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Grenfell, Austerity, and
Institutional Violence
Vickie Cooper
The Open University, UK
David Whyte
University of Liverpool, UK
Abstract
The complex chains of decisions that produce disasters like the Grenfell Tower fire are not
readily described as ‘violence’. ‘Violence’ is something that remains largely understood in popular
consciousness, and in sociology, as an interpersonal phenomenon, and as the result of a deliberate
attempt to cause harm. This is largely because our understanding of violence is always somehow
connected to legal concepts and principles. In this article, we argue that the Grenfell fire was
produced by a form of collective decision-making that we describe as institutional violence; it
reflects the routine order and detached administration of a form of violence that is intimately
connected to a more insidious targeting of subject groups and populations in ways that produce
and increase the likelihood of other, ongoing, violent circumstances occurring.
Keywords
austerity, Grenfell, regulation, social housing, violence
Introduction
Have we witnessed a more devastating and extreme public act of violence than the
Grenfell Tower fire in living memory in this country? In the past 30 years, the scale of the
death toll at the Grenfell Tower fire is perhaps only comparable to the Piper Alpha disas-
ter which killed 167 people on the 6 July 1988.
The complex chains of decisions that produce disasters like these are not readily
described as ‘violence’. ‘Violence’ is something that remains largely understood in popu-
lar consciousness, and in sociology, as an interpersonal phenomenon, and as the result of
a deliberate attempt to cause harm (Tilly, 2003; Tombs, 2006). This is largely because
Corresponding author:
Vickie Cooper, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
Email: victoria.cooper1@open.ac.uk
800066SRO0010.1177/1360780418800066Sociological Research OnlineCooper and Whyte
research-article2018
Rapid Response - Sociological Perspectives on the Grenfell Tower Tragedy
2 Sociological Research Online 00(0)
our understanding of violence is always somehow connected to legal concepts and prin-
ciples. Legal constructions of violence rest on a number of assumptions that reinforce the
interpersonal and deliberate characteristics of acts of violence. Two of those intercon-
nected characteristics frame the discussion in this paper. First, violence is generally
understood in law as something that is committed between autonomously acting indi-
viduals. Yet, as we will argue below, the violence of the Grenfell fire can only be under-
stood as the result of a complex configuration of collectively produced decisions made
by individuals working in organisations. Collectively produced decisions that result in
violent outcomes, such as the Grenfell fire, typically involve a more remote proximity, in
time and space, between the offender and the victim than we find in cases of interper-
sonal violence (Cooper, 2015; Whyte, 2017). Second, conventional understandings of
violence generally view a violent event as a series of atomised occurrences that exist in
isolation from their social context; in isolation from the ongoing relationship between the
victim and the offender (Cooper, 2015; Whyte, 2017). Yet, the genesis of the Grenfell fire
can only be explained, partly at least, as result of a set of ongoing power relationships, in
this case, between the tenant and the public or private authority that determines the way
their living conditions and the maintenance of the building are managed. It is this power
relationship rather than any isolated event or individual decision that produced the
extreme violence of Grenfell Tower.
We are not used to thinking of a local authority or housing authority as violent; how-
ever, in this article, we argue that the on going power relations between those making
the decisions and the tenants who were subject to the outcomes of collective decision-
making can be characterised as institutional violence. We use the term institutional
violence to describe the routine and detached administration of policies, implemented
by public and private authorities, that produce acute physical and psychological vio-
lence. Institutional violence involves the targeting of subject groups and populations in
ways that reproduce and increase the likelihood of other, ongoing, violent circumstances
occurring. The following section explores some of the institutional conditions that led
to the disaster, before the paper sets out precisely how and why we regard the Grenfell
fire as a case of institutional violence.
The conditions of violence
The Local Authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), the organ-
isation responsible for the management of the building, Kensington and Chelsea Tenants
Management Organisation (KCTMO), and the long list of companies in the supply chain
have serious questions to answer about their role in producing the risks that caused the
fire. The residents’ organisation, Grenfell Action Group, had warned that the renovations
and other work to the building might breach the law, be combustible, or otherwise poten-
tially deadly.1
Most commentaries have focussed on the unlawful or inappropriate use of materials in
the cladding used for the building, and indeed, this has been a major focus of investiga-
tions by both the government and the Metropolitan Police. The issue of who is responsible
for the use of unsafe materials is contested, and we don’t intend to enter into this discus-
sion. However, a different but related issue that is uncontested is that the renovation work
Cooper and Whyte 3
on Grenfell Tower that took place in 2016, and the cladding installed in this work, was the
subject of cost-driven downgrading.
