Grenfell is a tragic reminder to the Tories that regulation is not a dirty word

Even if David Cameron is not personally responsible for the gruesome deaths of 72 people in the Grenfell Tower inferno, his government's ideological pursuit of deregulation was one of the worst government mistakes in recent history.

The Tories still haven't learned their lesson.

In the Conservative-led coalition government, then Prime Minister Cameron appointed Tory Eric Pickles as Housing Secretary. Pickles was an enthusiastic and self-proclaimed “ambitious” Cabinet minister, eager to be praised by the Treasury for his drastic budget cuts to implement austerity.

But the “red tape challenge” was where he really shined. This meant that when the government introduced a new rule that imposed costs on businesses to comply with, departments had to remove or change existing rules to create savings for businesses that would counteract their spending. The policy was expanded to “one in, two out” in January 2013 and “one in, three out” in March 2016. It had some dangerous consequences.

The final report on the 2017 Grenfell disaster, published today, says the push for deregulation left officials at the Department for Communities and Local Government understaffed and prioritised cutting red tape.

In contrast, according to the findings, fire safety was “ignored, delayed or disregarded” and “countless warnings” went unheeded.

But even seven years later, deregulation is still a key buzzword for some conservatives.

The phrase “regulatory purgatory” crops up with seasonal predictability, with Tories sometimes forgetting that the pejorative term “bureaucracy” is just another way of describing rules designed to keep us safe.

Earlier this month, Tory leader James Cleverly called for a “one in, two out approach to regulation” to boost growth – a surprising echo of the Cameron project. Bookies' favourite Kemi Badenoch introduced government reforms she said would reduce the burden on businesses by up to £1 billion, or 50 million hours a year, by cutting unnecessary red tape and forms.

Candidate Tom Tugendhat also fired a broadside against over-regulation during his bid for the party leadership, claiming that it had drained “capital reserves” from the UK.

Being a Tory means wanting deregulation. So far, so simple. But it's time for the Conservative Party to think more carefully about whether it is justified in this view.

Of course, endlessly ticking off obligations is bad for business, but if we learn anything from the tragic Grenfell affair, it is that the public still needs to be protected from unscrupulous companies.

Some companies cannot be trusted to act in our best interests. The manufacturers of the cladding products that “contributed by far the most to the fire” were guilty of “systematic dishonesty” and used “deliberate and sustained strategies” to make their products appear safe, the damning report says.

No one can deny that these people are given appropriate regulations.

Campaigners will be keeping an eye on the prosecution of Arconic executives. The company that made the cladding panels for Grenfell's external facade was found guilty of “deliberately concealing” the safety risk. And the two companies that made the insulation – Celotex and Kingspan – were found guilty of simply “misleading” in their filings.

It has now been determined that the “incompetent” companies Studio E and Harley Facades, which were involved in the renovation of the tower in 2011, bear “significant” responsibility for the disaster.

At the end of this shameful list, the report states that project manager Rydon's oversight of the work had led to a culture of “blame-shifting”.

The whole episode – a spider web of blame between companies, central government, local authorities and the London Fire Brigade – is not a plea for less regulation. Rather, it shows that clearer lines of accountability are needed. It shows that the decisions of corporate management should be easy to understand.

Individuals in both the private sector and government should be made to own up to their mistakes. And this demand should extend all the way to the top – to the Foreign Secretary, even to the Prime Minister of the day, who has set the tone for the government.

A particularly large-scale test in 2001 “in which aluminium composite panels with unmodified polyethylene cores burned violently” was not even published by the department. This clearly predated the coalition, the argument goes: this is a decades-old problem. Pickles and Cameron can also point to parts of yesterday's report which highlighted the “many opportunities” missed by successive governments since the early 1990s to tackle the problem of combustible cladding.

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But they still owe the families of the victims answers. The Housing Ministry received “numerous warnings about the risks” posed by the facade cladding over a five-year period between 2012 and 2017. Pickles was in office from 2010 to 2015, his successor Greg Clark from 2015 to 2016.

Lord Pickles's testimony to the Grenfell inquiry in 2022 was breathtaking in its inadequacy. He took no responsibility for the failings of his poorly run department and claimed that “political” officials had made “assumptions” about the priority of deregulation. His gall in leaving the hearing on time and getting the death toll wrong – he claimed there were 96 “nameless” victims of the fire – did the peer no favours whatsoever.

The families of the victims – some of whom attended Keir Starmer's statement on Grenfell in the House of Commons – rightly want this mess to be cleared up. Colleagues in the House of Lords should also expect better answers from Pickles than he has given to the inquiry.

Both Starmer and Rishi Sunak recognise that the public are fed up with sloping roadsides and fed up with the constant passing of responsibility. “I see myself as responsible for providing safety,” the Prime Minister declared solemnly in the House of Commons.”

In his role as opposition leader, Sunak apologised in his role as former prime minister. “The state has let you down,” he told MPs. But he also took up some of the report's recommendations, including a single regulator to oversee change and a single Secretary of State “to end the fragmentation of powers in Whitehall”. Here we saw a Tory arguing for regulation where it is needed.

The seven-volume Grenfell investigation report contains more than a million words, but one thing keeps coming back: failure.

Next up – hopefully soon for victims – is prosecution and justice. But Tories battling for the party's future should also consider whether regulation is really the bogeyman they think it is.