Kenan Malik, writing in The Observer, calls Arconic's Grenfell settlements an indictment of our times. He is right, but the phrase is almost too gentle. What the numbers describe is not a moral failure that happened to occur inside a legal system. It is a legal system working precisely as designed, on behalf of precisely the people it was designed to serve.
The arithmetic
Arconic manufactured Reynobond PE, the aluminium composite cladding the public inquiry identified as the primary cause of the fire's rapid spread, and which the inquiry found had been sold on the back of manipulated fire safety data. Seventy-two people died.
The company subsequently completed two settlements. Research by Common Wealth and FIND sets them side by side: $74m — about £54.7m — went to Arconic's own shareholders, compensating them for the share price damage caused by the company's misleading statements about the product's safety. The estates of the bereaved and the survivors received $43m, or roughly £31.8m, after a considerably longer fight.
Sit with that ordering for a moment. The people who lost money on a stock were made more whole, faster, than the people who lost their children. Not through malice, particularly. Through the ordinary operation of two different bodies of law, one of which treats economic loss to investors as a serious and readily quantifiable injury, and the other of which does not much know what to do with grief.
Insurance as absolution
The detail that finishes the argument off is this: of the £86.5m paid across both settlements, all but around £1.5m was covered by Arconic's insurers.
That is the whole mechanism, laid bare. Liability was not borne. It was purchased in advance, priced into the cost of doing business, and passed to a counterparty whose job is to absorb exactly this. The firm did not suffer a consequence; it made a claim. And because the settlements were civil, there was no finding, no admission, and no criminal record — Arconic has consistently denied wrongdoing throughout.
Meanwhile British taxpayers picked up the remediation bill for buildings wrapped in the same material. The researchers found no evidence that Arconic has attempted to trace the rest of the roughly 12.75 million square metres of Reynobond it sold worldwide over two decades. Nobody has compelled it to.
What English law is actually for
The report's recommendations read like a list of things a serious country would already have. Make punitive damages available where corporate illegality is implicated in death — at present English courts award them only in narrow and rare circumstances. Give judges power to direct a share of shareholder settlement recoveries toward victims where the underlying conduct harmed identifiable third parties. Debar firms from public contracts until they disclose where dangerous products were sold.
None of this is radical. Most of it exists in some form in the United States, whose courts, note, are where Arconic's shareholders got their money. The gap is not one of legal imagination. It is that English corporate law was built to allocate risk between commercial parties, and has been asked, retrospectively and reluctantly, to also do justice.
The criminal process grinds on. The Metropolitan Police has spent around £150m across a nine-year investigation, with all evidence files due to prosecutors this month and charging decisions expected before 14 June 2027 — the tenth anniversary.
Final thoughts
Perhaps charges will come, and perhaps they will stick. But the civil settlements are already concluded, and they have told us what our institutions think a death is worth relative to a share price. The answer was published, in dollars, and almost nobody in Britain noticed. That is the indictment: not that the system failed, but that it produced this and no alarm sounded anywhere.
