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Hello and welcome to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast with me, Tom Simons.

This week, the inquiry focused on the policies used by the London Fire Brigade to prepare for fires in tall buildings.

And we learnt that despite a previous fatal high-rise fire

and in-depth reviews of those policies, senior firefighters struggling to cope at Grenfell

Tower had no formal guidance about when to evacuate the building. Much of the inquiry is about

documents. The generic risk assessment is an important one,

mentioned repeatedly in phase one of the inquiry which focused on the night of the fire. Why? Because

it's the guidance the UK's fire and rescue services were supposed to use when designing their own policies for high-rise fires.

If it changed, their policies and risk assessments would need to change.

And that's what happened in the years before Grenfell.

In July 2009, there was a fire at Lackenol House, a tower block in South London.

It's been described by the London Fire Brigade as a unique fire.

It's certainly one of the worst in peacetime London.

Fires spread to the external wall of the building.

Six people died.

In response to this fire,

the government's department for communities and local government, the DCLG, decided to review the high-rise generic risk assessment.

Now, we're going to be hearing a lot about that in this episode, so we'll call it the GRA.

The focus for the inquiry this week was on what changes were made to the GRA

and what they meant for the London Fire Brigade's approach to fires like the one at Grenfell Tower.

First, to face the questions, Peter Cowup.

...