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

This week, the inquiry heard two sets of legal statements, one closing, one opening.

What the inquiry is about to move on to, though, is important.

Because more than four years since the Grenfell Tower fire,

it will now ask questions about how central government set regulations and policies which underpinned

everything we've heard about so far. I'll come to the closing statements which wrapped up one section

of evidence later in the programme, but I want to start with this new section of the inquiry. It will be

investigating how national policies were set on a number of issues, including building regulations,

the certification of materials and fire risk assessments. But it's beginning by looking at how

local and national policies guided the work of firefighters. That in particular is what these opening

statements relate to. Danny Friedman represents one group of bereaved survivors and residents. He said

the inquiry needed to go back to 2004 to see where the challenges facing the London Fire Brigade

began. New Labour wants to set national standards to encourage modernisation and value for money.

Danny Friedman said the then government introduced legislation which abolished the Central

Fire Brigade Advisory Council. Instead, in England and Wales, decisions were now to be made

by individual local authorities rather than central government.

What it essentially introduced was a policy of localism.

That, he argued, had a detrimental impact on the LFB.

The effect of localism was to transfer the difficult political decisions over the future

of the service onto local governments and chief officers, who certainly in London have substantially

yielded to pressure to keep things the way they are. The root cause of the LFB's incompetent

respondent-Grenfell Tower can therefore be traced back to the problems identified in the reviews

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