The American manufacturer of the flammable cladding on the Grenfell Tower paid £23m more to its shareholders than to the families of the 72 people who died when the apartment block caught fire nine years ago, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The firm, Arconic, settled a class action lawsuit with its shareholders in 2023 for £54.7m.
Right. But why the complaint? Different legal system has different outcome and, yes?
The fact that the larger settlement was paid out in the US is hardly surprising. Punitive damages are a common outcome from routine civil litigation across the pond. Class action lawsuits are about as American as apple pie. But they’re relatively new in the UK, where courts are restricted to awarding “exemplary damages”, which are far more limited in their scope and application.
Groups like Common Wealth and the Corporate Justice Coalition say it is high time for this to change. They believe UK courts can intervene where successive governments have failed and secure some measure of justice for Grenfell’s victims.
“We hope these findings help drive the legal and political changes needed to ensure no company can evade responsibility in this way again,” Grenfell United, a group representing families of the victims, said of Common Wealth’s report.
Ah, they want punitive damages in English law then, do they? Any legal types care to wade in? For it’s possible that this hsa greater effects than just “Justice for Grenfell”, no?
The Grenfell crowd will never be satisfied because it’s become a cause célèbre on the left and the victims are secondary to using it as a stick to beat capitalists in general and the Tories in particular.
The cladding was also installed wrongly without firebreaks.
The fact that a large proportion of the tower were illegally sub letting seems to get forgotten.
And most of the fire doors had been removed and sold……….
It won’t have been just that. Individual rooms within apartments have to have their own compartmentalisation. Habitable rooms (not kitchens of bathrooms) have to have doors that produce half hour fire resistance & be fitted with automatic closers sufficient to operate door latch & doorways must be un-obstructed to permit them to operate. It’s to provide an evacuation route in case of fire & safe havens if evacuation is impossible. Reports mentioned closers removed or inoperable & doors wedged open. This the sort of thing should be picked up during scheduled regular fire inspections. Fire inspectors have right of access to all units. That’ll be in the rental contracts. Obviously the legally required inspections weren’t being done.
Mandatory fire safety certificates and the routine pre-inspection of standard residential rental homes were dropped in England and Wales in 2006. Since then, the landlord is responsible for undertaking a fire risk assessment: self-assessment, not certification, has been the name of the game for the last 20 years.
Since 2006 was the year I F’ed O, I may be a bit out of touch. But I’m talking about fire certification of buildings not individual dwellings. I very much doubt they’re doing that on self assessment. It’s exceedingly technical.
Give you an idea of how technical. The job was the refurb of a downstairs flat in an 80’s house conversion of a ’20s property’. Part of the refurb was removing the dividing wall between the lounge & kitchen to make one room. In the ’80s conversion the lathe & plaster ceilings had been replaced with plasterboard. That conformed to ’80s standards of compartmentalisation & would be grandfathered in. But. Removing a wall is a change of use & therefore has to be up to current standards. Round about 2000 the specification for p/b changed. Post change p/b complies, pre-change doesn’t.
Building control had accepted & signed off the existing ceilings.The Nigerian council building inspector was ignorant on British plasterboard standards. (Quelle surprise!) So I had to appeal the building control decision & get it reversed to a fail, so the whole ceiling would need replacing. Why? Because as the contractor, I’m responsible for what materials are being used. Counterintuitively, if the old lathe & plaster ceilings had still been in good repair, they would have passed. L&P has a higher fire rating than p/b
There is no mention of that in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report. However it does say that fire doors were open. Some due to lack of or disabling of self closing mechanisms, some due to having been broken down by firefighters rescuing people, and some due to firefighters running hoses through them.
The routine inspections should include explaining to residents how the fire doors work as many, for example, may not realise that closing the door after they escape is very valuable in delaying further progress of a fire.
One major point is that the windows were unsuitable to keep an external fire out. They had PVC frames which softened quickly and kitchen windows had embedded extractor fans which also melted. Plus, of course, the glass could not have survived the fire.
Subletting will change the fire certification of a building. The fire cert will have been for a residential apartment block with residents having a contract specifying terms of use. Sub-letting will turn it into something more like a hotel where users aren’t necessarily bound by terms of use. Enforcement becomes the responsibility of the building managers.
It’s why hotels can get iffy about you having someone not booked in, in your room. It effects their insurance conditions. They’re a liability the hotel hasn’t agreed to & thus they may not have insurance cover for. Also may breach occupancy limits.
