‘Many more’ lives could have been saved if Grenfell Tower had been evacuated earlier, a report into the devastating fire has found.

Instead, residents were told to ‘stay put’ because it was believed building regulations would ensure the fire would be contained.

Inquiry judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick said such was the faith in the ‘stay-put’ policy that abandoning it was ‘unthinkable’.

He said a decision to evacuate should have taken place within a 20-minute window once it was clear that the fire had spread out of control and that compartmentation had extensively failed.

In his report into the night of the fire he says this was, or should have been, ‘reasonably obvious’ to the London Fire Brigade (LFB) by 1.30am at the earliest and by 1.50am at the latest.

He said: ‘Mass evacuation of the occupants of the tower would no doubt have presented serious risks to the lives of both residents and firefighters, given the internal layout of the building and the absence of any kind of communication system.

‘Nonetheless, it is likely that, in the face of a rapidly developing fire on the exterior of the building and an increasingly pervasive spread of smoke and fire throughout the interior, prompt evacuation would have resulted in the saving of many more lives.’

The knowledge that high-rise buildings are constructed on the basis of effective compartmentation itself created a barrier to thinking about evacuation, the judge said.

He also noted an occasional reluctance of senior officers to believe that a building could ever fail to comply with regulations.

The evidence from the first phase of the inquiry ‘strongly suggests’ that ‘stay-put’ was an ‘article of faith within the LFB so powerful that to depart from it was to all intents and purposes unthinkable’, he said.

This explains why it was not considered until it was too late for many occupants.

Sir Martin added: ‘I have little doubt that fewer people would have died if the order to evacuate had been given by 2.00am.

‘The time between 2.00am and 2.47am, when AC Roe ordered the “stay put” advice to be withdrawn, was effectively lost.’

The judge said the absence of a plan to evacuate the tower was a ‘major omission’ in the LFB’s preparation.

However, because there was no attempt to carry out a managed evacuation of the tower, this is less significant than the lack of training to help incident commanders recognise when this might be necessary, he said.

And he said the failure to educate firefighters about the dangers associated with combustible cladding was ‘surprising’ given the ‘long history of fires involving cladding on high-rise buildings’ in the UK and abroad.

While the ‘wholesale failure of every layer of fire safety’ may not have been reasonably foreseeable, the risks of rapidly developing cladding fires in high-rises were “well-known” to the brigade by June 2017, he said.

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