Less than £5,000

The Times at midnight:

Grenfell Tower refurbishers would have needed less than £5,000 to upgrade the building’s external panels to a fire-resistant version thought not to have been used, The Times can reveal.

Hundreds of aluminium panels, known as Reynobond, were installed on the 230ft west London property in a £8.6 million refurbishment. Witnesses described the building’s cladding, made up of the panels and an insulating underlayer, as going up like a “matchstick”.

Reynobond offers three types of panel: a standard one with a polyethylene core (PE) and two with fire resistant or “non combustible” cores. Grenfell Tower had reportedly been fitted with the cheaper PE version.

Well it was council flats you know. Not for People Like Us. No sense wasting £5,000 just for fire safety.

Firefighters have stopped looking for bodies because they’re worried the building might collapse.

The Labour MP David Lammy has called the Grenfell Tower blaze “corporate manslaughter” as police announced the number of dead had risen to 17 and warned it would rise further during a painstaking search of the remains of the building.

Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, whose friend Khadija Saye and her mother, Mary Mendy, lived on the 20th floor of Grenfell Tower and were missing, gave a voice to the growing anger in the community.

“This is the richest borough in our country treating its citizens in this way and we should call it what it is. It is corporate manslaughter. And there should be arrests made; frankly, it is an outrage,” he said.

An easy walk from Kensington Palace.

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