Today, the years-long Grenfell Inquiry releases its final report into the fire that cost 72 lives.
What started as a small kitchen fire in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower, which contained 129 flats and stands at just over 200ft, ended up being the deadliest domestic blaze since the Second World War.
The report into phase one, published in October 2019, concluded the North Kensington property’s cladding did not comply with building regulations and was the “principal” reason for the rapid and “profoundly shocking” spread of the blaze.
It also heavily criticised the London Fire Brigade (LFB) for “serious shortcomings” and “systemic” failures in its handling of the fire, specifically due to its controversial “stay put” strategy which meant residents were told to stay in their flats by firefighters and 999 operators for nearly two hours after the fire broke out.
Image: The tower now holds a tribute to the victims. Pic: PA
The report published today relates to phase two, which looked into the critical circumstances and decisions leading up to the disaster – and it will name and shame those deemed responsible for devastation.
This is a minute-by-minute breakdown of exactly how the tragedy happened in the early hours of 14 June 2017, based on the statements of emergency workers and survivors.
12.54am: Behailu Kebede, 45 at the time, lives on the fourth floor in flat 16. He is asleep when his smoke alarm goes off and wakes to find white smoke billowing from behind his fridge-freezer. He dials 999 to report the fire.
12.59am: The first firefighters arrive on the scene. They are led by LFB watch manager Michael Dowden, a firefighter of around 13 years, who sees an “orange glow” coming from the window of flat 16.
1.06am: Mr Dowden notes the fire has “breached the window of flat 16”. He later tells the inquiry this isn’t uncommon in high-rise fires and therefore isn’t too concerned.
1.09am: The fire in flat 16 breaks out into the exterior cladding of the building and starts to climb the east facade rapidly.
1.14am: Firefighters enter the kitchen of flat 16 for the first time.
1.16am: Mr Dowden becomes “uncomfortable” about the way the fire is burning, later saying he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t being suppressed as a breathing apparatus team was inside.
1.19am: Mr Dowden notices the cladding is alight. He would later tell the inquiry he felt “out of my comfort zone” and “helpless” as the fire took hold.
Image: Watch manager Michael Dowden was emotional at points when speaking to the inquiry in 2018
1.21am: Dr Naomi-Yuan Li, who is in flat 195 on the 22nd floor with her cousin, Lydia, calls 999 after smelling something “like burning plastic” while lying in bed using her phone.
1.25am: 56-year-old Dennis Murphy, who died during the fire, makes the first 999 to report smoke coming into a flat. He is in number 111, on the 14th floor.
His son Peter told the inquiry he also called his family to tell them he was trapped and struggling to breathe.
1.26am: Met Police declares a major incident. Residents are still being told to stay in their flats.
The “stay put” strategy is standard guidance for high-rise blocks and assumes that a fire will be contained in one room or floor, allowing firefighters to tackle flames while residents remain in their homes.
1.27am: The fire reaches the roof and starts to spread horizontally. Fire chiefs believe only the cladding from the outside is burning but that it is still controllable internally.
1.29am: Mr Dowden increases the number of pumps being used to 20 – having escalated from four, to six, to eight, to 10 and to 15 between 1.13am and 1.28am. He says he is becoming “increasingly concerned”.
The amount of pumps is used by firefighters to measure the severity of a fire.
1.30am: Miriem Elgwahry, 27, is the first person to call 999 reporting that the fire is penetrating a flat. She was with her mum Eslah Elgwahry in flat 196 on the 22nd floor.
Miriem’s brother Ahmed Elgwahry said he was on the phone to them later that night and they were telling him they couldn’t breathe. Miriem and Eslah died later that night.
1.31am: After firefighter David Baddilo tells Mr Dowden they need more resources, the watch manager increases the pumps to 25.
By this time 110 out of 297 occupants have escaped, as the fire starts to spread to the north elevation of the tower.
1.42am: The London Ambulance Service declares a “significant incident”.
A report by fire protection expert Dr Barbara Lane states residents should have been told to evacuate by around this time at the latest, but the “stay put” policy remains in place.
1.45am: The first police helicopter arrives at the scene.
