The Grenfell Tower fire is often discussed as a failure of construction or local management. Peter Apps, deputy editor of Inside Housing and the journalist who broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding just thirty-four days before the fire, argues it was something far larger: a terminal failure of the British state. His Orwell Prize-winning book Show Me the Bodies traces how three decades of deregulation, corporate dishonesty, and institutional indifference combined to turn a reinforced concrete tower into a death trap.
“Show Me the Bodies”
The book takes its title from remarks attributed to Brian Martin, the civil servant responsible for fire safety guidance at the privatised national research laboratory, BRE. According to multiple witnesses at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Martin used this phrase when experts urged him to tighten fire safety regulations in response to a series of devastating fires, including the 2009 Lakanal House fire in Southwark, in which six people died due to combustible cladding.
The implication was stark: the government would not impose new restrictions on businesses unless there was a sufficient body count to justify the cost. In a bureaucratic culture built on cost-cutting, there were simply not enough deaths to warrant action. Martin later expressed regret at the Inquiry, but many of the corporations involved did not. Lead counsel Richard Millett KC described the conduct of cladding and insulation manufacturers as “incompetent”, “cynical”, and “possibly dishonest.”
Regulation by Death
This mentality was not an aberration but the product of a systematic programme of deregulation stretching back to the 1980s. Under successive governments, the institutions that should have protected the public, the Building Research Establishment, the British Board of Agrément, building control itself, were privatised, defunded, or stripped of the power to intervene effectively.
By the 2010s, this had intensified further. The “Red Tape Challenge” and policies such as “one-in, two-out” (later “one-in, three-out”) forbade officials from introducing any new safety regulation without scrapping others of equal or greater cost to industry. Fire safety became a secondary concern to economic competitiveness. As Apps writes in conclusion: “Thirty years of deregulation had exacted its tragic and, ultimately avoidable, price.”
A Pattern of Ignored Warnings
Apps documents how Grenfell was not a one-off failure but the culmination of warnings from a series of earlier fires that were never acted upon. Each exposed the same danger, combustible cladding on the exterior of residential buildings, and each was followed by inaction:
1991: Knowsley Heights, Merseyside
Fire spread the full height of an 11-storey building via its exterior cladding. No one was injured, and no regulatory changes followed.
2009: Lakanal House, Southwark
Six people died when fire spread through exterior panels. The coroner made specific safety recommendations; the government agreed to review building regulations but delayed action for years.
2017: Grenfell Tower, North Kensington
72 people died. ACM cladding with a polyethylene core, described as containing material equivalent to “pure petrol”, had been installed despite repeatedly failing the already inadequate testing standards.
“Grenfell tells us something about the priority our political and economic system places on human life, especially when those lives are likely to be poor, immigrant and from ethnic minority backgrounds.”
Peter Apps, Show Me the Bodies
Why This Matters for Teaching
Apps’ account reframes Grenfell as the inevitable result of a government that viewed safety as an optional expense and human lives as a data point in a cost-benefit analysis. For educators, it provides essential context: the fire was not caused by a single act of negligence but by a political culture in which “red tape” (the regulations designed to keep people alive) was treated as a burden on business. Understanding this is central to teaching about Grenfell through the lens of Education for Disaster Justice.
Optional Video: Peter Apps on the Systemic Failures Behind Grenfell
In the following video, Peter Apps explains the regulatory and systemic failures that allowed the disaster to occur, providing vital context to the “show me the bodies” mentality and the decades of deregulation that preceded the fire.