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

This week, the fire risk assessor for Grenfell Tower accepted that he presented his qualifications

in a way which could be misleading.

That assessor Carl Stokes copied and pasted sections of his reports, and his assessments

reported only one flat entrance door in Grenfell with a missing self-closing mechanism. An investigation

after the fire concluded that 64% of flats had missing or broken self-closers. Let's get started with the evidence then. The main

witness this week was Carl Stokes, who carried out six fire risk assessments on Grenfell Tower

between 2009 and 2017. Most of these were completed as an independent contractor under

Carl Stokes and Associates Limited, a company where he was the

only director. Fire risk assessments are designed to assess potential hazards in a building,

what the likelihood of a fire is and what its potential consequences could be. So Carl Stokes' work

is important because he was able to highlight issues with fire safety at Grenfell Tower

and ask the tenant management organisation to carry out work to remedy the situation.

Carl Stokes spent more than 20 years of his career as a firefighter,

much of it working in the Fire Safety department of Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service.

In 2006, a new piece of legislation came into force which changed the industry.

The fire safety order set out requirements for how those who owned or managed buildings

should look after, well, just that, fire safety.

It said they should take general fire precautions to ensure the premises were safe

and that there should be a, quote, suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks which

people were exposed to. Detailed fire risk assessments or FRAs became much more common.

...