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

This week, the inquiry started to hear from expert witnesses who've been asked to assess the work carried out during the refurbishment.

They suggested the failure of the fire safety consultant's Xova to analyse the cladding proposals

amounted to evidence of professional negligence. Building control made a fundamental failure

in not asking for more details of the materials being used in the cladding, and the fire safety

information compiled at the end of the project was not enough to operate and maintain the building

with reasonable safety. We'll go through all that evidence later, but first we've got one last

piece of witness evidence to cover. The director of assets and regeneration at the tenant management

organisation which ran the building, Peter Madison, started giving evidence

last week. You can hear the first part of that in episode 131 of this podcast. When we left him,

he was walking us through the tender process to decide who would take on the design and build

contract for the Grenfell Tower refurbishment. By March 2014, the tender submissions had been marked,

and Ryden, a company Peter Madison had worked with for many years,

had come out on top for both price and quality.

But there was a problem.

Despite Ryden's quote coming in £700,000 below their nearest competitor,

their bid of £9.2 million were still

way over the TMO's budget of £8.5 million. I was in a challenging position here because we had a

budget of one figure and a potential cost of a programme more than that. So I was in a difficult

position of trying to get a board approval

for that without doing some work to actually firm up what the price actually was. Peter Madison

wanted to talk to Riden to see if they would be willing to discuss reducing the cost of works by

...