The loss of 79 lives in the Grenfell Tower inferno has focused attention on the Conservative government’s ongoing assault on protective legislation.

Journalist Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, notes that while the government’s war on red tape is a seen as a central policy platform by top Tories, it undermines the rules for a safe and decent society. She noted post-Grenfell “whatever national appetite for deregulation and risk there might have been has gone.”

But critical and deadly damage has already been done, she indicates.

A third of environmental health officers have gone since 2010, and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) “is taking a 46 per cent cut and has been banned, on principle, from ‘proactive’ inspections in most workplaces: staff have to wait for a complaint – when it may be too late. Inspectors are down by 25 per cent, the number of workplace inspections cut back by 70 per cent.” She noted right up to Grenfell Tower burning down, the right-leaning press maintained their shrill support for the ‘bonfire of regulation’. “When the Daily Telegraph launched its Cut EU Red Tape campaign on the day Theresa May triggered article 50, [foreign secretary Boris] Johnson promised that Brexit would ‘get rid of some of the burdensome regulation that has accreted over the last 44 years’. Iain Duncan Smith pledged to ‘whittle away’ the regulation ‘burden’ with its ‘intrusions into daily life of citizens’. Lord Lawson called for a ‘massive’ regulatory cull: ‘We must lose no time’.” But Toynbee points out that red tape “is the very stuff of civilisation… it stops some abusing others, stops employers maltreating employees or polluting the environment, prevents rogue business undercutting good business, keeps us safe, guarantees the food we eat, the medicines we take and the professional standards of lawyers, doctors or engineers that we rely on for life itself. An inadequate safety net of red tape killed the Grenfell victims.”