Justice can no longer be denied to the Grenfell families

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Angela Rayner when, reflecting upon the final report into the Grenfell disaster, she declares: “What I have read has really angered me, upset me and affected me. As Ms Rayner freely admits: “We can’t have a situation where justice is delayed, because that is justice denied.” To be fair to Ms Rayner, she has been in office for two months, whereas a string of her predecessors have failed to either secure justice or make sufficient progress in making residential tower blocks safe since 2017. Ms Rayner, with the home secretary Yvette Cooper and the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, could and should push the criminal justice system to pursue those culpable much more rapidly. If another Grenfell-style inferno takes more lives in the coming months and years, then Ms Rayner’s still-promising political career will surely be brought to a premature end. That was fine in theory – but in practice, it has imposed unconscionable delays, thus denying justice, and it would surely have been possible to pursue criminal investigations in parallel with the inquiry.