Officers from the Metropolitian Police's Grenfell Tower investigation team are continuing to identify and question companies and organisation involved in the refurbishment programme prior to the fatal fire in the summer.
The police investigation is running alongside the public inquiry, with which the MPS is co-operating and Detective Chief Superintendant Fiona McCormack said the investigation into what happened at Grenfell Tower is a priority for the force.
"Outside of counter-terrorism investigations, this is the biggest investigation the MPS is undertaking and the scale is huge," she explained. "We hope by the end of the year our search teams will have finished their work inside the tower and the formal identifications will be complete. We are committed to finding, recovering and identifying everyone who died as quickly as we can.
"We do now think the final figure of those who died may not be as high as 80 but we don’t know exactly at this stage. The process is ongoing but we now have a better idea of figures. However, we still don't know if there was someone inside Grenfell Tower who died who was not reported missing, and we won't know until the searches are complete."
Around 200 officers, drawn from across the Met, are working full-time on the Grenfell Tower investigation, which is focussing on the construction, refurbishment and management of Grenfell Tower as well as the emergency services’ response.
The types of offences that may be discovered could range from fraud, misconduct, health and safety breaches, breaches of fire safety regulations or manslaughter on a corporate and/or an individual level. More than 2,500 exhibits have been seized so far, many from within the tower.
Officers previously said they had identified 60 companies that had been involved in the construction, refurbishment or management of Grenfell. That number has now grown to 336 different organisations. Each is being contacted to establish exactly what their role was.
Where their role is considered relevant, digital downloads of all business records are being recovered. So far, in excess of 31 million documents have been recovered and it is anticipated that number will increase. Specialist software will be used to enable officers to process and search those millions of documents in order to find any relevant material that may be used evidentially at a later stage.