In 2012, Construction News reported that the contract for the refurbishment of the
Grenfell Tower had been awarded to Leadbitter for a total £11.27 m (Wilmore, 2017).
However, KCTMO, then put the contract out to tender again to find a cheaper contractor
and, in 2014, awarded Rydon the contract for the refurbishment, at a substantially
reduced price of £8.7 m (Wilmore, 2017).
Not long after, in March 2015, the refurbishment project managers faced accusations
that it was ‘using cheap materials’.2 Documents attesting to the driving down of costs
include an ‘urgent nudge email’ that KCTMO’s project manager sent to Artelia, the pro-
ject cost management contractor, about cladding prices.3 This e-mail was reported to
have included the statement: ‘We need good costs for Councillor Rock Feilding-Mellen
and the planner tomorrow at 8.45 am!’4 Artelia replied with three options including a
downgrading of the cladding to make cost savings.5 Councillor Feilding-Mellen who at
the time was Chair of RBKC’s housing committee, approved the changes to the contract.
These cost-cutting decisions raise questions about KCTMO who commissioned the
refurbishment project and RBKC who retain overall responsibility for ensuring the safe
management and maintenance of Grenfell Tower.
The hazardous conditions generated at Grenfell by a climate of cost-cutting were
allowed to further deteriorate over time, despite clear warnings from the tenants. In a
chilling and now famous blog post, the Grenfell Action Group warned very clearly about
the likelihood of such a fire occurring. One post noted,
We have blogged many times on the subject of fire safety at Grenfell Tower and we believe that
these investigations will become part of damning evidence of the poor safety record of the
KCTMO should a fire affect any other of their properties and cause the loss of life that we are
predicting.6
There is an important political background to the local politics that is described here.
At every level of government, the regulation of safety has been on the back-foot in the
United Kingdom for some 30 years. Successive governments have virtually mandated a
withdrawal from law enforcement in health and safety and local authority regulation. In
most recent years, austerity cuts have taken us to the point that the average workplace
can now expect an inspector to call once every 50 years (James et al., 2018). Fire protec-
tion has been similarly compromised by the cuts; savings came predominantly from
reducing staff costs and reducing audits, inspections and fire risk checks. Fire safety
checks in tower blocks fell 25% in the most recent 5 years.7 This sustained ideological
and material attack on safety conditions has pervaded all levels of regulation as succes-
sive governments have proudly boasted of a ‘bonfire of red tape’ (Tombs, 2016; Tombs
and Whyte, 2010). We can only understand what happened in the political economy of
the refurbishment and on-going management of Grenfell Tower as a collective decision-
making process that is framed by this so-called bonfire of red tape.
RBKC policies delivered the central government strategy of regulatory degradation
with some verve. The borough is widely known as one of the richest in the country, with
the highest proportion of residents earning over £60,000.8 As such, it is one of the few
4 Sociological Research Online 00(0)
local authorities in the country that has ample resources to ensure that the housing it
owns is adequately maintained, and to ensure adequate levels of regulatory scrutiny in
housing and building standards. Yet, instead of investing in those areas of social protec-
tion, RBKC developed a council tax rebate scheme that benefits the borough’s richest
residents. In this scheme, RBKC has paid out annual ‘efficiency dividends’ in the bor-
ough since 2009. The scheme was based upon discounts given to the richest residents
(those with discounted bills or claiming council tax support were not eligible for this
‘dividend’). In order to pay for the dividend and to cut its council tax rate, RBKC at the
same time slashed expenditure in key areas of social protection. Spending on planning in
the local authority fell by 81%, housing by 76% and regulatory services by 22% as part
of an overall spending reduction of 36% (Benjamin, 2017). Thus, in the period leading
up to the Grenfell fire, there is evidence to show that RBKC was undermining housing
and safety regulation in order to provide hand-outs to the richest residents.
