SALES managers in France working for the company that produced combustible cladding used on Grenfell Tower were ordered to stop recommending the product more than a year before the fire.

Vince Meakins, sales manager for Arconic’s British division, told the inquiry into the disaster yesterday that he was unaware that his counterparts in France had been told to stop promoting the deadly cladding. 

The company made and sold the flammable aluminium composite material rainscreen panels with a polyethylene (PE) plastic core that were fitted on Grenfell Tower in west London, where 72 people in died in the June 2017 fire. 

“Up until the fire, the tragedy at Grenfell, there was nothing said to me to stop selling or producing or putting forward the PE product,” Mr Meakins told the inquiry. 

Despite Arconic telling sales staff in France to promote fire-safety cladding from 2016 onwards, the inquiry heard that the firm continued to sell the deadly PE product in Britain. 

Mr Meakins has said that Arconic’s technical advisers never directly brought any fire-safety shortcomings of the PE product to his attention and that he “never would have been selling or involved with a product if [he] knew how combustible it was.”