\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>here is something profoundly wrong when the company behind Grenfell Tower\u2019s flammable cladding paid more compensation to its shareholders than to victims of the disaster. Of Arconic\u2019s \u00a386m in Grenfell-related settlements, all but \u00a31.5m was covered by insurers. Hardly enough to make a multinational think again. The company whose product the inquiry found was the \u201cprimary cause\u201d of the fire\u2019s rapid spread has ended up paying only a fraction of the wider social cost, while the multibillion-pound bill for making hundreds of buildings safe falls largely on the state. In June 2017, 72 people \u2013 including 18 children \u2013 died in London\u2019s Grenfell Tower fire. Almost a decade later, nobody has been criminally charged over its causes. It\u2019s hard to conclude anything but that Britain\u2019s system of corporate accountability is rotten.<\/p>\n A new report by the thinktank Common Wealth and the financial investigations group FIND suggests putting right this state of affairs in England and Wales by adopting two changes that parliament could enact quickly. The first is a \u201cfailure to prevent\u201d law that would make companies responsible for having adequate systems to prevent foreseeable serious harm. The second is to adopt a \u201cpunitive damages\u201d approach. Rather than compensating victims for their loss, punitive damages ask what a company should pay for its conduct. Such an award against Arconic could have been used to meet the costs of remediation, the report says, \u201cat no public cost\u201d.<\/p>\n This is possible in America. Some Grenfell families tried to bring a case under US law, where damages can punish and deter corporate wrongdoing, not just compensate victims. Currently, Meta is accused in a California court of intentionally addicting children to Facebook and Instagram in pursuit of profit. It denies wrongdoing, but says litigation potentially exposes it to $1.4tn in penalties and changes to its products. Whatever the eventual outcome, the case shows how alleged social harm can be a company-sized risk.<\/p>\n Arconic successfully argued that the Grenfell families\u2019 case be heard in British courts, where civil compensation and criminal punishment are kept separate. The Metropolitan police are investigating 57 individuals and 20 organisations as criminal suspects, but no charges are expected before Grenfell\u2019s tenth anniversary. Compare that with Hong Kong\u2019s Wang Fuk Court fire, which killed 168 people in November 2025. Authorities immediately treated it as a potential crime involving corporate actors. Within seven months, seven people and two firms faced manslaughter charges. No one is suggesting authoritarian Hong Kong as a model. But nearly a decade without charges in Britain, against seven months in the far east, is an uncomfortable contrast.<\/p>\n There are reasons why justice has taken so long: the Covid pandemic disrupted the Grenfell public inquiry involving hundreds of core participants, and responsibility stretches across manufacturers, certifiers, architects, contractors and regulators. This exposes a deeper problem: the more entities involved, the easier it becomes for blame for a disaster to disappear between them.<\/p>\n Lawmakers know how to stop companies passing the buck. The polluter pays in environmental law. There are recall obligations in product safety and collective redress in competition law. Why aren\u2019t legal principles that are already used to force companies to account for economic and consumer harms being extended to catastrophic social harms? Until they are, the law will remain better at protecting investors rather than the public from corporate wrongdoing.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is something profoundly wrong when the company behind Grenfell Tower\u2019s flammable cladding paid more compensation to its shareholders than to victims of the disaster. Of Arconic\u2019s \u00a386m in Grenfell-related settlements, all but \u00a31.5m was covered by insurers. Hardly enough to make a multinational think again. The company whose product the inquiry found was the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1206,25197,477,1516,77,13243,1510,6805,913,12135,1511],"class_list":{"0":"post-51855","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-buck","10":"tag-companies","11":"tag-editorial","12":"tag-fire","13":"tag-grenfell","14":"tag-guardian","15":"tag-letting","16":"tag-pass","17":"tag-tower","18":"tag-view"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}