Arconic, the manufacturer whose flammable cladding was found to have driven the rapid spread of the Grenfell Tower fire, paid more money to its shareholders than to the victims of the disaster, according to newly reported figures. The 2017 fire killed 72 people, including 18 children, and almost a decade later no one has faced criminal charges over its causes.
According to a recent investigation, Arconic paid $54.7m to shareholders after the fire, more than the $31.8m it paid out to victims and survivors, with insurers covering almost all of both sums. Of the company's £86m in Grenfell-related settlements overall, only £1.5m came from Arconic itself rather than its insurers, a sum unlikely to prompt serious reflection inside a multinational company.
Why has the compensation gap drawn criticism?
Campaigners argue the figures expose a system that shields companies from the true cost of the harm they cause. The public inquiry into the disaster found that Arconic's product played a central role in how quickly the fire spread through the building, yet the company has ultimately borne only a fraction of the wider social cost, while the bill for making hundreds of other buildings safe has fallen largely on the state.
What is being proposed to fix corporate accountability?
A new report from the thinktank Common Wealth and the financial investigations group FIND sets out two changes that campaigners say parliament in England and Wales could pass quickly. The first would introduce a "failure to prevent" law, making companies legally responsible for having systems in place to stop foreseeable serious harm. The second would introduce "punitive damages", under which the courts would not simply compensate victims for their losses but require a company to pay according to the seriousness of its conduct. The report argues that a punitive award against Arconic could have funded remediation work "at no public cost".
Such damages are already used in the United States, where some Grenfell families attempted to bring a case. There, courts can award damages specifically to punish and deter corporate wrongdoing rather than simply to compensate victims. A comparable dynamic is currently playing out in a California court, where Meta is accused of intentionally designing Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children in pursuit of profit. The company denies wrongdoing but has acknowledged that the litigation could expose it to significant penalties and force changes to its products, illustrating how alleged social harm can become a company-sized financial risk.
Why has nobody been criminally charged in Britain?
Arconic successfully argued that the Grenfell families' case should be heard in British courts, where civil compensation and criminal punishment are handled separately, unlike in the United States. The Metropolitan Police have identified 57 individuals and 20 organisations as criminal suspects, but no charges are expected before the disaster's tenth anniversary. The contrast is often drawn with the response to the Wang Fuk Court fire in Hong Kong, which killed 168 people in November 2025; authorities there filed manslaughter and fraud charges against two firms and seven individuals within seven months. No one is suggesting Hong Kong's system as a model for Britain, but the speed of that response stands in stark contrast to the near-decade of delay in the Grenfell case.
Some of the delay reflects genuine complexity: the Covid pandemic disrupted the public inquiry, and responsibility for the disaster stretches across manufacturers, certifiers, architects, contractors and regulators. That dispersal of responsibility points to a deeper structural problem, since the more parties involved in a disaster, the easier it becomes for accountability to disappear between them. This pattern of prolonged struggle is not unique to Grenfell; survivors of disasters including Aberfan and the Manchester Arena bombing have also described a demoralising, decades-long battle for compensation and psychological support.
What happens next?
According to , the Metropolitan Police intend to seek criminal charges against the 57 individuals and 20 companies under investigation, with evidence files due to be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service by the end of September 2026. also reported that prosecutors are aiming to announce final charging decisions by June 2027, which would coincide with the tenth anniversary of the fire. Campaigners argue that existing legal tools already used to force companies to account for economic and consumer harms, such as the "polluter pays" principle in environmental law and product recall obligations in safety law, should be extended to cover catastrophic social harms of this kind. Until such measures are adopted, they warn, the law will continue to protect investors more effectively than it protects the public from corporate wrongdoing.
- The June 2017 Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people, including 18 children.
- Arconic paid $54.7m to shareholders after the fire, compared with $31.8m to victims and survivors, according to a recent investigation.
- Only £1.5m of Arconic's £86m in Grenfell-related settlements was not covered by insurers.
- The Metropolitan Police are treating 57 individuals and 20 organisations as criminal suspects, with files due to prosecutors by the end of September 2026.
- Charging decisions are expected by June 2027, the tenth anniversary of the disaster.
