THE dreadful ‘towering inferno’ disaster at Grenfell Tower in London has become another example of our nation’s failure to fully appreciate the threat posed by uncontrolled fire. Those who govern us have collectively produced the circumstances that allowed a fire that could and should have been extinguished in its incipient stages by sprinklers to become a killer on a horrifying scale.

I draw no distinction between the political parties that have formed our governments in this century. None have anything of which to be proud when it comes to fire safety and certainly none of them should be trying to score political points in the aftermath of Grenfell Tower.

I retired as Wiltshire’s Chief Fire Officer in April 2000 and in my latter years of service the nation’s fire chiefs were told repeatedly by civil servants that ministers wanted fire safety applied with a light touch. This was followed in 2005 by the Fire Precautions Act 1971 being scrapped and replaced by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order.

In effect this pushed the highly trained and experienced fire safety inspectors in the fire and rescue service into a minor role in enforcing the order. The responsibility for assessing fire risk and managing it was placed on the occupiers of premises. It was a Labour Government that did this.

In my opinion, from the moment the need for the fire service to play a lead role in ensuring that people occupying buildings were reasonably safe from fire was reduced, the first step had been taken towards the Grenfell Tower disaster.

My experience of self-regulation in fire safety matters leads me to believe that it rarely produces satisfactory standards of fire safety. The opportunity to apply fire safety with a light touch is seized upon by the fire risk assessors to cut costs and avoid fire safety measures that are seen as inconvenient. As we can now see, this attempt to save money has had exactly the opposite effect, not forgetting the dreadful loss of life that far outweighs the economic impact of the disaster.

There are other factors in my opinion that have combined to create the present national crisis in fire protection. Ministers are responsible to Parliament under the doctrine of ministerial accountability. On paper, the minister is 'the boss' but few are in office long enough to gain a real understanding of the matters under their supposed control. This is just the way the civil service likes it to be because this situation makes them non-accountable to Parliament and yet gives them enormous influence over what their particular minister does, says and writes.

Many very experienced people outside Whitehall have been calling for years for the building regulations to be reviewed and sprinklers given more government backing. Numbered amongst these is the coroner who made recommendations following the fire at Lakanal House high-rise block in London in 2009. Six people died in this fire and external cladding played a significant part in spreading the fire.

This should have caused the minister responsible to sit up and take notice. Instead of this he was recently interviewed on television stating that he relied on advice from his experts (civil servants) and he gave the strong impression that he had signed letters relevant to the coroner’s comments without really understanding the implications of what he was doing. A more diligent approach might have been to ask to meet with experts other than the civil servants to gain a fuller understanding of why the coroner had issued his recommendations.