At the time of writing this article, we are aware that explanations for the fire are bound
to change, and we do not claim that the brief summary above reflects precisely the condi-
tions that lead to the disaster. However, our commentary does indicate that some key
decisions instrumental in producing the disaster must be understood as avoidable. The
political conditions created by the bonfire of red tape at the level of central government
and the delivery of those policies at a local level encouraged profits and cost-savings to
be prioritised over basic safety standards. Those institutional priorities were very delib-
erately constructed.
Institutional violence
Sociologists seeking to overcome the epistemological limitations of interpersonal vio-
lence have tended to a conception of ‘structural violence’ (Farmer, 2004; Gupta, 2012).
The meaning of the term structural violence as coined by Johan Galtung (1969) is nor-
mally taken to mean the harms that are created through preventing people meeting their
basic needs. Structural violence results from inequalities that are rooted in institutional-
ised practices. Thus, racism, sexism and classism are forms of structural violence. Since
coming into our lexicon, the concept of structural violence has variously been deployed
to make sense of the violent conditions inextricably linked to poverty, sexism, white
supremacy and colonialism. Because the origins of violence are deeply rooted in social
practices and enduring inequalities, structural violence is systemic, ‘silent’, ‘routine’,
and ‘as natural as the air around us’ (p. 173). The concept of structural violence is useful
for shifting our focus away from the ‘interpersonal’, to ‘impersonal’ nature of violence;
a form of violence that is historically produced, built into structures of power and
imposed on its victims at a distance. However, it is precisely this shift towards the
‘impersonal’ that limits the concept. Galtung notes he is not seeking to describe ‘the type
of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as personal or direct’, but
rather, the type of violence, ‘where there is no such actor’ (p. 170). The concept of struc-
tural violence is therefore designed to capture a form of violence that is (a) indirect and
(b) involves no obvious protagonist.
Those two points represent the limitations of the concept as it might be applied in the
context of the Grenfell Tower fire. First, we do not see how in the context of the fire, the
Cooper and Whyte 5
dichotomy of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ violence is applicable. As we shall argue here, the
violent effects (the immediate deaths and the physical and psychological harm) have been
experienced directly by the victims. Second, we do not agree that there are no obvious
actors that can be identified as responsible for both direct and indirect forms of violence.
As Confortini (2006) has argued a major problem with Galtung’s approach is that it views
‘structures’ as abstract, free-floating entities, and fails to highlight structures as ‘material
processes’ (see also Graeber, 2012). Indeed, the violence of Grenfell was legitimated and
authorised in concrete ways that produced a very direct form of violence. We can explain
the conditions that led to the fire as having arisen from a string of decisions by people in
positions of power who could foresee the high chance of a violent outcome.
To talk of the violence that produced Grenfell Tower fire, then, is to talk of some-
thing much more concrete than ‘structural’ violence. On the one hand, it is clear that
Grenfell residents’ needs were not being met; there is evidence that their building was
not being managed in a way that could maintain a decent standard of safe housing
provision at Grenfell (a structural violence that is replicated across the UK; Carr
et al., 2018). However, on the other hand, the outcome of this kind of routine violence
is one that goes beyond a narrow understanding of needs not being met. At a mini-
mum, 72 people died in the most horrific circumstances imaginable. Moreover, the
lasting psychological damage can be measured in large numbers of suicides, post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and lifelong mental health problems for other vic-
tims and the families and friends of those who died and those who witnessed the fire
(Booth, 2017). The extreme physical and psychological harm done to people did not
result from a failure to provide needs, but stemmed from institutional policies and
practices that prioritised immediate economic benefits in ways that knowingly pro-
duced an immanent threat to safety.
We therefore argue that in order to understand the violence we witnessed at Grenfell,
it is important to take account of (a) the political and cultural context of a particular
institutional environment and how it informs particular decisions that produce violent
outcomes, whether intended or unintended, and (b) how those individuals and the insti-
tutions they represent are responsible for designing and implementing decisions that
knowingly produce violence. As we have argued, the public and private institutions
that are tasked with implementing and administering key political objectives, particu-
larly in the period known as ‘austerity’ have come to rely on acute forms of violence
as their modus operandi.
