Grenfell – what should happen now?

Six urgent priorities that should follow the Inquiry

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tube train runs on a raised track, in the distance is a tower block wrapped in white material with a green heart on it.

I remember standing at the base of Grenfell Tower on the morning of the 14th June 2017, talking with firefighters, gathering clergy to act as emergency volunteers, praying with evacuees from the surrounding blocks, as the building still smouldered. At the time the question on everyone’s lips was: how could something like this happen in sophisticated twenty-first century Britain?

Now we know.

In one sense the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell tower fire told us nothing new. Few people who have followed the Inquiry over the last six years will have been surprised by its conclusions. What is new is to see the dreadful catalogue of ‘incompetence dishonesty and greed’ laid out in excoriating detail for all to see.

So what should happen now? At least six things must be on the agenda:

Combustible cladding on remaining buildings around the country should be removed as soon as possible. Government estimates suggest there are 4,600 buildings around the country with unsafe cladding. Less than one third of them have had their remediation completed, and work is yet to start on half of them. And, astonishing as it may sound, this is now more than seven years after Grenfell. Cladding that is illegal on new buildings can still remain on existing ones. Developers and owners who are responsible for this state of affairs should be made to pay for the remediation rather than passing those costs on to leaseholders, or delaying remediation for technical and bureaucratic reasons. Institutional resistance to this, as outlined recently by Michael Gove, someone who from my dealing with him on Grenfell, was one of the better politicians to deal with this issue, has to be overcome with urgency.
Prosecution of those who have been identified in the inquiry as bearing responsibility for the fire should also be brought as soon as possible. The police investigation suggests that it will be a number of years before court cases take place. The victims of this tragedy have already had to wait seven long years and now face the prospect of another three or even more years until justice is served. That is too long.
Those named and shamed in the report should examine their own hearts. Some remorse and apology has been evident from some, but not enough. Many still deny responsibility despite seven years of evidence-gathering. This is not a matter of revenge, but an indispensable step towards justice for everyone. Those named have presumably carried a burden of guilt over these past years. The Christian doctrine of repentance, confession and absolution tells us that there is a relief in finally admitting culpability, bearing the penalty, and finally, once all this has happened, receiving a measure of absolution.

We might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

The companies involved often have big pockets and the bereaved and survivors are ordinary people without the resources to pay expensive legal fees. The government should set aside a sum of money to enable victims, if they wish, to bring a civil case against those accused in the report. Arguably this should have happened many years before to speed up the process of justice.
A wider debate needs to take place in our society as to how we place love for neighbour at the heart of national life. A libertarian individualism which focusses on personal fulfilment and a view of freedom as doing what we like as long as we don’t harm others, rather than freedom to do the good has led us to this point. What would it mean in company law, for example, for each business or institution to have to explain how it is seeking the genuine welfare of its staff, clients and customers, not as an add on in their ESG agenda, but as the primary purpose of the organisation?
We need a spiritual renewal. Toleration rather than persecution of the neighbour was a good legacy of the Enlightenment, but it is not enough to build a well-functioning society. We are commanded not just to tolerate our neighbours but to love them. And this only be justified if my neighbour has ultimate transcendent value. The new atheism was an act of cultural vandalism, undermining faith in God, an objective basis for each human life, and having nothing to replace it with. As Nick Cave recently put it: “People need meaning. And secular society has not come up with the goods.” This is why religious traditions including Christianity have tended to link love for God to love for neighbour. What that spiritual renewal looks like is hard to tell, and yet we have perhaps seen a stirring of it in recent times.

If something approaching those six things happened, then we might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

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Justice

Music

17 June 2025

5 min read

Millions of people are still cold, hungry and naked – will you be there?

The call to justice that echoes from Trafalgar Square to primary schools

Pete Moorey

Pete Moorey is a campaigner for Christian Aid.

A school choir sings in an ornate abbey setting

Twyford School Choir sings in Westminster Abbey.

Dean & Chapter of Westminster.

I’m getting close to my 50th birthday, so I’m prone to nostalgia. My mind wanders back forty years to my primary school days in the early 1980s in a village in Sussex.

Once or twice a week, we’d have school assembly. This included singing hymns. Not something that a shy seven-year-old would usually enjoy. But, in fact, we belted out a series of classics with gusto, accompanied by an almost proficient teacher on an almost tuned piano.

