Eric Pickles, the former housing secretary, is facing calls to quit as a Tory peer over the Grenfell inquiry, but he has blamed “middle-ranking officials” for failing to act on a coroner’s warning about fire safety.
Emma Dent Coad, who was Kensington MP when the fire killed 72 people, said Pickles should “have the grace to resign” from the House of Lords and as a government ethics adviser after criticism in the Grenfell report. Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, also said Pickles should be stripped of his peerage.
The report found Pickles and his department failed to act on a coroner’s 2013 recommendation to tighten fire safety regulations after a cladding fire at Lakanal House, another London council block, killed six people. It was “not treated with any sense of urgency”, the inquiry found, and the tightening had not happened by the time Grenfell went up in flames on 14 June 2017.
In a statement to the Guardian, Pickles said he had spoken about the coroner’s recommendation as a “serious matter” to the then permanent secretary Bob Kerslake, who died last year.
He said Kerslake was the finest public official he had worked with and was tasked with overseeing the response to Lakanal House.
“During the inquiry, evidence emerged that middle-ranking officials did not share Bob’s deep-seated sense of public duty. Their attitude shocked and appalled me. I feel they let down Bob, the government, and, more importantly, the public,” he said.
The report also found that Pickles, David Cameron’s housing secretary until 2015, had “enthusiastically supported” the prime minister’s drive to slash regulations and it dominated his department’s thinking to the extent that matters affecting fire safety and risk to life “were ignored, delayed or disregarded”.
During cross-examination under oath, Pickles insisted the anti-red tape drive had not covered building regulations. But the inquiry said this evidence was “flatly contradicted by that of his officials and by the contemporaneous documents”.
After the report, Pickles said: “In practice, the deregulation of building regulations was not pursued vigorously.
“One of my first acts was to separate ministerial responsibility for housing and planning from building regulation. This was done to act as a check to any temptation to cut corners in our push to increase housing numbers.
“As a further check, the minister for building regulations was always a Lib Dem. All of them did a great job clarifying and improving building regulations.”
He also said the report had clarified that fire and building safety were outside the scrutiny of the “red tape challenge”, which cut regulations.
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But Dent Coad, who is now an independent councillor in Kensington, having represented the area since 2006, said Pickles “should not be in the Lords” or keep his job as the head of the advisory committee on business appointments.
“He should have the grace to resign,” she said. “I was there at the inquiry when he was trying to hurry up business because he had an important lunch date to go to. It was the utter contempt that he in particular had with the whole process. Some at least had the shame to apologise. His self-importance filled the room.
“It is contemptuous to have people like that still continuing in positions of power … he certainly shouldn’t be chairing any kind of committee that relies on the chair having integrity.”
Pickles said no one had raised the issue of dangerous cladding with him throughout his time as housing secretary from 2010 to 2015.
But Wrack, who leads the Fire Brigades Union, said: “As the secretary of state for communities and local government in the crucial years between the Lakanal House fire and Grenfell, Eric Pickles had more opportunities than almost anyone else to avert the catastrophe … Instead of acting on warnings, he doggedly pursued an agenda of aggressive deregulation, aiming to give private companies maximum opportunity to make a quick buck at the expense of residents’ safety.
“The result of his actions, and the actions of every single politician who participated in this agenda, was the tragic deaths of 72 people at Grenfell Tower. When called to testify, Pickles told the inquiry not to waste his time and couldn’t even get the number of victims right … As a start, Eric Pickles should be stripped of his peerage.”
After the report, Pickles posted on X: “I welcome the recommendation of the Grenfell Inquiry. I particularly welcome the call for greater transparency and coordination within government.
“I thank the Inquiry Team for their diligence in a detailed examination of the Grenfell fire and hope the lessons learnt ensure that such a tragedy never happens again. My thoughts and prayers are with the survivors and their families.”
After he appeared at the inquiry, Pickles apologised for getting the number of people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire wrong when giving evidence. He had incorrectly said 96 people died in the June 2017 blaze when the correct number of victims was 72.
Dent Coad, an architectural historian who has campaigned since 2017 for justice for Grenfell survivors, lost her seat in 2019 and was blocked from standing again for Labour in 2022. The former MP was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, the Jeremy Corbyn-loyal wing of the parliamentary Labour party.