1 week Ago
ONCE again the country reels from a statutory inquiry’s report which sets out the wilful blindness of those in who we trust our safety and lives. First the infected blood scandal, now Grenfell, writes columnist Graham Bartlett. Last week, over seven years on from the Grenfell fire which claimed 72 lives, inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick revealed the “complacent, defensive and dismissive” government officials who prioritised cutting red tape; an “inappropriate relationship” between inspectors and those they were inspecting and Grenfell residents being dismissed as “militant troublemakers”.
The report pulled no punches in pointing to Arconic, the cladding manufacturer, who “deliberately concealed” the true extent of the danger of the material used to wrap Grenfell Tower. Regarding the insulation it said Celotex made “false and misleading claims” about its product being suitable and Kingspan had misled the market by not revealing the limitations of its product. Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s (RBKC) Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) showed persistent indifference to fire safety and the needs of the vulnerable.
This led to a breakdown in trust and relations between the TMO and residents and a “serious failure to observe responsibilities”. Of RKBC’s chief executive, the report says “he was reluctant to take advice from those with greater experience and was unduly concerned for RBKC’s reputation”. Many residents, including the bereaved, are understandably disappointed that, despite these damning findings, there is no guarantee that anyone named or implicated in these systemic failures will face justice.
There will be efforts to bring criminal cases, I have no doubt, and compensation claims will rumble on for years, if not decades, but justice delayed is justice denied. The law on corporate manslaughter is not suited to a situation like this where there are so many interlocking failures, affording each defendant an open goal at blaming others. The same is true of gross negligence manslaughter.
Both are criminal offences and therefore need to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Health and safety law, against companies and organisations this big, is a toothless tiger too. Civil law is cumbersome and the only winners there are the lawyers.
Were the companies and their officers all in the public sector there is a little known common law offence which carries a sentence of life imprisonment which could be used. Misconduct in a public office is committed when a public officer acting as such wilfully neglects to perform their duty and/or wilfully misconducts themselves to such a degree as to be an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder. It tends to emerge as a catch-all law when police officers (and the like) act in such a way that their behaviour is a blatant affront to their role but no alternative offence can be proved.
For example, many have been convicted and imprisoned for this having been caught in relationships with vulnerable people they first encountered as victims. Given it is a common law offence, there is no statutory definition; it develops through case law and Attorney General’s guidance. An element of misconduct in a public office is that the function is such that the public have a significant interest it, additional to an interest of those directly affected.
While the companies concerned are private, the service they deliver is very much public and the quality of what they provide and their integrity could not be more in the public interest. Were this offence to be widened to include those providing services such as in the Grenfell case, the legalities become simpler and justice could be swifter. Given the deliberate and abject failure of those involved in causing the Grenfell disaster was during their paid employment, I argue that their salaries have been earned through crime .
Therefore, with any other suspected criminal who benefits from their illegal acts, law enforcement should be enabled to first restrain then seek the confiscation of their assets. Restraint orders can be obtained at any time from the outset of an investigation so were the law to change that could happen now, severely curtailing the suspects benefiting from their failures. Grenfell residents and the wider public deserve to see the wrongdoers pay with both their liberty and wealth and these two tweaks to existing law, and making those changed retrospective, could enable that and cut short the interminable wait for justice.
Former Brighton and Hove police chief Graham Bartlett’s Jo Howe crime novel series continues with City on Fire which is published in paperback later this month.