I was staggered that they were allowed to get away with this. It was run by a “tenant management organisation”, an arrangement set up on lefty principles that the “ordinary people” should run things. The Labour MP was a member of the TMO, alongside various residents, and praised the redevelopment.
The TMO was following a left/green objective of increasing insulation, which came up against a left-wing desire to keep rents low for council tenants. To reconcile these, the TMO rejected the initial contractor bids for being too expensive, forcing other contractors to come up with cheaper alternatives in order to win the contract.
The TMO for years had allowed fire doors to be removed, widespread illegal sub-letting, and rubbish to pile up in the communal areas, all without taking action against the tenants to stop it, and even threatened legal action against those tenants who complained.
And yet somehow this is the Tories’ fault? I can see why the Left wanted to portray it so, and we know they don’t care about truth when a ‘narrative’ can serve their purposes, but how they got away with this one I cannot understand.
You can’t hate the legacy left wing media enough
Grenfell Tower was managed by a committee where the Council House Tenants outnumbered the Conservative Councillors
I would have thought that the true believers would be ecstatic over all those sacrifices to Gaia.
No, the proper sacrifices are all white. Just like the proper sacrifice to Zeus.
/sarc
“Common Wealth”, eh? aka “We want some of yours!” Loadsa lawyers; “We won’t charge you any money, we’ll just take a teensy bit of the £152,567,243,437 you get awarded”…
Er, the usual portion is a third of the award.
Usually nothing, or not much up front. They’re running a bunch of actions at any given time so they can afford to wait for the payoffs.
Note that the payout to the class action plaintiffs is often a coupon, offering a discount on more services.
But for some reason the lawyers insist on cash.
What seems to be rarely mentioned is who was behind the push to install fancy insulation panels on tower blocks.
What possessed people to go to that immense expense when reasonable insulation could be had with non flammable rock wool.
The Management Committee chaired by the local MP ?
One wonders about their portfolio and stock in same.
Beats me why the manufacturer of the cladding has any liability. The specs for the product will have been on the data sheets. The negligence lies with who specified the material & the design of the installation. As Ottokring points out, fire checking requires compartmentalisation. I’ve spent hours designing compartmentalisation into building plans. And checking data sheets for the suitability of the materials being used. This is all normal practice. I could write a book on the subject.without needing to go to reference material.
The other thing is, as Adolf mentions. Buildings have to have inspection regimes that have to be conducted & enforced to ensure fire regs aren’t breached. It’s a legal requirement.
Punitive damages in civil court is an insidious invention of POS lawyers.
Criminal courts is where punitive damages belong.
Civil courts are simply there to award damages. The idea that parties should get more than their actual damages is an abomination.
When i was studying this stuff i seem to remember one of the definitive cases about punitive damages was MGN (i.e Maxwell’s mirror) vs Ratzen (as in Esther) . Iamnotalawyer but I’m going to now look it up to remind me of the details.
Replying to myself. Yes it is relevant i think. Judge able to overule silly money payments by juries…but it’s really statute law that allows it.
The defendants also argued that the award by the jury was excessive in relation to the damage that the articles had caused. As a result, they requested a new trial under the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990. The Court considered this as the Act allowed for the Court either to order a new trial or to substitute the award for a figure that they deem appropriate.[2] This power was introduced by the Lord Chancellor during the drafting of the bill so that disproportionately large awards by juries,[3] once called “Mickey Mouse money” by members of the judiciary as juries tended to award amounts for libel that were larger than those for personal injury claims, could be substituted by the courts.[5][6] The Court considered this alongside the applicability of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. They ruled that the Act which allowed for a new trial to be ordered if the award was disproportionate allowed for them to substitute the award in lieu of ordering a new trial and stated that juries should be instructed to consider purchasing power and proportionality of any award.[2] As a result, the Court of Appeal quashed the £250,000 award and substituted it with an award of £110,000 and Rantzen was granted leave to appeal to the House of Lords.[2][3]
But the Left don’t care about that. They don’t care about consistency. They don’t care about principles. All that matters is group affiliation.
They will happily argue for punitive damages when there is a case against a big corporation, and against punitive damages when the same corporation is suing an online activist for slander. The only thing that matters to them is the relative status of the two parties.
This is part of why our arguments consistently fail to get through.