In our book, The Violence of Austerity (Cooper and Whyte, 2017), we adopt a concept
of institutional violence to identify precisely how particular public and private organisa-
tions have delivered acute physical and psychological harm, and have caused untold
injury and death by administering austerity policies. In front of the very obvious rogues
gallery of politicians who designed the austerity agenda – and refused to change course
when its human consequences were in clear view – stand the officer corps of civil serv-
ants, government departments and Local Authorities. And in front of them stand the
armies of private officials in companies like G4 S and ATOS and public officials in ben-
efits offices and housing authorities.
Institutional violence generally unfolds over time, at a deteriorative pace. In this
sense, the violence of austerity can be best understood as slow violence that pervades
6 Sociological Research Online 00(0)
people’s lives over long periods of time (Nixon, 2013). It is the slow, deteriorative pro-
cess of institutional violence imposed by austerity that gives it its force. The threat of
destitution, repossession, deportation, going without a meal or having electricity or gas
cut off, have now become a very real possibility for a fast-growing section of the popula-
tion. Of course, we could not describe the Grenfell Tower fire itself as an example of
‘slow violence’, but the fire is the outcome of a longer-term, slow, process of institutional
violence. Grenfell tenants were part of a diverse community, comprising immigrants,
migrant workers, welfare recipients, and precarious workers. Their socio-economic sta-
tus mirrored the very population constantly vilified under neoliberal ‘anti-welfare ideol-
ogy’ (Jensen and Tyler, 2015); a political ideology that has taken a venomous turn under
austerity (Burnett, 2017).
Although the state once acted as an important buffer against the private market and
provided a vital source of protection, austerity governments have plunged working-
class communities into a perpetual state of anxiety and distress. In 2010, the former
Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, attributed the growing structural
budget deficit problem directly to ‘out of control welfare costs’.9 In crafting an anti-
welfare ideology, austerity governments have generated a major upheaval in our wel-
fare institutions and administration, at a significant human cost. For the first time in
the history of our welfare state, we are seeing a distinct pattern of death and physical
injury resulting from cuts to welfare provision. Death by suicide or the rapid deterio-
ration of existing health conditions is rapidly becoming a normal outcome of welfare
cuts, not least through the punitive conditions imposed by work capability assess-
ments. Another distinct pattern can be clearly discerned in the rise in mortality among
the elderly, who are dying prematurely at a time when the provision of social care is
in steep decline (Dorling, 2017).
The violent effects of austerity are equally bleak and protracted when we examine
the everyday practices of our housing institutions. The political and ideological attack
on social housing tenants has been palpable and indeed had a direct impact on Grenfell
Tower tenants. Under conditions of austerity, social housing investment has declined
by 60%, social rents in vacant properties have increased by up to 80% of private mar-
ket rates, and a suite of welfare reforms, such as the Bedroom Tax and the Benefit
Cap, have targeted social housing tenants. Given the impact of these reforms, one
Housing Association was initially put on ‘suicide watch’, following a survey that
found 45% of housing staff in the North-West of England had experienced their ten-
ants making suicide threats (Straightforward and Northern Housing Consortium,
2013). These housing reforms send a clear message to working class tenants that they
are no longer entitled to the same housing rights and conditions provided under previ-
ous governments.
A combination of national and local austerity policies has culminated in a form of
social cleansing (Minton, 2017) that targets working-class communities, like people liv-
ing in North Kensington, and displaces them en masse. Eviction is now the most common
weapon routinely used by housing institutions to force out working-class families and
free-up land value, often involving the forced removal of whole housing estates (Paton
and Cooper, 2016). Eviction is, in essence, a violent measure, involving techniques of
forced entry and the physical removal of people from their homes, carried out by bailiffs
Cooper and Whyte 7
and enforcement agents (Paton and Cooper, 2016). These violent effects are also mani-
fested in the build-up to the eviction, inducing psychological stress and anxiety, and even
triggering the onset of suicidal thoughts (Yerko, 2017).
