Central-Local Government relations in an age of mistrust: The Grenfell Tower Disaster

A breadth of research documents declining citizen trust towards public and private institutions. Among the varying reasons for this trend, one causal factor given relates to the onset of new generational values lacking in deference. If this explanation is accepted there is little reason to suspect that elites within this generational cohort do not also bear such values. The institutions they inhabit are not wholly separate from civil society, nor are they as individuals exempt from wider societal change. Despite this, there is a lack of research which seeks to understand what effect declining citizen mistrust has upon inter-elite relations. Where there has been an analytical focus upon elites within government, for instance in core executive studies and research upon the British Political Tradition, the focus has remained insular, underplaying the broader social context within which elites operate. My PhD attempts to broaden the analytical lens of political elite studies by investigating the effect of declining citizen trust upon the relations between central and peripheral elites.

I will study mistrust within inter-elite relations by examining 'blame avoidance', which, due to its iterative nature spanning political and administrative domains is a highly suitable approach. Of primary importance for this research are the presentational strategies that elites employ to influence public opinion. I will build upon this literature by assessing how underlying public sentiments, such as mistrust of government, influence the formation of presentational strategies and the narratives within them. This will be done by answering the following research question:

How, if at all, is declining citizen trust in public institutions utilised as a strategic resource in the formation of blame between central and peripheral elites in the English system of governance?

For the purposes of this study, I intend to use the Grenfell Tower disaster as an example of blame avoidance between central and local government. An interpretivist epistemology will be employed to analyse this case study. A micro-level analysis will identify textual based narratives in the formation of presentational strategies, whilst also being situated within a meso-level analysis of institutional constraints. The primary data sample for this will be public documents and minutes produced between 2017-19 by the Independent Grenfell Recovery Task Force, Ministers, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council (RBK&C) covering the management of the disaster. In addition to this, an ethnographic method involving the observation of events in which central Government agencies and RBK&C conduct business relating to Grenfell will be employed. This will allow for the analysis of the way in which the narratives discovered in policy documents manifest in face-to-face interactions between political elites and in any attribution of blame.