Thirty lives have already been saved thanks to changes in firefighting since the Grenfell tragedy, the new London Fire Brigade commissioner has told Sky News.

There are more straightforward times to take over the running of a major emergency service.

The new London Fire Brigade (LFB) Commissioner Andy Roe took on the job at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

He said: “I’ve got 300 firefighters, co-crewing ambulances. I’ve had over 100 firefighters providing services for people who’ve lost their lives in their homes, making sure they’re treated with dignity.

“I’ve had my logistics people distributing their 10 millionth piece of PPE on Friday.”

But bigger still for his crews is the response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy almost three years ago and the subsequent and highly critical report from the first phase of the public inquiry into the fire published last October.

LFB has fully accepted the recommendations made in the report, with the commissioner saying the deaths of the 72 victims “weigh heavily on him”.

He says they were “badly let down”, but they have pushed him towards reform.

Mr Roe told Sky News: “I am absolutely motivated because of my personal involvement in this incident to drive that change forward.

“I could not allow a tragedy of this scale in London without making that promise to those families, those people who lost everything.”

He said changes are already being brought in and have already saved 30 lives across the capital.

“Even in the middle of this pandemic, they involve changes to equipment, so an increased fleet of extended turntable ladders, which means we can reach further up a high-rise building; and the introduction of smokers (fire escape hoods), which means that we can bring members of the public safely down through smoke filled lobbies.

“And, actually, since their introduction, they have saved the lives of 30 Londoners across approximately 20 incidents.

“They’ve already proven their worth. So real changes are tangible,” he said.

But he continued: “The residents in that tower block were vulnerable people, many of them had come to this country to seek refuge from war and other tragedy.

“They should have been able to feel safe in the environment they were living in. I think they were badly let down by all sorts of organisations and legislation and years of erosion of good standards.”

Instead, he said, they woke to a scene of “utter carnage” in west London after the fire broke out at 12.54am on 14 June 2017.

At the time, 297 people were in the tower – 67 of them were children.

Within 20 minutes, a vertical column of flames had reached the top floor. At 1.30am the first 999 call was received, reporting the fire had penetrated a flat on the 22nd floor.

But residents were told to “stay put” in their flats.

Mr Roe, then deputy commissioner of the fire service, arrived around 2.30am and became Incident Commander.

He said: “My personal experience of it was that it was the most serious incident I’ve ever attended as a professional firefighter or officer.

“I knew immediately on arrival that my colleagues who were there and who were risking their lives, time after time, were facing the biggest professional firefighting challenge of their lives.

“And to be frank, what I saw in front of me was a community torn apart, a failure of the building regulation system and, just actually almost breathtaking, the scale of failure of the building.”

The external cladding at Grenfell had acted as an accelerant. Mr Roe told the government inquiry it was like “a petrol fire” and he said he quickly realised that “stay put” was “absolutely unsustainable”.

The fire had been burning for more than an hour and a half.

Asked if he would have revoked “stay put” sooner if he’d arrived on scene earlier, he said: “I think it’s impossible for me to say.

“I can only tell you what my decision was in the very moment and to me, in that moment, it was very clear what the appropriate decision was. The building completely failed.

“It was no longer acceptable to advise people that they were to stay put and therefore it had to be changed immediately.”

One of the first things Mr Roe did as commissioner was to meet the victims’ families, he said.

He told Sky News: “I cannot tell you how both moving and humbling that was, in terms of their courage and their great desire to seek the truth and see change, so that other people wouldn’t have to suffer as they did.”

Rebuilding trust is key, he says. But he acknowledges that it is “extremely” tough to get high-rise residents to accept that “stay put” is still the correct thing to do.

He added: “Actually stay put is still the right advice in over 90% of occasions. I completely accept that if you live in a high-rise block in London, it is very hard to trust that advice, knowing what happened at Grenfell”.

In the light of the George Floyd protests, which have challenged trust in police forces in America, he insisted his team is “working very hard to ensure that the London Fire Brigade properly represents the communities we serve, in diverse, multicultural London.”

Buildings in the capital with Grenfell-style cladding yet to be removed will be subject to mass evacuation orders and residents will know the drill, he added.

Cladding removal “has to happen as quickly as possible,” he says, although a government target of this June to get the work done has been abandoned.

For Commissioner Roe, a Londoner with 18 years service as a firefighter and six members of his family in the same profession, this is personal.

He said: “You know, I have family members who live on estates just like that where the tower at Grenfell was. I’ve lived here all my life. My family is mixed. It’s very diverse.

“What it gave me was a great sense of motivation to ensure that it never happens again and to ensure that the men and women of the London Fire Brigade were never put in that position again, where they had to respond to such a terrible tragedy.”

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