“That fire was so violent, that was the most violent thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Eddie (Survivor)
Netflix’s Grenfell: Uncovered doesn’t uncover anything new, and that’s exactly the point. Eight years on, this is the story we still don’t want to face. The film puts the voices back at the centre. Survivors. Families. The people who watched neighbours die while the state stood by. It’s all there. The fire. The failures. The cover-ups.
And still, no justice.
The documentary is clear-eyed and furious. But the anger’s been building for years. Most of it thanks to the work of Peter Apps. His book Show Me the Bodies: How we let Grenfell Happen cuts through the noise. It names names. Follows the money. Traces exactly how a block of council flats ended up covered in cladding that burns like petrol. Not an accident. Not a freak event. A consequence. Of deregulation. Of outsourced risk. Of the kind of politics that sees poor people as expendable.
The Inquiry confirmed it. Two full phases. Years of testimony. The final report landed in September 2024 and said what everyone already knew: every death at Grenfell was avoidable. But it wasn’t just the cladding. It was the whole system, one long chain of failure.
One of the key failures was the “stay put” policy. LFB stuck with it for far too long. They’d built their whole model of high-rise firefighting around the idea that fires stay contained. That the building will hold. But Grenfell didn’t. The cladding turned it into a furnace. Fire raced up the outside and punched back in through the windows. Floor after floor. People were told to stay where they were, in rooms filling with black smoke and toxic gas. That decision cost lives. The Inquiry called it out. The families already knew.
“I know my dad called them multiple times, but they were telling us to stay inside, but the fire was getting closer, it made no sense.”
Still, the government has done the bare minimum. They’ve accepted the Inquiry’s 58 recommendations, but timelines are vague. Quarterly reports come and go. Some buildings are still covered in the same kind of cladding. Others have been built since Grenfell with ACM panels still in place. In 2024, Tower Hamlets found one. Built after the fire. With the same material that turned the tower into a torch.
The documentary also rewinds to Lakanal House—Camberwell, 2009. Six dead, including three children. A tower block. A fire that spread fast. A test run for what was coming. And still, nothing changed.
Celestine Cheong, of the Fire Protection Society, puts it plainly:
“Lakanal House was a huge opportunity for this country to take notice and improve fire safety.”
The coroner who investigated Lakanal didn’t pull punches. In 2013, they wrote a letter to the government and the London Fire Brigade, calling for action. Emergency call handlers needed better training, to know when to tell people to stay or to flee. The brigade needed a plan for what to do when a high-rise fire spirals out of control. Government policy needed to define when we switched away from the stay put policy. But neither were taken seriously. The letter gathered dust. Nothing was implemented.
That letter would have landed on the desk of then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, right as his coalition was on a crusade to gut regulation. Cameron wasn’t subtle about it either. He stood at a podium and said:
“We’re going to have a new rule, which is that any minister in my government who wants to include a regulation has to scrap one first.”
It became the so-called “one in, two out” rule, designed to strangle new safety laws at birth. The logic was simple: if protecting lives meant adding rules, they weren’t interested.
So by the time Grenfell happened, the same playbook was still in use. Stay put. Hope for the best. No floorplans. No evacuation strategy. No lessons learned.
It makes me sick. Because when Grenfell burned, it wasn’t just the fire that killed people. It was political decisions. It was a deliberate war on regulation. It was government policy that said safety was too expensive and the market knows best.
“David Cameron’s driving political ideology was deregulation, he believed that the state had no place in telling private businesses what they could and could not do.”
Peter Apps
Public housing stock was old, and tearing it down costs money. So they patch it up. Wrap it in plastic. Slap some cladding on it to make it look sharp from the outside. Aesthetics and cost trump safety every time.
And the people inside? Working-class. Migrants. Tenants. Poor. People with the least power to kick up a fuss. When they complain, they’re ignored. Treated as nuisances. Marked down as aggressive. The Grenfell residents tried—they warned, emailed, raised alarms. Just like Lakanal. And again, they weren’t heard until it was far too late.
This isn’t just about policy failure. It’s about whose lives are allowed to burn.
The contempt wasn’t hidden. Apps reports that after the Lakanal coroner’s letter landed, a civil servant said privately:
“The law requires us to respond to the coroner, but we don’t have to do what she says.”
That tells you everything.
The people of Grenfell were treated like a problem to be managed, not a community to be listened to. The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), which ran the building on behalf of the council, ignored complaints for years. Leaks. Broken lifts. Poor heating. Shoddy repairs. Residents were routinely dismissed. And when the refurbishment began, things got worse. Instead of meaningful consultation, they were handed glossy leaflets and half-truths.