To Be A Pilgrim with its lyrics about fighting giants. All Things Bright And Beautiful and those purple headed mountains. And then our favourite When I Needed A Neighbour with the opportunity to scream out the words “I was cold, I was NAKED!” at top volume, cheekily looking at your classmates as you asked, “Were you there?”

The thing about those hymns was that the lyrics stuck. Not just now, decades on, but even back then. And so when a teacher in assembly started to talk to the school about the famine in Ethiopia or the hurricane in the Caribbean, you began to think “Is that my neighbour?” And when your church encouraged you to deliver envelopes door to door to raise money for Christian Aid Week, you asked yourself “Was I there?”

Of course that was the intention of those songs. The story of When I Needed A Neighbour is bound up with the history of social justice movements in the UK and in particular the organisation I work for, Christian Aid.

Christian Aid was founded in 1945 by the British and Irish churches, who felt convicted to do something to tackle the refugee crisis and poverty sweeping across Europe following the Second World War.

By the late 1950s, it was running Christian Aid Week - a big charity appeal to tackle global poverty long before Live Aid or Comic Relief. And as Christian Aid reached its twentieth anniversary in 1965, this annual fundraiser was a big deal.

Such a big deal in fact, it decided to launch the fundraiser in Trafalgar Square by running a Beat & Folk Festival. You can find an old newsreel of the occasion on YouTube. Nelson’s Column is surrounded by thousands of young people listening to the Christian equivalent of Peter, Paul and Mary and getting fired up about global injustice.

For the occasion, the then Christian Aid area secretary for London, Brian Frost, decided that a new song needed to be written. And so he approached the modern hymn writer of the moment, Sydney Carter. Two years early, Sydney had written his most famous hymn Lord of the Dance.

Brian was of that era when Christians were at the heart of the anti-apartheid movement and committed to ecumenical action. And so combining this passion for social justice and the folk song mastery of Carter - When I Needed A Neighbour was born.

As Christian Aid marks its 80th anniversary, we revisited this classic. When you watch the newsreel of an early performance in 1965, you quickly realise its folk credentials. It’s not just the fact that it’s being sung by marvellously hirsute men, it’s also there in the folk melody, guitar accompaniment and sung refrains.

A year later Sydney Carter would record an EP that included Lord of the Dance which featured the folk royalty of Martin Carthy on guitar. For folk aficionados, you’ll know him as one of the English folk music greats - married to the incredible Norma Watterson and father to Eliza Carthy. For those less familiar with the genre, he was also an important inspiration for Paul Simon and Bob Dylan - yes, him off A Complete Unknown.

There’s no evidence that Martin appeared on When I Needed A Neighbour but I think his involvement a year later confirms that the song sits firmly in the Sixties folk music boom. To young ears, it would have been hip. To older ears, perhaps scandalous.

How do you reimagine such a classic as When I Needed a Neighbour, 60 years on from its birth - and now 80 years into Christian Aid’s history? Especially at a time when we witness our global neighbours in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, the DRC, and more wondering if - in the face of conflict and humanitarian disaster - anyone is there.

We started with the lyrics. In 1965, Sydney Carter captured something of the simplicity of the issue at hand. People are cold, hungry and in need of shelter. And there’s something that each and every one of us can do, in our common humanity, no matter who we are, whatever our creed, ethnicity or background.

Within a few years of the song being written however, Christian Aid had a lightbulb moment - it wasn’t enough for us to respond to emergencies around the world. Not enough also to work with communities on long term economic development. No, if are to live out God’s call to act justly and to love mercy, then we needed to be part of movements tackling the unjust structures and systems that result in poverty and inequality around the world.

And so in returning to When I Needed A Neighbour and working with hymn writer Ally Barrett, we have now written new words that act as a call to each and every one of us to be a neighbour by speaking out for justice. This is something that Christian Aid has done throughout our history, calling for action to drop the debt in the 1990s or as one of the first development organisations campaigning for climate justice in the 2000s.

This week we marked our 80th anniversary at Westminster Abbey by recommitting ourselves to God’s call for justice. And this included the Kingdom Choir (who famously sang at Harry and Megan’s wedding) and the Sacred Choir from Twyford Church of England school in London performing a gospel-tinged version of When I Needed A Neighbour.

My hope is that, 60 years on, the song will still carry resonance. In an age when conflicts rage, the climate crisis runs riot and inequality is rife, isn’t it time to answer When I Needed A Neighbour’s call again?

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