Hello and welcome to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast with me Kate Lamble.

This week, nearly two and a half years after the inquiry started,

we finally heard staff from the tenant management organisation which ran the building

explain how the refurbishment, which clad the walls

and combustible materials, came about. And we started to get a clear picture of just how

important cost was in determining what was used on the building. Staff from the TMO admitted that

they held a secret meeting to discuss cost savings on the

refurbishment of the tower. They also admitted asking the architect Studio E to keep their fees

below a certain level to get around public procurement regulations. And none of the senior

management we've heard from so far read any of the fire safety strategies produced for

the building. We'll get to that evidence in just a minute. But first, I want to put the tenant

management organisation into context for you. What was its role? And had it always been involved

in large regeneration projects like Grenfell Tower? Alistair Macintosh is the chief executive of the Housing Quality Network

and he helped set up Kensington and Chelsea's TMO just under 20 years ago.

It was the early 1990s.

At that stage, investment in local authority housing was at a record low

and stock condition was very, very

poor. The options they faced at that time were number one, you could transfer the homes to a

housing association. The upside of that was that you avoided limits on public expenditure. The downside

was you lost local political control. If you stayed with the local

authority, the risk was that you had to tender the housing out to the likes of the capitals and the

circles, which is unpalatable. And then almost at the last minute, the government came up with

...