GRENFELL justice campaigners and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) today condemned the leaking of the inquiry’s first phase report to the Telegraph.

On Monday, the inquiry’s core participants were made to sign non-disclosure agreements before being given 48 hours to read and digest the report ahead of its wider publication and debate in Parliament today.

But the embargo was broken and the report was splashed on the front of today’s Telegraph.

Campaign group Grenfell United said: “A number of bereaved and survivors have not yet had the opportunity to read the inquiry report and it is unacceptable that they should be drip fed the inquiry’s findings through the national media.”

Joe Delaney, who was evacuated from a block of flats adjacent to Grenfell Tower, called for the embargo to be dropped because it “silenced” those affected while media outlets were free to report.

FBU general secretary Matt Wrack condemned the “deeply upsetting” leaking of the report to the media.

He also criticised the inquiry for focusing on actions of firefighters and “utterly failing” to scrutinise the aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding that was put on the tower a year before the June 2017 fire broke out and killed 72 people.

Mr Wrack described the inquiry as being “completely back to front.”

He added: “The truth is that the fire spread the way it did because it was wrapped in flammable cladding.

“The firefighters turned up after that had happened, after the building had already been turned, in reality, into a death trap.”

In the report, inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick acknowledges that the “principal reason” the flames spread at speed was the ACM cladding with polyethylene cores which acted as a “source of fuel.”

But he says “serious shortcomings” plagued the London Fire Brigade’s (LFB) response and fewer people would have died if firefighters and 999 operators rescinded the “stay-put” strategy sooner.

He praises the bravery of firefighters, but accuses LFB commissioner Dany Cotton of “remarkable insensitivity” after she said she would not have done anything differently.

Mr Wrack said: “The issues behind the Grenfell Tower fire go back 30 years or more and they lie at the heart of central government.

“My frustration with this is that individual firefighters, including senior officers like Dany Cotton, are being subject to a degree of scrutiny which government ministers are avoiding.”

The inquiry’s second phase is due to start in the new year.