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

It was a big week for the inquiry as two former heads of the London Fire Brigade gave evidence.

That includes Danny Cotton who ran the brigade at the time of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Danny Cotton gave evidence to the inquiry back in 2018,

which you can hear in episode 65 of this podcast.

And at the time, her evidence was controversial

with many of the brief survivors and residents

for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, she said that she wouldn't have changed anything

about the way the brigade responded to the fire at Grenfell Tower.

She also said that it wouldn't have been reasonable for the London Fire Brigade to have expected and prepared

to fight a fire like that seen on the 14th of June 2017. In the same manner that I wouldn't

develop a training package for a space shuttle to land on the shard. That is an instant of that scale. So I wouldn't expect

us to be developing training or response to something that simply shouldn't happen. This time

there was a different story. Danny Cotton accepted that three years before Grenfell, national

guidance forewarned of the fire risks posed by external cladding. She accepted that by failing to issue any form

of policy or training that covered cladding, the brigade failed to follow this national guidance,

and that as a result, the LFB was at fault in failing its health and safety responsibilities

to both fire crews and the public. Let's look at all of this in more detail then.

We'll start by focusing on what information the LFB had available in the years before Grenfell

to warn them about the risks posed by cladding in insulation materials and how fires could

spread beyond the flat where they started.

...