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Deregulation and austerity policies undermine health and safety: lessons for the global community from Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Introduction by Croakey: The lessons from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry – about the impact of political and economic systems that promote deregulation and austerity policies, rather than the health and wellbeing of communities – have a wider resonance, according to researchers.

The inquiry’s findings are a reminder of why the public health community must consider the role of fiscal agendas in shaping health equity, say Dr Kathrin Lauber from the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Policy Unit, Claudia Fernandez De Cordoba Farini from UCL in London, and Adelle Mansour from the University of Melbourne.

These reseachers are Fellows of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse’s 2024 Future Leaders Program, which recently took place at the ANU, and seeks to “create new opportunities for knowledge mobilisation that aims to improve planetary health equity”.

Their article below launches a wide-ranging series by the Program’s Fellows for Croakey readers.


Kathrin Lauber, Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini and Adelle Mansour write:

Seven years after the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, the public inquiry has finally concluded, exposing a series of catastrophic failures and decisions that led to the tragedy.

The report outlines 58 technical recommendations aimed at improving fire safety, overhauling regulatory oversight, and enforcing stricter building controls. While these measures are vital, the inquiry alone can only address part of the problem.

The deeper issue lies in a political and economic system that, through austerity, has systematically devalued the lives of working-class and marginalised communities.

Preventing another Grenfell will require not just regulatory reforms, but systemic action to challenge the institutions that prioritise cost-cutting and profit over people.

Similar austerity policies have also been implemented across other countries, including France, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Ireland, and Greece. The Grenfell report offers important lessons beyond the UK context, highlighting how political agendas that centre cost reduction can undermine health, safety and wellbeing.

What happened?

On 14 June 2017, the United Kingdom’s worst peacetime fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a residential high-rise tower block in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

The 24-storey building burned for 60 hours, leaving hundreds displaced and at least 72 people dead, many of whom were migrants and refugees, children, and people living with disability.

Residents of the tower, which largely contained social housing, had been raising concerns about the building’s safety since at least 2010, but were met with inaction and neglect.

Launched soon after the 2017 blaze, the public inquiry became the central mechanism for investigating the disaster.

Although the Grenfell Tower Inquiry doesn’t have the power to assign civil or criminal liability, its broad remit allowed it to scrutinise systemic failures in regulations, management, and governance. The inquiry took over seven years to produce its findings, costing £173 million.

Its initial report, released in 2019, outlined the events of June 14, 2017.

The new report actively exposes the failures and deliberate choices that led to the fire. It concluded that the deadly blaze was “the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry”.

It documents how subsequent and repetitive failures of public and private actors built up to the devastating fire. It notes, for instance, the Government’s decision not to act on warnings about the inadequacy of fire safety regulations, companies’ deception about the safety of their cladding and insulation materials, and a cavalier attitude towards fire safety by the Tenant Management Organisation and contractors involved in the tower’s refurbishment.

While the Fire Safety Act 2021 and Building Safety Act 2022 have introduced some crucial changes, key gaps persist.

Recommendations for change

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry has put forward an additional 58 recommendations aimed at preventing such a disaster from happening again. They include a single regulator for the construction industry; the appointment of a chief construction advisor; that a fire safety strategy be required for the construction or refurbishment of any higher-risk buildings; and establishing a college of fire and rescue.

While the technical recommendations of the Inquiry hold significant value, it is crucial to recognise that the unsafe conditions at Grenfell Tower were the result of cumulative decisions made by institutions like governments, companies, and regulators that render lives expendable and harm communities.

Although the inquiry stops short of explicitly mentioning the role of austerity, it is evident throughout that the tragedy reflects the continuing fatal impacts of state retrenchment, deregulation, and the devaluation of working-class and marginalised communities.

The new report provides striking insights into how the pressure to deregulate eroded fire safety provisions. Deregulation was an important strategy of the UK’s Conservative and coalition governments in the 2010s, leading to systematic efforts to weaken and remove so-called “red tape” rules which, in practice, represented essential protections for the health, safety, and the environment.

The inquiry explicitly notes how government initiatives like the “Red Tape Challenge” and the “one in, one out” rule, which required equivalent regulatory costs to be cut when new regulations are introduced (escalated to “one in, two out” and “one in, three out” in 2013 and 2016 respectively), fostered a reluctance to introduce new “burdens” on companies.

It concludes that following a 2009 high-rise building fire in London, enthusiastic support for the Government’s deregulatory agenda within the Department for Communities and Local Government dominated its “thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded”.

Austerity in the UK and beyond

The Government’s deregulation agenda formed part of a wider austerity politics, characterised primarily by the erosion of public spending in areas such as local government, key services and health in pursuit of reduced deficit and economic growth.

The push for deregulation and broader austerity politics is echoed in former Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2012 New Year’s resolution to “kill off the health and safety culture for good“. This statement reflected a wider ideological shift towards prioritising economic liberalism over protections for public welfare.

It contributed to a political climate that increasingly viewed regulations – whether in health, safety or environmental standards – as burdensome, removing important safeguards to human and ecological wellbeing.

Former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, attributed the loss of 11,000 firefighter positions to austerity. These measures have had widespread health and socioeconomic consequences.

The effect of state retrenchment on health has been summarised through two main mechanisms: directly via cuts to healthcare and subsequent reduced access to health services, and indirectly through social factors like rising unemployment and homelessness.

More than 330,000 excess deaths between 2012 and 2019 have been linked to the UK Government’s austerity politics alone, whose impacts have exacerbated socioeconomic and health inequities.

Similar outcomes of such measures have also been reported elsewhere in Europe and beyond.

With this in mind, it is crucial for the public health community to consider the role of fiscal agendas in shaping health equity.

To do so, we must critically investigate the role of institutions – both public and private ­– and bureaucratic processes, the values they represent, as well as whose agendas they advance, and whose interests they fail.

Grenfell Tower protest, 2017, Whitehall. Credit: Alan Denney, Flickr

Author details

Dr Kathrin Lauber is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Policy Unit and a Research Associate with the University of Bath’s Centre for 21st Century Public Health.

Claudia Fernandez De Cordoba Farini is a Doctoral Researcher in biodiversity governance through multi-species lenses at UCL, part of the UK Transforming Food Systems Centre for Doctoral Training. Head of One Health Warnings at UCL and former One Health Senior Strategy Lead for the UK Government.

Adelle Mansour is a Research Fellow and PhD Candidate with the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing, based at the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health.

All three authors are Fellows of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse’s 2024 Future Leaders Program.


Other commentary

https://shorturl.at/wBzHq

https://shorturl.at/1pPPX
https://shorturl.at/2UfTE
https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1990
https://shorturl.at/i55hz

PostScript from Croakey: Regular readers will know of our interest in the importance of media, especially local media, as an upstream determinant of health. Concerns about the lack of media capacity to cover the local community’s concerns before and after the Grenfell disaster have been raised over some years.

https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2024/news/more-local-journalism-could-have-stopped-grenfell-claims-sky-news-presenter/

Declaration from Croakey: The Planetary Health Equity Hothouse’s 2024 Future Leaders Program contracted Croakey Professional Services, for Croakey’s Editor in Chief Dr Melissa Sweet to present to participants.


See Croakey’s archive of articles on social determinants of health

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