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

Before we take a break while the inquiry writes its final report, we have one more episode for you,

an interview with Nick Hurd, the former Minister for Policing and the Fire Service.

In 2019, he stepped down as an

MP and became the government's independent advisor on Grenfell Tower. On the morning of the Grenfell

Tower fire back in 2017, you'd been Minister for Policing and the Fire Service for two days.

What's your overriding memory of that day of the 14th of June?

Most people just profound shock. I mean, I don't think anyone expected something like that

to be happening in kind of modern Britain. And so I don't think anything could have prepared

me for that. And then I went down to visit the tower, the site of the disaster around about lunchtime

and just felt the raw kind of horror of the building and then had to go immediately into

chairing some meetings in Whitehall to try and coordinate the support.

So it was a sort of stunning first day.

Something that stays with you. Yeah, never leaves it.

During your evidence to the inquiry, you said the response in the aftermath of the fire was

wholly inadequate. What failings in the government's response do you now see in that immediate

aftermath? Well, I said this to the inquiry when I gave evidence. I think we were too slow to

realize that the council was failing and the council was overwhelmed. By too slow, I mean

possibly two days, but that's an eternity in this context. And I think, you know, we should have

been quicker to challenge what the council was saying. And their message was, we don't need any help. We don't need any help. And we should have been quicker to challenge what the council was saying, you know, and their message was, we don't need any help, we don't need help.

And we should have been quicker to challenge that and get what I call our own ground truth.

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