Joe Delaney, Justice4Grenfell and Grenfell Action Group veteran.

Yesterday’s announcement from the Metropolitan Police stated that there are 57 individuals and 20 companies that it believes have a realistic case to answer is welcome — but it is also long overdue and not – we hope – much over-promised. Before we see anyone face a prison sentence for the at least 72 deaths attributable to that fire, and all of the damage it has wrought upon this area and its community so far, there were four hurdles to overcome: the investigation by the police, the evaluation and prosecution decision by the CPS, the trial in the courts, and the verdict of the judge. All we were told yesterday is that the first of those hurdles has almost been cleared – haven’t we been told something similar before? And also before that? Or have I just imagined this and this too?

It will have taken more than nine years, 145 police officers and 39 police staff, and £150 million for the Metropolitan Police to present a case to the CPS — despite the fact that clear evidence of premeditated crimes, criminal negligence, and misconduct in public office had been publicly exposed years before the fire. Francis O’Connor summarised many of the concerns a lot of us felt and that he had previously documented on the Grenfell Action Group blog from when the project was tendered, and then in November 2016 made his now-infamous prediction that only a catastrophic fire would force the authorities to listen. Seven months later, 72 people were dead.

The full extent of that greed, misconduct, negligence, and recklessness were again laid bare in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s Phase One Report in October 2019 and its Phase Two Report in September 2024. Operation Northleigh examined the actions of 15,000 people across 700 organisations, took 14,400 witness statements, and interviewed 56 people under caution. It is the largest and most complex investigation the Metropolitan Police has ever carried out. All of that effort, all of that time, and all of that money — and only now are we approaching the point where the CPS will be presented with evidence that was not hidden, but exposed and sometimes even predicted yet still repeatedly ignored in plain sight long before that building started burning. Some of us may die, but it is a risk they were all willing to take.

The Metropolitan Police statement itself warrants criticism. The very least they could have done today was begin with an apology — to the bereaved, to the survivors, and to the North Kensington community — for the extraordinary time it has taken to reach even this point. It reads more like carefully crafted and feels more like institutional reputation management than a sincere effort to inform us of developments mainly because there are virtually no developments apart from one or as many as 77 . But we won’t know the definitive answer to that question for several years but we hope the number of potential cases announced will compel the CPS to bring all of them to trial.

A Timeline That Is Not Justice

Whatever comfort might be drawn from today’s announcement is quickly tempered by the reality of what lies ahead. With charging decisions not expected until June 2027 — on the tenth anniversary of the fire — and trials unlikely to begin before 2029, it will be well over twelve years before anyone stands in a courtroom to answer for what happened on 14th June 2017. We do not meet that prospect with anything approaching celebration. We meet it, as we have met every development in the nearly ten years since, with caution, grief, and an unyielding determination to secure justice.

For a disaster that claimed at least 72 lives, many see that timeline as a profound failure of the British justice system. To many survivors and bereaved families, the timing feels less like justice and more like another exercise in institutional management designed to soften political fallout.

A Partnership of the Worst of Both Sectors

The only comfort we can really draw from today’s announcement is the hope that the time it is taking reflects the breadth of culpability across both the public and private sectors — because both are equally to blame. The 77 suspects identified span both, and that matters, because Grenfell was never solely the product of corporate malpractice or state failure alone. It emerged from a deadly partnership between deregulated private interests and a public sector that was as compromised as it was inadequate: public servants who were anything but, and elected representatives who served private agendas and personal ideologies regardless of their legal obligations or any promise they had made to get into office.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea ceased behaving like a local authority long before Grenfell Tower burned. It behaved instead like a private property developer pursuing the personal interests, ideology, and ambitions of its own councillors — councillors who did everything they could to subvert and undermine the wishes of local residents, undermine democratic scrutiny, and bring the full legal weight of the council down upon anyone who dared to speak out. Residents who raised concerns — I was one of them — were threatened, ignored, marginalised, and treated as obstacles to a redevelopment agenda that was never about housing need and always about ideology. This was not local government. It was gentrification and social cleansing conducted under the cover of public office.

This conduct was evident before the fire, it was evident during the fire, it was evident in the immediate response, and the gap between RBKC’s public commitments and its actual behaviour in the years since has been demonstrated time, and time, and time again.

Since the fire, the Royal Borough has spent approximately £10,000 per day defending its indefensible conduct and shielding officers and councillors from the legal consequences of their own actions. Public money has been weaponised to fund legal strategies designed to protect public servants from accountability for breaches of statutory duty, criminal negligence, and misconduct in public office. It is long past time we stopped letting them do it, and it is certainly long past time we stopped paying for it.

The private sector must answer equally for its crimes. Too often we see privatised profits and socialised losses — it is time we saw accountability and consequences, or else we will find ourselves in a world where killing people is simply treated as another cost of doing business. Those who take risks must bear the consequences of those risks. That is what justice is, and it is what common sense demands.

What Has Been the Cost?

The financial cost of this disaster to the taxpayer already exceeds £1.2 billion and continues to rise. Metropolitan Police figures disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act show that by March 2023 alone, policing costs associated with victim recovery, the criminal investigation, and support for the Public Inquiry had already reached £88.5 million — £28 million of which was provided directly by the Home Office. The total cost of Operation Northleigh has now risen to £150 million.

But the true cost cannot be measured in money. Our community paid with at least 72 lives. Residents in the immediate vicinity continue to worry about the long-term health consequences of exposure to the asbestos and carcinogens released during the fire, compounded by the fact that debris was stored beneath local homes during the removal process. Many others continue to pay every day with trauma, illness, displacement, grief, and the lasting psychological impact of what happened. Young people experienced serious disruption and lasting disadvantage in their education. Adults had their health and livelihoods destroyed. The bereaved had their wishes about preserving the remains of their dead overridden and ignored. These are terrible consequences, but they are by no means the full extent of the harm that continues to be done to people in this community.

