Reports that Matter

About this edition

Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report

How the text was made, and where it falls short

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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 12 November 2026.

The edition

  • Source: the seven volumes of the Phase 2 report (HC 19-I to HC 19-VII, ISBN 978-1-5286-5080-9), as published on GOV.UK on 4 September 2024: 1,694 A4 pages in all (232, 228, 202, 326, 212, 220 and 274), kept with their SHA-256 checksums in the report's repository. They are the canonical citation target. The Inquiry's own website carried copies of the same edition.
  • Licence: Crown copyright 2024, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0, as each volume's imprint states.
  • Covers: all fourteen Parts and 113 chapters. Volume 1: Part 1, Introduction (with Chapter 2, the Panel's executive summary of the whole report), and Part 2, The path to disaster. Volume 2: Part 3, the testing and marketing of products. Volume 3: Parts 4 and 5, the Tenant Management Organisation and the management of fire safety. Volume 4: Part 6, the refurbishment. Volume 5: Parts 7 and 8, the gas riser and the London Fire Brigade. Volume 6: Part 9, the deceased. Volume 7: Parts 10 to 14, from the response and recovery to the recommendations.
  • Left out: Volume 7's appendices (Appendix A, Glossary; Appendix B, Guide to references, with its tables of hearing days and witnesses; Appendix C, The Inquiry Team; PDF pages 249 to 274), which are tables and will be added when tables can be shown. The cover, title page, imprint and back cover of Volumes 2 to 7, which repeat Volume 1's, are not repeated here; Volume 1's are.
  • Size: about 821,000 words including the notes; 15,340 notes; 1,557 pages marked.
  • 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 volumes were made from InDesign and their text layers are clean; no OCR is involved. 96.1% of the PDFs' words are in the text here; the rest are the running heads ("The Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report" and "Part 3 | Chapter 16: Arconic - evidential matters" and so on), the contents' leader dots, the covers left out above and Volume 7's appendices.
  • Page numbers are the printed ones: roman on Volume 1's contents (v to viii), arabic from the first page of each Part. Each volume numbers its pages from 1, so a page number on its own is ambiguous across volumes: a page 50 is printed in each of several volumes. A link to a paragraph is not; the volume is the one whose Part the section belongs to (Volume 1: Parts 1-2; 2: Part 3; 3: Parts 4-5; 4: Part 6; 5: Parts 7-8; 6: Part 9; 7: Parts 10-14). One page prints no number, the title page of Part 10 (Volume 7), and is numbered 5 from its place in the sequence.
  • Paragraphs. The report numbers its paragraphs by chapter ("16.1", "97.108"), and the numbering runs on from volume to volume, so each number is unique in the report. Each is one citable paragraph, with its number; every number the volumes print is here once, in order (797, 851, 846, 1,213, 757, 1,032 and 913 by volume). A time of day or a clause reference that falls at the start of a printed line ("02.05", "12.7 of Approved Document B") stays inside its sentence.
  • Headings are set by typeface only, so they are read from the PDF's layout: the fourteen Parts, the 113 chapters, and three levels of sub-heading. In Part 9 the chapters are floors ("Chapter 88: Floor 14") and the sub-headings name each person who died, then the Inquiry's headings for its findings about them ("Background and composition of household", "Vulnerability", "Events of 14 June 2017").
  • Notes. Each volume numbers its notes from 1 (2,019, 2,192, 1,829, 3,279, 1,772, 1,798 and 2,451, the counts the PDFs' own tags give). All 15,340 are linked to their markers in the text. One marker in Volume 1 (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.
  • Lists. Lettered sub-items ("a.", "b.") in Volumes 2 to 7 are read as items of their own, each with its wrapped lines.
  • Checked against the Inquiry's HTML edition of Volume 1. 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; for Volume 1 we compared against it: every body heading here is a heading there, and it has the same 2,019 notes. Volumes 2 to 7 were checked against the PDFs' own tags (notes, paragraph numbers) instead.

Known limitations

  • Figures, charts and tables are not shown. The figures and tables are drawn as pictures in the PDFs; their words are left out here and only their captions remain (in Volume 1, Figure 5.7 and Dr Lane's Figures 6.1 to 6.6, pp.54-79; in Volume 4, Figures 48.1-48.2, 57.1, 58.1 and 60.1-60.3; in Volume 5, Figure 81.1; in Volume 7, Figures 109.1-109.3). The PDF is the authority for them. The Inquiry's web edition of Volume 7 names one image "Corrected_Figure_109.3"; the GOV.UK PDF already carries that corrected figure.
  • Volume 7's appendices are not here yet (see above).
  • Two headings in Part 9 run together where the PDF sets a group heading over a person's name: "People who died in or near Flat 201 Raymond (Moses) Bernard" (Volume 6, p.168) and "Flat 204 Hesham Rahman" (p.199).
  • Some paragraphs are split at a page break or into a false quotation. About 35 places in Volumes 2 to 7 where a paragraph's end is shown as a quotation, mostly lists without letters (Volume 6) and paragraphs running over a page into an indented passage. And where a page opens in the middle of a paragraph, a line on it that begins with a capital can start a paragraph of its own: inside 22.102 in Volume 2 (p.94) "K15 was rated national Class 0…" and "B) the amended version…" stand apart, and inside 113.11 in Volume 7 (p.234) the recommendation that the statutory guidance be reviewed is split over two short paragraphs; about a hundred such breaks in Volumes 2 to 7, most in Volume 7. The words and their order are right.
  • The cover is repeated at the start of Volume 1: 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 volume, page number and passage.