There is an English expression the Grenfell inquiry brought back into fashion: “merry-go-round of buck-passing”7. An almost light-hearted image, straight from the funfair, the boardroom version of pass the parcel. Yet it describes something very precise: a structure in which every player can, without lying outright, point to the next one as responsible.
To understand it, you have to look at how a public refurbishment project is organised in the UK. There is an owner, the council. There is a delegated manager, KCTMO. There is a tender. A main contractor wins the contract. It subcontracts. Sometimes to subcontractors who subcontract in turn. Consultants come in on technical points. Each has its contractual scope. Each has its limits of liability. And each, by definition, answers only for what is written in its contract.
Rydon wins the Grenfell contract in 2014 with a bid of £9.2M, the cheapest of the three finalists. Someone close to the case describes it as the conductor of a large and varied orchestra. The image speaks for itself. A conductor coordinates, supervises, sets the tempo. But at Grenfell, the conductor was not reading the score.
The Rydon project manager assigned to the site had never worked on cladding. It was even... his first job at that level of responsibility. He said he was not familiar with Approved Document B, the core regulatory guidance on fire safety in the UK. Yet his CV, attached to the bid, claimed he coordinated design and managed subcontractors8. In reality the CV had been written... by the marketing team.
But this is not an anomaly. It is how the system normally works. The main contractor wins the contract, then hands the work to specialists. The specialists rely on the manufacturers’ certificates. The manufacturers point to test results. The tests are run in configurations that do not match real conditions. And at no point does anyone have the contractual job of checking that the whole thing, once assembled, holds up.
The inquiry documents a precise example of this mechanism. Rydon promised five times to appoint fire safety advisers for the project. Five times. It never happened. Worse: when the type of cladding was changed during the works, Rydon explained that the compliance of materials was a matter for the manufacturers. Harley Facades, the cladding subcontractor, replied that choosing the products was not its call. Studio E, the architect, pointed out that once the contract was awarded, design responsibility passed to the main contractor. Michael Mansfield, the families’ barrister, summed it all up as a wall of obfuscation9.
Meanwhile, the residents were raising the alarm. The Grenfell Action Group published at least eight blog posts between 2014 and 2017 on the fire risks in the tower. In November 2016, they wrote that only a catastrophic event would expose the failings of their landlord. The problem is that in the project’s contractual architecture, the residents did not exist as stakeholders. They had no formal channel for raising technical concerns. They were not consulted on the choice of materials. When they complained, they were seen as a nuisance. One site manager called them “rebels” in an internal email. Another suggested that a resident might be making it all up to serve their own agenda.
The contempt was not individual. It was structural. In this system, the people living in a building are not stakeholders. They are occupants. After all, how could poor people have a relevant opinion about their own building?
The inquiry’s final report, published in September 2024, would run to nearly 1,700 pages to untangle this mess. It concluded that every party contributed to the disaster, “in most cases through incompetence but in some cases through dishonesty and greed”.
Every party.
The government, the council, the landlord, the architect, the contractor, the subcontractors, the consultants, the manufacturers, the testing and certification bodies, the fire brigade.
That is the logic of the system. Every link is protected by its scope. Every contract limits the exposure of whoever signs it. Every delegation passes the risk on to the next one. The structure works very well for those who take part in it. It simply does not protect those who live inside.