The Committee on Standards in Public Life, an independent body which advises the Prime Minister on arrangements for upholding ethical standards of conduct, has marked its 30th anniversary by issuing a report relating to the need for better recognition by public sector bodies of early warning signs.
‘Not another review’, you might be thinking, with some justification. Well, this is one which should be compulsory reading by everyone in the public sector, and especially by the Government. It brings together a number of critical issues which have damaged public sector performance in recent decades. The examples given are Ockenden, Windrush, Infected Blood, and Grenfell.
As a former Government lawyer for 34 years, there are two areas mentioned by the Committee which ring very true for me as regards central Government and the Civil Service.
The first is the need for an open culture in which officials at every level are encouraged to raise concerns about policies, without being marginalised as someone who is not ‘can do’.
The second is the importance of learning lessons from past failures.
Grenfell encapsulates both these two issues. It was not the first high rise block of flats to catch fire. In 2009, the 14 storey Lakanal House caught fire and six people died including three children. On 28th March 2013, the Coroner issued a ‘prevention of future deaths report’ to the Department of Communities and Local Government saying that the regulatory guidance contained in ‘Approved Document B’ was unclear and needed urgent review to ensure it was intelligible to the wide range of people engaged in construction, maintenance and refurbishment of buildings ‘with particular regard to the spread of fire over the external envelope of the building’.
The Grenfell Inquiry concluded that the Department ought to have undertaken an immediate review of this Guidance to find out whether the use of unsafe panels in the external wall of Lakanal House was an isolated incident or had been due to systemic ignorance or misunderstanding of the Regulations and Approved Document B.
However, the Department failed to undertake any such investigation.
Why? Because one of the principal policies of the government that came to power in May 2010 was deregulation. The Government’s ambitious deregulation agenda included a new “one in, one out” rule for all new regulations and a drive to reduce the overall burden of regulation.
The Inquiry heard detailed evidence from civil servants that the priority given to deregulation permeated every aspect of the Department’s implementation of policy. Therefore, when officials became aware of the Coroner’s Lakanal House report and the need for regulatory change, effective steps were not taken to draw those ‘risks to life’ issues to the attention of Ministers. Although officials were privately expressing frustration at the delay in reform, they were not conveying that to Ministers.
If ever there was a need for ‘speaking truth to power’ and learning lessons from past failures, this was it.
There followed the Grenfell refurbishment in 2016 in which ‘external envelope’ issues again arose from the use of combustible composite cladding (although the firespreads in Lakanal House and Grenfell were not due to exactly the same underlying causes).
How did all this happen? One explanation is what the Committee refers to as ‘Groupthink’ when people are reluctant to challenge or speak up for fear of being seen as an outlier. From one angle, it is important that officials should see their role as helping Ministers to deliver the policies for which they were elected, deregulation being, perhaps, one example. But from another angle, candidly ‘speaking truth to power’ should be a key part of an official’s job, especially when prevention of future deaths is concerned.
The Committee’s report is timely since even after Grenfell, the Government are not implementing one of the Inquiry’s central recommendations that scrutiny of the implementation of Public Inquiry recommendations and Prevention of Future Deaths Reports should be a matter for Parliament, to which the Government should be required to report annually (paragraph 113.40 of the Phase 2 Report). This has been repeated by the Statutory Inquiries Committee in its Report of the Session 2024-25, ‘Public Inquiries: Enhancing Public Trust’ at paragraph 116. Merely enhancing transparency and accessibility by means of a public record of recommendations, as proposed by the Government, is not the same thing as robust scrutiny of implementation.
There is no better way of learning lessons than by implementing inquiry and inquest recommendations, and this is would be an excellent place to start.
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