Grenfell Tower was built by a Labour Council under Labour government in 2007-2008, when Sadiq Khan was the Housing Minister.
Incorrect. Grenfell Tower was built in 1974 under a Conservative council. There was a Labour government at this time, but Sadiq Khan was not a minster: he was a young child in 1974.
The cladding used on Grenfell Tower was chosen by Ed Miliband to meet EU climate change legislation.
Incorrect. Ed Miliband did not choose the cladding on Grenfell Tower. There is no evidence we’re aware of that environmental legislation was behind the choice of cladding material.
The cladding used on Grenfell Tower has previously been banned in the USA.
Correct. The cladding used on Grenfell Tower is been banned on tall building in some parts of the USA.
As Mayor, Sadiq Khan produced a report to say that the Fire Services did not need further funding.
Correct. In 2016 a report commissioned by Mayor Khan recommended that the London Fire Brigade did not need its budget increased.
Jeremy Corbyn has voted against the installation of sprinkler systems in tower blocks and high-rise buildings.
Incorrect. There is no such vote that we are aware of.
An image that makes several claims about the Labour party and Grenfell Tower has been shared over 1000 times on Facebook. Most of the claims are incorrect, although some are accurate.
Grenfell Tower was part of a housing complex in West Kensington, London. On 14 June 2017 a fire broke out in the tower, which caused the deaths of 72 people. There is an ongoing public inquiry examining the circumstances surrounding the fire.
“Grenfell Tower was built by a Labour Council under a Labour government in 2007-2008, when Sadiq Khan was the Housing Minister.”
This is incorrect.
Grenfell Tower was built in 1974, not 2007-2008, in the London Borough Council of Kensington and Chelsea. Since 1964, when this borough was formed, the council has always been controlled by the Conservative party, though there was a national Labour government in 1974, led by Harold Wilson.
Work on the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower took place between 2014 and 2016.
Sadiq Khan was born in 1970, meaning that he would have been three or four years old at the time the Tower was built. He was the MP for Tooting between 2005 and 2016 and had several ministerial roles in that time, but has never served as the Minister of Housing.
“As Mayor, Sadiq Khan produced a report to say that the Fire Services did not need further funding.”
This is broadly correct.
Sadiq Khan commissioned a report into the resourcing of the London Fire Brigade, to “assess the impact of cuts made to the service under Boris Johnson on the ability of the service to keep Londoners safe”. This report, written by Anthony Mayer (a former Chief Executive of the Greater London Authority) and published in November 2016, said that the London Fire Brigade “coped well” with the funding reductions.
The report recommended that the budget should not be increased, but that there should be no further reduction either.
We have contacted the Mayor’s office for more information.
“The cladding, which had previously been banned in the USA, was chosen by Ed Milliband [sic] to meet EU climate change legislation.”
The external cladding on Grenfell Tower has been identified by the Grenfell Tower inquiry as being “the primary cause of the rapid spread of fire” during the disaster. The cladding, added to the building in 2015, was composed of Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) panels with a polyethylene (PE) core.
This type cladding is reportedly banned on buildings over 40 feet across most, but not all, jurisdictions of the USA. Grenfell Tower was 220 feet tall.
We can find no evidence linking Ed Miliband to the cladding on the tower. A report on the strategies for greener homes was produced under Ed Miliband as Secretary of State of Energy and Climate change, but it does not make any recommendations about cladding.
The type of cladding proposed to be used in the refurbishment of the tower was changed during the refurbishment process to a cheaper version.
In 2017, the Daily Mail claimed that Grenfell tower’s cladding was put in place to meet green energy efficiency targets. But a fact check from Carbon Brief argues that the reporting by Daily Mail was “highly selective and misleading” and that the primary reasons for change to Grenfell Tower mentioned by the council were not green energy targets.
An Express article cited 2010 EU regulations for building’ energy consumption in relation to the fire, but did not offer evidence of the link.
“Jeremy Corbyn has voted against the installation of sprinkler systems in tower blocks and high-rise buildings.”
This is incorrect.
This claim appears to have originated from Twitter posts (one of which has since been deleted) which said that “On June 7, 2005, @jeremycorbyn voted to exempt tower blocks built before 2007 from requiring sprinklers”. However, there were no votes in the Commons on this date. The regulations linked to in the tweets—The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005—are a type of legislation known as a “statutory instrument”, which are often not voted on. And these regulations don’t mention the sprinklers at all.
The regulations that actually govern sprinklers in buildings are known as “Approved Document B (fire safety)”, which were changed in 2007 to make sprinklers compulsory in new buildings more than 30m high. This did not apply to existing buildings, however. These regulations were also not voted on.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because, whilst some of the claims are accurate, the majority are incorrect.
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