The anger surrounding Grenfell Tower remains entirely understandable. Seventy-two people died in the 2017 fire, survivors had raised concerns before the disaster, and the public inquiry later exposed serious failures across regulation, management, construction, fire safety and decision-making.
But there is a danger in allowing justified anger to harden into something less defensible: the belief that anyone professionally connected to Grenfell should effectively carry the stain of the disaster for the rest of their working life.
That argument surfaced again after Laura Johnson, who was director of housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea at the time of the fire, was appointed to a senior housing role with the Barnet Group. The Guardian reported criticism from survivors and bereaved families, including a call for people named in the Grenfell inquiry not to hold positions of power while the police investigation remains unresolved.
The frustration behind that view is easy to understand. The principle behind it is much harder to defend.
There is a difference between accountability and contamination. A person should be judged on what they did, what they knew, what decisions they made, what warnings they ignored or acted upon, and whether their conduct fell below the standard reasonably expected of them. Simply having worked in an organisation connected to a tragedy cannot, by itself, become a professional life sentence.
That distinction matters far beyond Britain. Jamaica should pay attention too.
Proximity is not responsibility
Dean Jones, founder of Jamaica Homes and a chartered construction and property professional, has a personal reason for reflecting on this.
During the period before Grenfell, Jones was moving through senior project and property roles in the Old Ford housing and construction sector. He had worked with Circle Housing and its Group Project Management Office before moving into another major programme. Around that period, he was approached by a former colleague, attended an interview and, as he recalls it, received a verbal offer for a role connected with work at Grenfell Tower.
He did not take the job.
Nearly a decade later, the obvious question is impossible to answer: would anything have been different if he had?
There is no responsible way to know. Perhaps a different surveyor might have spotted something. Perhaps concerns would have been raised. Perhaps those concerns would have been ignored. Perhaps the role would have had no bearing whatsoever on the chain of decisions that ultimately mattered.
Counterfactual history is seductive because it allows certainty where none exists.
But the more important question is simpler. Had Jones taken that role and subsequently appeared somewhere in the long list of people professionally connected with Grenfell, should that association alone have followed him through the rest of his career?
Clearly not.
That would not be accountability. It would be guilt by geography.
Grenfell demands precision, not blanket condemnation
The Grenfell inquiry did not simply declare that everybody connected to the tower had failed. It examined evidence, roles, decisions and systems. That is what inquiries are supposed to do.
In Johnson’s case, the findings concerning her conduct must be considered on their own merits. Serious questions were raised about decisions involving cost, refurbishment and fire safety. Those matters should neither be minimised nor casually dismissed.
But that is very different from saying that everyone named in an inquiry, or everyone who worked somewhere in the institutional chain, should automatically be regarded as unsuitable for future responsibility.
Such a principle collapses all degrees of involvement into one category.
The junior surveyor becomes indistinguishable from the senior executive. The person who raised concerns becomes indistinguishable from the person who ignored them. The contractor who followed an instruction becomes morally equivalent to the person who gave it. The employee who happened to be present inside a failing system becomes permanently branded by the failure itself.
That is neither fair nor useful.
An inquiry should be a scalpel, not a bucket of paint.
Its purpose is to distinguish between negligence and reasonable judgement, warning and indifference, individual failure and institutional weakness. Once that distinction disappears, the very idea of accountability begins to lose meaning.
Jamaica should learn the right lesson
Jamaica has had its own commissions of inquiry, investigations, regulatory failures and institutional tragedies. There will be more.
The wrong lesson would be to treat every person connected to a failed institution as professionally radioactive.
The better lesson is to become much better at identifying precisely what went wrong and who was responsible for what.
That means asking difficult questions. Was there negligence? Were warnings ignored? Was the law followed? Did someone deliberately choose a cheaper option despite known risks? Was professional advice overridden? Were people working without enough information? Was a failure caused by one individual, several individuals or a broken system?
Those questions matter because Jamaica is still strengthening its own construction, planning, housing and regulatory systems. Major developments continue to rise. Infrastructure programmes are expanding. New homes, apartments, hotels and commercial projects are being delivered at speed.
A system like that needs experienced people, including people who have worked in organisations that got things wrong.
In fact, some of the most valuable professionals may be those who have witnessed failure closely enough to understand how easily it happens.
The issue is not whether someone has ever been associated with a failed project or troubled organisation. The issue is what that person actually did.
Did the professional raise concerns or suppress them? Did the manager challenge unsafe practice or quietly accept it? Did the director learn from an inquiry or simply move on from it? Has subsequent conduct demonstrated better judgement?
Those are harder questions than simply searching a report for somebody’s name, but serious institutions have to ask them.
Accountability must remain individual
Grenfell should never become an argument against accountability. The opposite is true.
The families who lost loved ones deserve accountability that is exact, evidence-based and properly directed. Survivors deserve justice. Organisations responsible for housing people safely should face intense scrutiny when those systems fail.
But justice is weakened when responsibility becomes collective by default.
If someone made a disastrous decision, say so. If someone ignored a warning, establish it. If professional standards were breached, apply the consequences. If the evidence supports disciplinary, civil or criminal action, that process should follow.
But being employed somewhere, being named in evidence or having once worked on a project cannot automatically mean professional exile.
Jamaica would do well to remember that distinction before its next national controversy produces the familiar rush to decide that everyone who was somewhere near the problem must somehow become part of the punishment.
Accountability is about what a person did.
Association is merely about where they happened to be.
A serious society should know the difference.
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