The public costs of the Grenfell Tower fire have exceeded £500m after the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea revealed it had spent £406m on its response and recovery efforts in almost four years since the disaster. The sum is in addition to the costs to the taxpayer of the ongoing public inquiry, which hit £117m by the end of March this year, most of which was taken up with lawyers’ bills. The figures stand in stark contrast to the £300,000 saved in a cost-cutting exercise during the refurbishment of the 24-storey council block between 2014 and 2016 that led to combustible aluminium panels being substituted for the planned non-combustible zinc on the exterior of the block. The plastic-filled replacements fuelled the fire on 14 June 2017 which killed 72 people, the inquiry has already concluded. “It has already cost half a billion, and at the end of this awful process some people have estimated costs will reach £1bn,” said Emma Dent Coad, a Labour councillor in north Kensington and former MP for the area. “All of this is the consequence of saving £300,000 on cladding. The scale of the spending reveals the huge impact of this false economy.” Companies involved in manufacturing materials used on the tower and the builders have spent tens of millions of pounds on lawyers defending their conduct amid an ongoing Metropolitan police investigation. By late 2019 Arconic, the firm that made the combustible cladding panels, had spent £30m on consultants and lawyers responding to the fire. The council’s spending was revealed in a report from its audit and transparency committee, which showed that of its costs arising from the disaster to the end of March this year, £105m was recovered or covered by grants from central government. It showed that in the first two years since the disaster £57m was spent on rehousing people from the tower and surrounding estates, £13m went on mental health support including counselling for members of the community, many of whom still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and £13m was given in grants to people plunged into hardship by the disaster. The largest amount spent since the fire – £221m – went on capital costs including acquiring properties to permanently rehouse survivors. The council also spent £6m on its own legal costs and £5m on consultants from KPMG, PWC and EY. A further £26m is earmarked for recovery efforts between now and 2024. This week the public inquiry heard that a senior councillor with responsibility for overseeing housing at the Tory borough felt residents’ complaints about the £10m refurbishment works were “grossly exaggerated”. “We’re spending £100k per flat of public money to improve the building,” Quentin Marshall, the chair of the council’s housing and property scrutiny committee, said in an email to Kensington’s then MP, Victoria Borwick, in March 2016. “This is a massive level of support … For leaseholders in particular, this is essentially a £100k gift from the state. I’m therefore not massively sympathetic to general ‘it’s all terrible’ complaints.” Under cross-examination by Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry, Marshall admitted that on reflection “I don’t think we saw the bigger picture. I don’t think we addressed the emotional side and I think we lacked a little humanity … We could have done better.”