‘Going into people’s homes and ripping out the entire wall finish was just an unimaginable amount of disruption,” Andrew McQuatt told the Grenfell Tower inquiry one morning in September. 

McQuatt, a project engineer at consultant Max Fordham and part of the original Grenfell refurbishment team, said the idea of insulating the insides of Grenfell’s exterior walls to improve the thermal efficiency of the block was “very quickly discounted” in 2012 in favour of overcladding.  

Five years and £10m of regeneration work later, the highly combustible aluminium composite material cladding and flammable insulation added to the 24-storey west London block would catch fire, delivering catastrophic disruption, claiming 72 lives and shattering hundreds more.

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