A National Scandal That Has Not Gone Away

Across the country, the cladding crisis that Grenfell exposed has never been resolved. The government monitors only a fraction of affected buildings — any property below 11 metres in height is excluded entirely from official figures. Even within the buildings it does monitor, MHCLG’s own data from January 2025 shows that between 5,900 and 9,000 residential buildings over 11 metres tall are known to have or have had unsafe cladding requiring remediation in England. Of the estimated 236,000 dwellings in those buildings, around 94,000 have completed remediation and 47,000 have begun it. That leaves approximately 95,000 dwellings in buildings where remediation has not even started.

For leaseholders in the 4,322 buildings MHCLG classifies as ‘relevant buildings’ with ‘relevant defects’, 1,923 have not yet begun remediation. Those outside that classification face remediation bills of between £10,000 and £100,000. Meanwhile, the legislation announced in the King’s Speech is designed to narrow manufacturer liability to producers of dangerous cladding only, letting many others off the hook entirely. Leaseholders who own part of a building freehold face an even worse position, potentially bearing the full cost of remediation shared across the freehold.

These leaseholders remain unable to switch mortgage providers, obtain affordable buildings insurance, or sell their homes, because they lack the building regulations completion certificates that both the law and mortgage lenders require. Nine years after Grenfell, the people living in these homes are still paying for a crisis they did not create, whilst those who manufactured, sold, and installed dangerous products are being granted statutory protection from the full consequences of their actions.

It seems that everyone has been forced to pay something for this avoidable tragedy — apart from those actually responsible for it.

The Man in Downing Street

We call upon the CPS to deploy its best legal minds to bringing these 77 prosecutions swiftly and effectively, and call upon the Ministry of Justice to provide every resource necessary to support that effort. We also call upon the former Director of Public Prosecutions, now residing in Downing Street, to use both his past professional experience and his current political office to ensure that no political consideration, institutional reputation, or establishment interest is ever permitted to obstruct justice. No one in Parliament understands better how the CPS works, what pressures it faces, and what it is capable of when properly directed. There is no excuse for silence. There is no excuse for further delay.

A Royal Borough That Has Forfeited the Name

The Royal Charter was granted to the old Borough of Kensington in 1901, at the request of Queen Victoria. It became the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in 1965 when the two boroughs were merged. That was a different time and a very different council. Records show that between 1993 and 2019, RBKC provided just ten new social homes. Since 2020, it has provided a further 48. For a ‘Royal Borough’ of 160,000 people, in one of the most acute housing crises in the country, that is not a record of public service. It is a record of deliberate neglect dressed up as local governance.

The Royal Borough has consistently treated the consequences of Grenfell not as a devastating humanitarian catastrophe, but as an inconvenient reputational crisis to be managed. The suspicion of criminal acts and misconduct in public office can result in the loss of royal privilege and titles, as demonstrated very recently by King Charles. Given the scale of suspected criminality now identified, and the longstanding evidence of misconduct in public office surrounding this disaster, we believe the continued use of the title ‘Royal Borough’ disgraces the very institution from which it derives and is an insult — to the victims of Grenfell living and dead, and to every resident of this borough who deserved better.

We therefore call upon His Majesty King Charles III to revoke RBKC’s royal status — as an act of solidarity with the bereaved, survivors, and the wider community; as a signal that public office must carry real consequences; and as recognition that institutions which fail so catastrophically in their duty to protect life should not continue to enjoy honorary distinction from the Crown.

In a recent statement, Buckingham Palace said:

“Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”

Here are some of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s conclusions about the culture within the Royal Borough and its ALMO:

“The overwhelming impression we have gained from the evidence, both that of the witnesses and that contained in the contemporaneous documents, is that between 2011 and 2017 relations between the TMO and many of the residents of the tower were increasingly characterised by distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger.

In the end, however, responsibility for the maintenance of the relationship between the TMO and the Grenfell community fell not on the members of that community, who had a right to be treated with respect, but on the TMO as a public body exercising control over the building which contained their homes.

However irritating and inconvenient it may at times have found the complaints and demands of some of the residents of Grenfell Tower, for the TMO to have allowed the relationship to deteriorate to such an extent reflects a serious failure on its part to observe its basic responsibilities.

Residents have never been considered more than irritating and inconvenient to the Royal Borough and its agents but we would hope that Their Majesties recognise how unequally we have been treated over many years and how abusive the Royal Borough’s behaviour has been. They have been caught using the unequal relationship dynamics to bully residents. hide negligence, and avoid accountability. For anyone to be mistreated by a local authority is bad enough but to have it committed by one with an added royal endorsement is disrespectful. Queen Victoria can be continue to be remembered for her relationship with the Borough of Kensington and her request was to mark that borough – not its successors who have brought the honorific into disrepute through their wilful misconduct. Honours should be earned but they all should be revoked if actions or conduct are found to be abusive or illegal.

This might seem meaningless to many, but I can assure you that an image-conscious Royal Borough — one that lists ‘[p]rotecting the Council’s reputation’ as a primary objective in its latest Risk Management strategy — will prove to be more troubled by this possibility than anything else it has faced since the fire. It will be more concerned about this loss of status than the contents of any statement issued by the Met. Police or the CPS.

If we are expected to wait at least a further two years before there is any possibility of a criminal trial and there are still no guarantees that there will be any trials yet, let alone verdicts. But we have waited nine years for something and this is symbolic victory that would not have the slightest impact on any potential criminal trials.

If we must wait over a decade for criminal justice, is that too much to ask?