There is something profoundly wrong when the company behind Grenfell Tower’s flammable cladding paid more compensation to its shareholders than to victims of the disaster. Of Arconic’s £86m in Grenfell-related settlements, all but £1.5m was covered by insurers. Hardly enough to make a multinational think again. The company whose product the inquiry found was the “primary cause” of the fire’s 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 – including 18 children – died in London’s Grenfell Tower fire. Almost a decade later, nobody has been criminally charged over its causes. It’s hard to conclude anything but that Britain’s system of corporate accountability is rotten.
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 “failure to prevent” law that would make companies responsible for having adequate systems to prevent foreseeable serious harm. The second is to adopt a “punitive damages” 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, “at no public cost”.
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.
Arconic successfully argued that the Grenfell families’ 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’s tenth anniversary. Compare that with Hong Kong’s 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.
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.
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’t 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.
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