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

Sometimes the inquiry works in mysterious ways.

And one of those mysterious ways is that this week it had closing statements,

not for the section of evidence we've just heard about the management of fire safety inside the building, but for two previous sections of evidence.

If you're a regular listener to the podcast, you may recall that between January and October last year,

the inquiry heard evidence related to the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, which placed combustible materials on the external walls of the building.

Between November and March this year,

it heard evidence about the manufacture and marketing of the materials which were used.

These are the topics which legal representatives for all the core participants

have had a chance to respond to this week.

And one thing to bear in mind as you listen to the evidence

is a phrase lead counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett has repeated several times over the past few years.

In my opening address at Phase 1 of this inquiry, I invited the call participants not to indulge in a merry-go-round of buck-passing.

I'll leave you to decide whether you think the core participants have taken up that invitation

this time.

Before we get started, I should say that as we've poured over all this evidence for many months,

this week I'm going to try not to repeat myself and keep it short.

All the evidence was also heard over Zoom, so in some instances, the audio quality isn't the best.

We'll begin then with the design and refurbishment of Grenfell Tower.

As the owners of the building, the local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea,

funded the refurbishment work, monitoring the tenant management organisation which managed

Grenfell's day-to-day operations, and it was RBKC's Building Control Department,

...