On June 14 2017, a social housing tower building in London known as Grenfell Tower caught fire. 72 people were killed as a result of the fire which burned for 60 hours. Subsequent to the investigation that determined how the fire occurred, a follow up enquiry was convened by the UK Government to ascertain the reasons for the failures of the systems and processes in place to prevent the poor design and construction decisions that lead to the fire occurring.

The second enquiry looked into how a combination of factors allowed the Grenfell Tower to be partially refurbished with a disregard to good practice that would have prevented the fire. The report, handed down in early September 2024, is 1,700 pages long and suggests there were a number of failures to protect human life by the designers of the refurbishment, the building owner, the suppliers of building material and government.

The Guardian reported

After 400 days of evidence in an inquiry that has cost the UK taxpayer more than £200m, [Sir Martin] Moore-Bick reserved some of his most damning conclusions for central government.

It regulates the safety of buildings but failed to tighten up ambiguous fire regulations while it was engaged in a “bonfire of red tape” launched by the Conservative prime minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2016 in an attempt to boost the economy after the global financial crisis.

The inquiry found that the government was “well aware” of the risks posed by highly flammable cladding “but failed to act on what it knew”.

Eric Pickles, Cameron’s housing secretary until 2015, had “enthusiastically supported” the prime minister’s drive to slash regulations and it dominated his department’s thinking to the extent that matters affecting fire safety and risk to life “were ignored, delayed or disregarded”, the inquiry concluded.

Pickles also failed to act on a coroner’s 2013 recommendation to tighten up fire safety regulations after a cladding fire at Lakanal House, another London council block, killed six people. It was “not treated with any sense of urgency”, the inquiry found and the tightening up had not happened by the time Grenfell went up in flames on 14 June 2017.

In cross-examination under oath, Pickles vehemently insisted the anti-red tape drive had not covered building regulations. But the inquiry said this evidence was “flatly contradicted by that of his officials and by the contemporaneous documents”.

It seems if the UK Central Government had done its job correctly ensuring the regulator of the building industry could function appropriately; the architects, material suppliers opportunities to potentially minimise expenditure and maximise profit could have been reduced. While both progressive and conservative sides of politics have been rightly accused of abrogating their responsibilities when ‘cutting red tape’ it’s reasonable to suggest the conservatives are far more open to the idea of allowing business to self regulate while promoting they are ‘tough on crime’ if an individual breaks the law. The Australian Conservative Coalition parties are good examples to demonstrate the point.

In 2021, The Monthly published a long list of examples where the Morrison Coalition Government appears not to have followed due process in governance as well as awarding contracts to business associates/supporters of the Coalition. At the same time the government was referring social security claimants to debt collectors through the ‘robodebt’ fiasco, forcing other social security recipients onto the “Indue” card system (by implication claiming all the recipients in certain localities were spending their benefits ‘inappropriately’) and indefinitely jailing refugees and asylum seekers in offshore detention centres.

The recently elected Northern Territory CLP Government and current Queensland LNP Opposition are both proposing to reduce the age of criminal consent despite jails being full of people. Surely that demonstrates that incarceration doesn’t stop crime. Lowering the age of criminal consent may well contravene the guidelines of the UN Committee Against Torture. Meanwhile the Tasmanian Liberal Party Government has chosen to remove the construction of a treatment facility for those with heart problems in the north of the state from the state budget while at the same time promising to be ‘tough on youth crime’. Both issues were ‘priorities’ during the election campaign earlier this year. Is it too cynical to suggest that ‘tough on crime’ is seen to be the better popularity and vote winner over assisting people with needs for specific health care requirements?

The tragedy is that 72 people had to die and 7 years had to pass to demonstrate the failure of successive UK Conservative Governments to do their job. We should be concerned as the Australian Conservative Coalitions when in government have long supported ‘small government’ and ‘helping’ business to operate freely by removing ‘red tape’. We don’t know what successive Coalition governments have done to remove appropriate regulation and inspection activities in Australia by design or neglect. Hopefully we’ll find out in time to fix the problem before a tragedy. Campaigns to throw 10 year olds who commit crime into jail rather than understanding the causes why 10 year olds are considering committing crime are unconscionable as well as ethically doubtful, especially when conservatives actively choose to under regulate other sectors of the community.

The question is really who does more harm to the wider community? Is it the young person who steals a car, the company director that puts the profit motive over the health and safety of users of their products or the governments who don’t investigate, fund or regulate as appropriate to prevent crime occurring? The fire in the Grenfell Tower and the ‘marketing’ around youth crime probably gives us the answer to the question.