We argue that the Grenfell Tower fire occurred austerity; a violent political order that
is organized though the routine and legitimised administration of policy. This is a context
in which the palpable disdain for social housing tenants undoubtedly amplified a culture
of negligence and institutional disregard directed at Grenfell tenants. Evidently, this
institutional violence is set to continue. By the end of March 2018, 294 Grenfell house-
holds, including those from the surrounding area were accommodated in temporary
accommodation, some of them left without kitchen facilities or proper living conditions.
Grenfell survivors now count towards the 60% increase in the number of homeless fami-
lies living in temporary accommodation since 2011 (House of Commons, 2018). When
they are rehoused, the survivors of Grenfell will not be exempt from the harmful housing
policies (e.g. Bedroom Tax and Benefit Cap) that have culminated in the violent, forced
removal of people from their homes. Despite the scale of harm already done to Grenfell
tenants, the everyday, routine institutional violence will continue and they will still
exposed to the same austerity anti-immigration policies as before.
Conclusion
We should have no difficulty at this point in human history in recognising the intimate
relationship between violence and politics. The very long line of 20th-century thinkers
that have exposed in detail the intrinsically violent foundations of the state’s political
power include Walter Benjamin (1978), Emma Goldman (2003), Vandana Shiva (1989),
Max Weber (2004), and C Wright Mills (2000). Hannah Arendt (1970), whose essay On
Violence sought to dissect the relation between political power and the organisation of
violence, argued that the use of force to achieve political ends had become so naturalised
that the ‘enormous role that violence plays in human affairs’ had become ‘taken for
granted and therefore neglected’ (p. 8).
The Grenfell fire represents a rare moment in which the violence of contemporary
capitalism comes into full view, for all to see. But in the aftermath, we need to think
about how Grenfell is the product of a much larger complex of institutional violence that
we are in danger of taking for granted. The ‘bonfire of red tape’, the sustained attack on
social housing and the demonisation of the tenants of social housing as ‘undeserving’,
‘scroungers’ and so on, are constituent elements that caused the fire, just as the particular
decisions to cut corners and use cheap materials were.
We can only understand what happened at Grenfell as an institutional chain of
events, framed by a neo-liberal politics that promotes the withdrawal of health and
safety regulation as an efficient way to ‘improve business’. The neo-liberal politics of
austerity permits institutions to increase the vulnerability of working-class communi-
ties in order to create new spaces of accumulation. These mundane decisions and
targets set by government and administered at institutional level are rarely thought of
as violent, but they are, undeniably so. Although the Grenfell Tower fire was an
exceptional display of extreme violence, the series of events that led to the fire were
routine and mundane – the driving down of costs, undercutting health and safety
8 Sociological Research Online 00(0)
measures and the systematic refusal to listen to tenants when they warned of the
deadly risks they faced. Precisely the same experiences of institutional violence can
be found across the country in countless communities. This is why Grenfell Tower has
become such a powerful emblem of austerity Britain.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. See the blog postings in the Grenfell Action Group archive, especially the post dated 20
November. Available online at: https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/
kctmo-playing-with-fire/
2. Reported in Independent, 30 June 2017.
3. Reported in The Guardian, 30 June 2017.
4. As footnote 1 above.
5. As footnote 1 above.
6. The full blog is at: https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/kctmo-playing-
with-fire/
7. From Freedom of Information requests supplied to the Sunday People and published, 17th
June, 2017.
8. Office of National Statistics, datasheet KS101EW Usual resident population, local authori-
ties in England and Wales. Available online, here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation-
andcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/2011censuskeystatistic
sforlocalauthoritiesinenglandandwales
9. George Osborne’s speech to the 2010 Conservative Party Conference; full speech
available online here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/oct/04/george-osborne-
speech-conservative-conference.
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Author biographies
Vickie Cooper is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Open University where she is Co-Director of
HERC (Harm and Evidence Research Collaborative) and researches issues related to homeless-
ness, criminal justice system, housing and eviction. She is the co-editor of The Violence of Austerity
(Pluto, 2017).
David Whyte is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Liverpool where he
researches issues related to corporate violence and corporate corruption. He is the co-editor of The
Violence of Austerity (Pluto, 2017).
Date submitted: 1 September 2017
Date accepted 8: August 2018
