In a separate report fire safety inspections, the Conservatives said, had been reduced for some companies from six hours to just 45 minutes.

The move, titled Cutting Red Tape, was part of the Tory plans to abolish a ‘health and safety’ culture that they claimed was hurting money-making businesses. …

Former Prime Minister David Cameron promised to abolish the ‘albatross’ of ‘over regulation’.

… Businesses with good records have had fire safety inspections reduced from six hours to 45 minutes, allowing managers to quickly get back to their day job.’

… The group describe their purpose as working ‘with business, for business’.

The reference to the 2013 slashing of fire regulation for new-builds had previously been ‘welcomed‘ by the Chief Fire Officers Association.

But such lax or light touch regulation only becomes fatal in a system – such as we have – designed to drive down costs and save money, not to put the safety of people first.

It is a system in which those working for all the interconnected bodies that made the refurbishment decisions and gave the wrong safety advice to tenants are able to say – as if that makes it alright – “we followed the rules”.
It is a system in which identifying anyone who can be proved to be ultimately responsible for what happened may be impossible.

And as we saw in the banks before the financial crisis, when people can take reckless decisions safe in the knowledge they can’t be held to account, reckless decisions get taken.

The horrific corollary of a faceless, irresponsible system of public-housing governance is that many of the poor and vulnerable people who died in the fire are not even being given the respect of formal identification as victims – because they live on the fringes of the state, and the authorities seem unable to be confident they even existed, let alone that they have died.