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

This week, the inquiry continued to look at the London Fire Brigade,

examining what the organisation knew about the risks of combustible cladding materials

before the fire at Grenfell Tower,

and how they used that knowledge to train

the firefighters who actually had to fight the fire. And we learnt that weeks before the fire

at Grenfell Tower, senior LFB staff wrote a presentation which warned that facade fires were

a significant threat. The brigade's former deputy commissioner said that ideas which could have improved the

response to the Grenfell Tower fire would not have progressed because of cultural resistance.

And a senior LFB manager accepted he misled a meeting about the brigade's progress when it

responded to recommendations emerging from a previous high-rise firefighting operation.

Let's get started with the evidence then.

We're only two weeks in to this part of the inquiry, but already it's becoming clear that

certain parts of the London Fire Brigade knew about the potential risks of combustible materials

being placed on the outside of buildings.

Last week we heard that between 2009 and 2012, the Brigade sent a

series of letters to the Department for Communities and Local Government, asking for clarification

on, among other things, what building regulation guidance said about the external spread of fire.

This week, the inquiry picked up on that same thread, as Rita Dexter, the LFB's deputy commissioner from 2009 to 2015,

returned to complete her evidence.

In November 2013, a report that Rita Dexter had commissioned

...