A fire officer recalled advising a father trying to escape Grenfell Tower to turn back and search for his children in the smoke-logged stairwell, despite fearing that he would not survive.

Jason Oliff, station manager at Chiswick and Feltham north-west area, told the public inquiry into the blaze of the moment he believed that advice to evacuate the block had cost the lives of an entire family.

Oliff was responsible for relaying information from 999 calls made by trapped residents from the control room to the incident ground to aid rescue efforts.

He was called over by a control room operator, who had advised a man on the 21st floor on the other end of the phone to try to escape with his heavily pregnant wife and young children. The operator had expected firefighters to guide the family through their smoke-logged descent, but realised that the family would have to make the journey alone.

The man stayed on the phone, first saying he had lost his wife in the confusion, and later becoming separated from his children.

In a written statement, Oliff said: “The operator could hear the male calling out for his children. He was now in extreme distress.

“The operator was also understandably distressed. She informed me that the male didn’t know what to do and again asked me, ‘What do I tell him?’

“This was an impossible decision to make. There was no right or wrong answer I could give and I did not give this advice easily. I told the operator ‘tell him to go back and get his daughters’.

“I knew in saying this that the male probably wouldn’t survive but my thinking was that, if it was me, I wouldn’t want to get out of that tower without my family and live with that for the rest of my life.”

The control operator later said she could hear the man talking to someone and believed he had found the children. A short while after she thought she could hear an unconscious male breathing.

Oliff said that a few months later he learned that the family had survived after being aided by firefighters, but that the unborn baby had died.

The baby was the youngest of 72 people who died as a result of the blaze on 14 June last year.

The fire officer also recalled that a lack of television footage in the control room had made it “difficult for us to know and picture what was going on at the incident itself”.

The control room was usually based in Merton, but due to routine repairs had been operating in Stratford, east London, on the night of the fire.

Oliff said that when he arrived at Stratford, one of the first things he noticed was that the TV was switched off. He was told it was broken. “Merton always has a large-screen television switched on and I believe this is an invaluable tool in decision-making when an incident like this is unfolding,” he added.

“I believe that having access to the images of this event as it happened would have assisted us in making assessments from our remote location.”