Legal Tales | Despite lapses behind Tai Po fire, Hong Kong’s unity shows in a time of crisis
Catastrophic fires in other places offer lessons in the administration of justice, but Hongkongers’ care and resilience will carry them through
I grew up in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district and Wang Fuk Court was a stone’s throw away from my school. In the recent fire, 16 students and one staff member of my alma mater were affected. Fortunately, there were no casualties among them, but homes were destroyed and their loss was profoundly felt. The alumni circle was unanimously grief-stricken and many made every effort to offer whatever modest help we could.
In the wake of the fire, messages of sympathy and concern for Hong Kong arrived one after another from friends overseas and from the mainland, a testament to compassion that truly transcends borders.
A former classmate now living in the UK recounted how one of his friends was affected by the infamous Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 and, to this day, deliberately avoids the surrounding area. That catastrophe claimed 72 lives and left many injured, sending shock waves across the nation. The British prime minister at the time, Theresa May, promptly announced the establishment of a public inquiry, led by retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick.
The inquiry and its final report took seven years to complete and concluded that the tragedy was caused by a cascading series of failures across both the UK government and the private sector.
The fire was initially ignited by an electrical fault in a fridge-freezer on the fourth floor, but spread rapidly because of the building’s highly flammable aluminium composite cladding, installed during a recent refurbishment.
Experts had warned about the dangers of cladding fires as early as 1992, but the materials were nevertheless used at Grenfell. Such cladding had been shown to “burn violently” in safety tests conducted in 2001, but they were never banned. As the materials had previously been classified as meeting one British safety standard, the test results were kept confidential, and no meaningful tightening of regulatory requirements followed.
The inquiry further found evidence of “systematic dishonesty” on the part of those who manufactured and marketed the cladding, including deliberate concealment of the true extent of the fire risks posed. Taken together, the findings exposed not an unforeseeable accident, but a preventable disaster rooted in regulatory complacency, commercial misconduct, and the repeated failure to act on clear warnings.