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

This week, the permanent secretary for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

said her department failed in its duties over many years.

There's an awful lot about these episodes which I feel extremely saddened by and that it's

just not the standards I would have expected of government departments. Let's get started with the

evidence then. Dame Melanie Dawes became the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Housing,

communities and local government in March 2015. She's the most senior civil servant we've heard from at the inquiry,

and it was her responsibility to support ministers and manage staff.

Around 8.30 a.m. on the 14th of June 2017, as Grenfell Tower was still burning,

and just 20 minutes after the last resident was evacuated from the tower,

Melanie Dawes held a meeting

with the then Secretary of State, Sajid Javid, and other officials. And she said that at that meeting,

questions were immediately raised about the government's response to recommendations made by the

coroner investigating a previous fire, Lacknell House in South London, where six people had been killed.

Four years earlier in 2013, the department had told the coroner that they would review the building

regulation guidance related to fire safety, making sure it clearly set out the need for external

walls to adequately resist the spread of flame and that refurbishments could pose a risk to existing fire protection.

The deadline they'd set themselves was March 2017,

but no update had ever been published.

In the meeting on the morning of the Grenfell Tower fire,

Melanie Dawes said the thought of missing that deadline

...