Labour councillors representing the survivors of the Grenfell tower fire have claimed they are being excluded from the inquiry.

The councillors, including Emma Dent Coad, who unexpectedly overturned a Conservative majority of more than 7,000 to win the seat for Labour the week before the blaze, said their request for core participant status had been turned down three times by the inquiry chairman, Sir Martin Moore-Bick.



“We’re feeling marginalised and neutralised,” she said. “This is our patch, it’s us who work on the ground. We have far more knowledge and experience than someone who’s never been up a tower block.”

The inquiry has granted core participant status to 521 people, organisations and entities. This guarantees legal funding, the first sight of documents disclosed by other participants, such as the tenant management organisation, and the right to cross-examine witnesses.

The number is thought to include all the bereaved, as well as people closely involved in managing the 24-storey block, and involved in the events around the fire and its aftermath.

But the Labour councillors have been told they must work with the Conservatives under a single legal team, despite Labour’s long years of opposition and criticism of the management of social housing in the borough.

Dent Coad said this could give the impression that they had been engaged in joint enterprise with the ruling Conservative group against the constituents. The councillors’ lawyer, John Cooper QC, said there was a clear conflict of interest.

The inquiry has struggled from the start to win the confidence of local residents. Moore-Bick, a retired judge, is seen as rigid and formal, and although he has appointed a consultative panel of seven people, many survivors feel its members do not represent their lives.

Many of them, as well as those living in the flats connected by walkways to the tower, have yet to be granted core participant status. There are fears that a lack of confidence in the inquiry is deterring applications. The councillors argue that the rejection of their role as representatives of survivors will worsen the credibility gap.



Grenfell campaigners want a wider and more diverse advisory panel with decision-making powers to sit alongside the inquiry. They won a debate in parliament after a petition gained more than 150,000 signatures. But the prime minister has rejected the idea and Moore-Bick is proposing a community forum instead.

At a press conference on Friday, Dent Coad’s voice broke as she explained how people were coping nine months on. “It is still raw,” she said.

“People are still living in hotels and they are deteriorating, physically and mentally. And the prospect of not getting justice at the end of it, of fearing they may not get justice at all, it is driving people over the edge.”

Nine months after the fire, the inquiry has yet to hold its first evidence session. That has been promised for May or early June, shortly before the first anniversary of the blaze. An interim report into the immediate causes was originally promised by Easter, but has slipped back to the end of this year.



An inquiry spokesperson said it had received nearly 300,000 documents under the disclosure procedure. It is thought they cover every aspect of the fire, including the refurbishment and the external cladding that is blamed for spreading the fire so rapidly.

In a letter to the prime minister in November, Moore-Bick said he had “been driven to the conclusion” that he could not go faster without undermining the police investigation as well as the inquiry.

