to this report. We've already seen they've come out and said that they're going to implement personal emergency evacuation plans for disabled and vulnerable residents in tall buildings, which is a key recommendation from the first report that the previous government decided to reject. So that's one big change.
But another really interesting conclusion and recommendation from the report is that they suggest the government should have a duty to report on its progress for how it implements recommendations from public inquiries. That's something that the families and bereaved from Grenfell have called for.
And if Starmer and his government want to show that they're turning a new leaf and responding in a way that's really robust to this report, they might consider bringing into play some sort of mechanism like this where there's a publicly accessible record showing where the government has taken steps to act on these recommendations and explaining why they're not if they choose not to.
Yeah, that's the other really big next question. So it's not the job of an inquiry to determine criminal culpability, but I think they set out here with some quite damning language for various failures and to what extent, if these failures were avoided, Could the tragedy have been avoided?
And so it's now up to the Metropolitan Police, who have been conducting an incredibly long and detailed investigation at the same time as this inquiry, to take these findings on board. They've said it's already going to take them about 12 to 18 months to digest this report. and compare it with their own investigation.
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