1.50am: Mr Dowden hands over incident command to station manager Andrew Walton, who had been listening to the incident on the radio while on a standby shift. By this time 168 of 297 occupants have escaped, though firefighters don’t know the numbers at this stage.
1.58am: Mr Walton is still trying to inform firefighters that he is in charge of the incident when he sees DAC Andrew O’Loughlin, who is two ranks above him, “making big steps” towards him.
Mr O’Loughlin, who has been a firefighter since 1989, had heard 25 pumps mentioned on his radio and knew it was an “exceptional” situation, and that “something very serious was going on”. He is surprised there aren’t more high-ranking officers at the scene already.
He asks Mr Dowden how many people were still in the building, but he doesn’t have a number. He says many people have already come out from the lower floors, and Mr O’Loughlin estimates there are between 100-200 people still in there.
“We didn’t know the condition, age, ambulatory or health issues of any of these people and so I knew that getting them down a smoke logged staircase was going to be a challenge,” he would later say, explaining why he felt the “stay put” advice would be best for some of the people in the building.
2am: Flames travel across the north and east elevations of the tower, and start to spread around the top of the building and diagonally across the face of the building, affecting flats in the southeast and northwest corners.
2.04am: Group manager Richard Welch declares himself incident commander and increases the number of pumps to 40, not knowing that Mr O’Loughlin has already assumed command.
2.06am: Mr Welch declares a major incident on behalf of the LFB.
2.11am: Mr Welch realises Mr O’Loughlin is on site, apologises for taking control and fills him in on what he has done. Mr O’Loughlin thanks him and says he is happy with the actions he took.
2.15am: Senior operations manager Joanne Smith, who has 23 years’ experience, arrives at LFB’s control room and receives a briefing.
2.20am: Flames start to spread to south elevation. Between now and 2.50am, the control room receives 35 emergency calls from or on behalf of trapped Grenfell residents.
One was from Marcio Gomes in flat 183 on floor 21, who was trapped with his wife, who was seven months pregnant, and his two daughters. Mr Gomes, his wife and daughters survived the blaze, but his son Logan was stillborn in hospital as a result of the smoke.
Image: Mr Gomes speaking at the inquiry in 2018
2.23am: A Met Police operator calls LFB’s control room to tell them a caller is trapped on the 23rd floor and their phone has cut out.
One of the LFB’s control room officers responds: “I think they’re trapped everywhere.”
2.26am: The London Ambulance Service (LAS) declares a major incident.
2.35am – ‘stay put’ advice is revoked
Ms Smith has been listening in to two long-running emergency calls, one of which is with the El-Wahabi family in flat 182 on floor 21.
The El-Wahabi family consisted of Abdul Aziz, 52, and his wife Fouzia, 42, and their three children – 21-year-old Yasin, 16-year-old Nur Huda and eight-year-old Mehdi. They all died on the 21st floor.
Image: Mehdi El-Wahabi (centre), his father Abdulaziz (top left), mother Faouzia (bottom right), brother Yasin, 20 (top right), and sister Nur Huda, 15 (bottom left)
Ms Smith says listening to these calls is making it clear the situation is getting worse in terms of smoke and heat, and she becomes “increasingly uncomfortable with the ‘stay put’ policy”.
The LFB control room decides to revoke the “stay put” advice and tells all occupants calling 999 to leave the tower at all costs and that it is a matter of life and death.
Mr O’Loughlin, still in charge of the scene at Grenfell, later tells the inquiry he wasn’t informed of this change for some time and that he was “confused” by it once he was.
2.44am: LFB assistant commissioner (AC) Andy Roe takes over incident command from Mr O’Loughlin. He later tells the inquiry Mr O’Loughlin had not revoked the “stay put” advice at that time.
Mr Roe, who joined the LFB as a firefighter in 2002 and had been made AC in January 2017, says he knew as soon as he arrived on the scene that there had been a “complete building system failure” to contain the blaze.
He could see the whole tower from the third floor upwards was alight.
2.47am:Mr Roe officially revokes the “stay put” advice.
He says in his testimony he doesn’t recall being told that the control room had already stopped giving the “stay put” advice, and that he made the decision solely because he could see the fire had spread in all directions, resulting in a total failure of compartmentation – a safety feature designed to keep a fire in the region of origin.
Inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick later said more lives could have been saved had a “stay put” policy been abandoned sooner – but Mr Roe was individually praised for making the call.
2.50am: The fire spreads horizontally across the south elevation at the top of the building.
3am: The fire starts to spread across the west elevation of the tower, from north to south.
3.20am: Mr Roe chairs the first Tactical Co-ordination Group (TCG) meeting, attended by representatives of the Met Police, the LAS and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
At this stage, 100 people are believed to be trapped in the tower and it is understood three people have died.
4.02am: Fires on the south and west elevations start to converge at the top of the southern corner of the west face. Rescue efforts across the building continue for hours.
8.07am: Elpidio Bonifacio, a partially sighted retiree, becomes the last survivor to leave the tower when two firefighters rescue him from his flat on the 11th floor.
Mr Bonifacio, whose wife of 42 years was at work, later tells the inquiry he had “lost all hope” and was “ready to die” before the firefighters came and supported him down the staircase.
The aftermath
It wasn’t until November 2017 that the identities of all 72 deaths were confirmed by authorities. Among them were 53 adults, 18 children and a stillborn baby who died on the day of the blaze. One of the people who lost their lives was 10-weeks pregnant.
The first report from the Grenfell Inquiry found the LFB’s preparation for a tower block blaze such as Grenfell was “gravely inadequate” and its lack of an evacuation plan was a “major omission”.
Inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick did, however, praise the “extraordinary courage and selfless devotion to duty” of firefighters and said “those in the control room and those deployed on the incident ground responded with great courage and dedication in the most harrowing of circumstances”.
Sky News will have full coverage of the Grenfell report when it is published at 11am – watch a special programme on the disaster on Sky News at 8pm
Labour’s welfare reforms bill has passed, with 335 MPs voting in favour and 260 against.
It came after the government watered down the bill earlier this evening, making a dramatic last-minute concession to the demands of would-be rebel MPs who were concerned about the damage the policy would do to disabled people.
The government has a working majority of 166, so it would have taken 84 rebels to defeat the bill.
In total, 49 Labour MPs still voted against the bill despite the concessions. No MPs from other parties voted alongside the government, although three MPs elected for Labour who have since had the whip removed did so.
Which Labour MPs rebelled?
Last week, 127 Labour MPs signed what they called a “reasoned amendment”, a letter stating their objection to the bill as it was.
The government responded with some concessions to try and win back the rebels, which was enough to convince some of them. But they were still ultimately forced to make more changes today.
In total, 68 MPs who signed the initial “reasoned amendment” eventually voted in favour of the bill.
Nine in 10 MPs elected for the first time at the 2024 general election voted with the government.
That compares with fewer than three quarters of MPs who were voted in before that.
A total of 42 Labour MPs also voted in favour of an amendment that would have stopped the bill from even going to a vote at all. That was voted down by 328 votes to 149.
How does the rebellion compare historically?
If the wording of the bill had remained unchanged and 127 MPs or more had voted against it on Tuesday, it would have been up there as one of the biggest rebellions in British parliamentary history.
As it happened, it was still higher than the largest recorded during Tony Blair’s first year as PM, when 47 of his Labour colleagues (including Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, who also voted against the bill on Tuesday) voted no to his plan to cut benefits for single-parent families.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
A 92-year-old man has been sentenced to life with a minimum term of 20 years in prison for the rape and murder of an elderly widow nearly 60 years ago.
Ryland Headley was found guilty on Monday of killing 75-year-old Louisa Dunne at her Bristol home in June 1967, in what is thought to be the UK’s longest cold case to reach trial, and has been told by the judge he “will die in prison”.
The mother-of-two’s body was found by neighbours after Headley, then a 34-year-old railway worker, forced his way inside the terraced house in the Easton area before attacking her.
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The UK’s longest cold case to reach trial
Police found traces of semen and a palm print on one of the rear windows inside the house – but it was about 20 years before DNA testing.
The case remained unsolved for more than 50 years until Avon and Somerset detectives sent off items from the original investigation and found a DNA match to Headley.
He had moved to Suffolk after the murder and served a prison sentence for raping two elderly women in 1977.
