Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report, Volume 1

How the text on Reports that Matter was made, and where it still falls short of the printed page. Nothing has been rewritten. Where we know the text differs from the published report, this page says so.

Last reviewed 4 October 2026.

The edition

• Source: Volume 1 of the Phase 2 report (HC 19-I, ISBN 978-1-5286-5080-9), as published on GOV.UK on 4 September 2024: 232 A4 pages, SHA-256 51d7e2c9…d3fe, kept in the report's repository. It is the canonical citation target. The Inquiry's own website carried a copy of the same edition, with the same text.
• Licence: Crown copyright 2024, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0, as the PDF's imprint (p.iv) states.
• Covers: Volume 1 only: Part 1, Introduction (Chapter 1, Introduction, and Chapter 2, Executive summary, which summarises all fourteen Parts of the report) and Part 2, The path to disaster (Chapters 3 to 14). Volumes 2 to 7, including the recommendations (Part 14, in Volume 7), are not here yet.
• Size: about 117,000 words including the notes; 2,019 notes; 215 pages marked (the contents, pp.v-viii, and pp.1-224, less the blank pages).
• Not used: the large-print edition (the same text at different page numbers), and the separate 52-page Overview and its translations.

How the text was read

• Born-digital, so the words are the PDF's own. The PDF was made from InDesign and its text layer is clean; no OCR is involved. 96.8% of the PDF's words are in the text here; the rest are the running heads ("The Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report" and "Part 1 | Chapter 1: Introduction" and so on), which are removed, and the contents' leader dots.
• Page numbers are the printed ones: roman on the contents (v to viii), arabic from the first page of Part 1. An independent check that reads each page's opening words in the PDF places all 213 located markers on the right page.
• Paragraphs. The report numbers its paragraphs ("1.1", "4.20"); each is one citable paragraph, with its number; every number is present, in sequence.
• Headings are set by typeface only, so they are read from the PDF's layout: the two Parts, the fourteen chapters, and three levels of sub-heading, 204 in all. The executive summary's account of each Part of the report ("Part 3: The testing and marketing of products (Chapters 15 – 29)") is a sub-heading of Chapter 2, as printed, not a Part of this volume.
• Notes. The 2,019 notes at the page feet are all linked to their markers in the text. One marker (note 1148, p.154) is set at the start of a line after a full stop, where no reading rule finds it; it was linked by a recorded correction, checked against the page.
• Checked against the Inquiry's HTML edition. The Inquiry also published each volume as a web page (now archived). It has no paragraph numbers or page numbers, so it is not the source here, but we compared against it: every body heading here is a heading there, and it has the same 2,019 notes.

Known limitations

• Figures, charts and tables are not shown. The figures of Chapter 5 and the charts and tables of Chapters 5 and 6 (Figure 5.7, the European classes, and Figures 6.1 to 6.6, Dr Lane's summaries of the guidance on external walls through time, pp.54-79) are drawn as pictures in the PDF; their words are left out here and only their captions remain. The Inquiry's HTML edition has the seven tables as tables; until they are added, the PDF is the authority for them.
• The cover is repeated. The text opens with the cover's words and then the title page's, as the PDF does.
• Chapter headings read "Chapter 1: Introduction", as the contents prints them, where the chapter's first page sets "Chapter 1" and "Introduction" on two lines.

Reporting a problem

If the text here differs from the published report, the PDF is the authority. Open an issue on the report's repository with the page number and the passage.