'Rotten culture': reckoning in construction sector over failures across supply chain

After the damning findings of the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire, the construction industry is facing a moment of reckoning.

- Julia Kollewe

The 2017 fire stemmed from a "rotten culture in the construction industry", where failures occurred across the supply chain, according to Dame Judith Hackitt, an engineer who led a review on building safety after Grenfell.

She said the inquiry report, which was published on Wednesday and chronicled failures in the construction industry, the council, regulators and central government, "provides all of the evidence and more to reinforce the messages that I gave about the state of that culture in the industry back in 2017".

She added: "This whole issue is about much more than cladding and insulation. It is about an industry that does not assure quality in the building of homes for people to live in, in the way that it should." The 1,700-page report by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the public inquiry, found a chain of failures over decades that ultimately contributed to the fire, including "systematic dishonesty" on the part of the makers of the cladding panels and insulation products Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex. The architects Studio E, the builders Rydon and Harley Facades, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's building control department all bore some responsibility for the blaze, the report said.

The findings laid bare some of the deeper structural issues at the heart of the construction industry - not least its highly fragmented, competitive and blame-shifting nature. Operating on wafer-thin margins, contractors and subcontractors are interdependent while also trying to squeeze out their share of the profits.

The number of subcontractors on building sites has steadily risen since the 1980s, although specialist work has always been subcontracted to expert firms.