Even before the fire, residents were warning something was coming. The Grenfell Action Group, a local blog run by tenants, had been raising concerns about fire safety for years. Six months before the fire, they wrote that only a “catastrophic event” would expose how unsafe the building had become. The council’s response? They accused the blog of scaremongering—said it was “quite frightening for residents.” They even blocked council and TMO staff from reading it at work. People were raising the alarm in plain sight, and the system closed its ears.
Then there’s Brian Martin, the senior civil servant who oversaw fire safety policy in government for almost two decades. When asked at the Inquiry what he said when warned that a future fire might kill ten or twelve times more people than Lakanal, his alleged response was:
“Where’s the evidence? Show me the bodies.”
Martin denies saying it. But his attitude is clear from the record. In one message he wrote:
“We only have a duty to respond to the coroner, not kiss her backside.”
That’s the mindset. Arrogance layered over indifference. Treating fire safety as an admin task, not a matter of life and death.
Murray, admitted at the Inquiry to being the “single point of failure.” But that kind of admission works like a shield. It lets everyone else off the hook. No structural blame. No criminal charges. Just a few bureaucrats saying sorry and disappearing.
Eric Pickles, who oversaw housing and local government under Cameron, turned up to give evidence like it was an inconvenience. On the second day of testimony, he seemed more interested in getting away. He even got the number of deaths wrong—saying 96 instead of 72. He quoted the death toll from Hillsborough. It wasn’t a slip. It was a tell. As Peter Apps put it:
“That number should stick with you—if the number of deaths is important to you. If it’s not, then yes, sure, it’s something you’ll forget. You’ll just mix it up with another number where lots of working-class people died.”
Even Theresa May would later admit that people hadn’t looked closely enough at the regulations being stripped away—the very regulations meant to keep people safe. But by then, the safety net was gone. Torn apart in the name of efficiency, cost savings, and ideology. Grenfell was the result.
And the number is 72. Remember it. Because if they don’t, they’ll do it again.
Rydon, the main contractor brought in to lead the refurb, and their subcontractors treated the tenants with contempt. Residents complained of poor workmanship—exposed wiring, flammable insulation left lying around, chaotic installation work. And when they raised safety concerns, they were brushed off. Some were even told they should be grateful. “You’re getting something for nothing” that was the attitude.
The original architects had specified zinc cladding, a safer, more fire-resistant material. But in a cost-cutting exercise, that was stripped out of the design and replaced with cheaper aluminium composite material (ACM) with a polyethylene core. The saving? Around £300,000 1. That’s what their lives were worth on paper. Over and over, the record shows value engineering—not to improve safety or longevity, but to hit a budget and deliver something that looked nice from the outside.
Here’s the bit that sticks in the throat: it would have cost just £40 per flat to use a safer version of the cladding. That’s it. Forty quid. The price of a takeaway. But because the entire focus was on cutting costs, not protecting lives, it wasn’t even considered. Not debated. Not weighed up. Just ruled out. It’s criminal. Not in the metaphorical sense—actually criminal. They made a choice to save a few thousand pounds and ended up wrapping a tower in petrol. And now the people who signed off on that decision are still walking free.
This was the era of Pickles, then Communities Secretary, barking orders about “doing more with less.” Local councils were being gutted. Fire services slashed. Regulation seen as red tape to be burned. In that climate, the idea of acting on a coroner’s fire safety recommendations (spending money, updating guidance, mandating sprinklers) was never going to fly.
If there’s one criticism of the documentary, it’s that one film isn’t enough. Grenfell is too big (too layered, too political, too human) for a single, hour-and-a-half retelling. Personally, I think it would have been stronger as a series: one episode on the residents and their warnings, one on the London Fire Brigade, another on the Council and TMO, another on the refurb and the cladding companies, and finally, the Inquiry. It needed space to breathe. Space to name every part of the system that failed, and the people who built that system.
“I would have thought they would have put safety in front of prettiness.”
Former resident
“It wasn’t a poor tower, it was a working tower.”
Former resident
“The Tower was an eyesore for the affluent who lived in the area, and it kept property prices down.”
Sister of former resident
“So they (the council) said in internal emails over cladding Grenfell Tower would be a good idea, as it would help the tower look less of a poor cousin (when compared to a new leisure centre).”
Peter Apps
Footnotes
- This figure is taken directly from documentation presented during the Grenfell Inquiry, which showed that switching from zinc to ACM cladding saved approximately £293,368—a decision that prioritised cost over safety. ↩︎
