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Grenfell – catastrophic governance at many levels
Grenfell is a case of “if anything can go wrong, everything will go wrong”. The entire system of governance – of the state, regulators, markets, corporations, and professions – failed.
Seven years ago, a fire broke out in a refrigerator on the fourth floor of the Grenfell Tower in west London. I had often seen the building while travelling on a nearby elevated section of the London Tube. It wasn’t an elegant skyscraper, just a functional tower that didn’t perform its function very well.
The flames soon engulfed the building, propagated, at speed, by the cladding that had just been retrofitted to protect the building. Confusing instructions at the outset led many residents to stay inside the building when they might have evacuated. The 24-storey residential block, occupied mainly by poorer people, had only a single staircase. Seventy-two people died.
The headlines and news bulletins in Britain have been dominated in the past week by this bit of old news. That’s because the public inquiry into the catastrophe, published on September 4, laid the blame on, well, everyone and everything that touched the case, with the exception of those who had lived there. The report on the inquiry’s second phase came in seven volumes totalling 1,694 pages. Long, and as The Economist called it', “tardy”. Others have been less polite.
It’s easy to find summaries of the events, so I won’t recount them. Instead, let’s consider how a system like this can fail so completely, the same way that the structure and fabric of the building did. Among many other things, the inquiry panel reported:
Professions and individual professionals: The British Board of Agrément, a commercial organisation that certifies the compliance of products with the requirements of legislation, showed its “incompetence” in its “failure to adhere robustly to the system of checks it had put in place” (Vol. 1, p. 15).
Companies: Manufacturers of the materials knew there were problems and supplied them anyway, engaging in “dishonest strategies” (Vol. 1, p. 15).
Regulators: The Building Research Establishment – the standard setters – engaged in “poor record-keeping, which exposed it to the risk of manipulation by unscrupulous product manufacturers” (Vol. 1, p. 11). It was once a government entity but now a private-sector “profit-for-purpose” organisation that donates any surpluses to a research charity.
Government: A central government department “failed to pay due regard to the striking results of a large-scale test in 2001 involving aluminium composite panels with unmodified polyethylene cores, which burned violently” (Vol. 1, p. 10).
The inquiry itself: Its failure is that this exercise in discovering what happened took this long, far longer than the panel intended. Several members dropped out of it and had to be replaced. One member died before the process concluded. Police investigation halted. No one has yet faced justice for the injustices in this case. Perhaps hundreds of other buildings are still covered with such material.
That the various bodies involved so often ignored advice indicates, at least, that some people tried to warn of the dangers.
In terms of governance, what’s shocking is that the system lost the necessary delicate balance between engagement of the various levels and the psychic distance between them. In state governance, we often worry about “capture” – where the apparatus of legislation and regulation becomes subverted by special interests (Hellman, Jones, & Kaufmann, 2000; Van Der Pijl & Yurchenko, 2015). In corporate governance, we know about the tension directors face as they try to help top managers even as they critique and discipline them, the dilemma of service and control (Concannon & Nordberg, 2018; Hillman & Dalziel, 2003). The system seemed to have stopped thinking.
The intellectual and moral tissue of governance needs to separate the parties as much as to connect them. It needs to flex between the two roles of stepping on the accelerator and the brake. If you don’t touch the accelerator, you get nowhere. If you don’t brake, everything goes to hell. Brakes make the car go faster (Nordberg, 2011, p. 7). It’s easy to lose that balance.
The case of Grenfell Tower is a tragedy for all the families who lived there and for all the emergency service personnel who responded to the fire. There are many lessons in the public inquiry’s report.
But there are others we can draw for the principles of governance. As a single case, it raises issues about the detail of governance at each level. As an exemplar, it also raises questions about what makes a government, a society legitimate, at what point legitimacy fractures, and at what point the system itself collapses. These questions concern states well beyond Britain and societies of every size and shape, including the societies we call Sociétés Anonymes, Aktiengesellschaften, and, in plain English, corporations. Perhaps I’ll point those out in coming posts.
Trickier are the problems like Grenfell, when the system as a whole messes up. Is there a lynchpin, a root cause? If so, it might not rest at any of the levels in the case, but instead elsewhere. Here it might lie with the fracturing of the bonds throughout society. If they were intact, each actor might have seen a need to act and to break some of the rules, formal and informal, earlier with the aim of preventing a known but not-yet-evident fault.
Grenfell Tower is now a metaphor for the failure of the system of governance. Its looming hulk, wrapped and with a heart of remembrance at its top, is a visual reminder of the need for a better system of governance. It’s …
Concannon, M., & Nordberg, D. (2018). Boards strategizing in liminal spaces: Process and practice, formal and informal. European Management Journal, 36(1), 71-82. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2017.03.008 or https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/27957/7/1-s2.0-S0263237317300531-main.pdf
Hellman, J. S., Jones, G., & Kaufmann, D. (2000). 'Seize the State, Seize the Day': State Capture, Corruption, and Influence in Transition. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 2444. Retrieved from https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/19784/multi_page.pdf
Hillman, A. J., & Dalziel, T. (2003). Boards of directors and firm performance: Integrating agency and resource dependence perspectives. Academy of Management Review, 28(3), 383-396. doi:10.5465/amr.2003.10196729
Nordberg, D. (2011). Corporate Governance: Principles and Issues. London: Sage.
Van Der Pijl, K., & Yurchenko, Y. (2015). Neoliberal Entrenchment of North Atlantic Capital. From Corporate Self-Regulation to State Capture. New Political Economy, 20(4), 495-517. doi:10.1080/13563467.2014.923827