Prosecutors said the convictions showed he had a “tendency” to break into people’s homes at night and, in some cases, “target an elderly woman living alone, to have sex with her despite her attempts to fend him off, and to threaten violence”.
Image: Louisa Dunne in 1933. Pic: Avon and Somerset Constabulary
Image: Headley during his arrest. Pic: Avon and Somerset Constabulary
Headley, from Ipswich, who did not give evidence, denied raping and murdering Ms Dunne, but was found guilty of both charges after a trial at Bristol Crown Court.
Detectives said forces across the country are investigating whether Headley could be linked to other unsolved crimes.
Mrs Dunne’s granddaughter, Mary Dainton, who was 20 when her relative was killed, told the court that her murder “had a big impact on my mother, my aunt and her family.
“I don’t think my mother ever recovered from it. The anxiety caused by her mother’s brutal rape and murder clouded the rest of her life.
“The fact the offender wasn’t caught caused my mother to become and remain very ill.
“When people found out about the murder, they withdrew from us. In my experience, there is a stigma attached to rape and murder.”
Image: The front of Louisa Dunne’s home. Pic: Avon and Somerset Constabulary
Image: Louisa Dunne’s skirt. Pic: Avon and Somerset Constabulary
Finding out her grandmother’s killer had been caught after almost six decades “turned my life upside down,” she said.
“I feel sad and very tired, which has affected the relationships I have with those close to me. I didn’t expect to deal with something of such emotional significance at this stage of my life.
“It saddens me deeply that all the people who knew and loved Louisa are not here to see that justice has been done.”
Image: Palmprint images. Pic: Avon and Somerset Constabulary
After her statement, Mr Justice Sweeting told Mrs Dainton: “It is not easy to talk about matters like this in public.
“Thank you very much for doing it in such a clear and dignified way.”
The judge told Headley his crimes showed “a complete disregard for human life and dignity.
“Mrs Dunne was vulnerable, she was a small elderly woman living alone. You treated her as a means to an end.
“The violation of her home, her body and ultimately her life was a pitiless and cruel act by a depraved man.
“She must have experienced considerable pain and fear before her death,” he said.
Sentencing Headley to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years, the judge told him: “You will never be released, you will die in prison.”
Detective Inspector Dave Marchant of Avon and Somerset Police said Headley was “finally facing justice for the horrific crimes he committed against Louisa in 1967.
“The impact of this crime has cast a long shadow over the city and in particular Louisa’s family, who have had to deal with the sadness and trauma ever since.”
The officer praised Ms Dainton’s “resilience and courage” during what he called a “unique” case and thanked investigators from his own force, as well as South West Forensics, detectives from Suffolk Constabulary, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Three managers at the hospital where Lucy Letby worked have been arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter.
They were in senior roles at the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016 and have been bailed pending further enquiries, Cheshire Constabulary said. Their names have not been made public.
Letby, 35, was found guilty of murdering seven children and attempting to murder seven more between June 2015 and June 2016 while working in the hospital’s neonatal unit.
Detective Superintendent Paul Hughes explained that gross negligent manslaughter focuses on the “action or inaction of individuals”.
There is also an investigation into corporate manslaughter at the hospital, which began in October 2023.
That focuses on “senior leadership and their decision-making”, Mr Hughes said. The intention there is to determine whether any “criminality has taken place concerning the response to the increased levels of fatalities”.
The scope was widened to include gross negligence manslaughter in March of this year.
Image: Lucy Letby was found guilty of murdering seven children and attempting to murder seven more
Mr Hughes said it is “important to note” that this latest development “does not impact on the convictions of Lucy Letby for multiple offences of murder and attempted murder”.
He added: “Both the corporate manslaughter and gross negligence manslaughter elements of the investigation are continuing and there are no set timescales for these.
“Our investigation into the deaths and non-fatal collapses of babies at the neo-natal units of both the Countess of Chester Hospital and the Liverpool Women’s Hospital between the period of 2012 to 2016 is also ongoing.”
Earlier this year, lawyers for Lucy Letby called for the suspension of the inquiry, claiming there was “overwhelming and compelling evidence” that her convictions were unsafe.
Their evidence has been passed to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, and Letby’s legal team hopes her case will be referred back to the Court of Appeal.