This informal CPD article ‘Proving Command Competence at Major Incidents: Why Training Is Not Proof - lessons from the Grenfell, Manchester and Cranston Inquiries’ was provided by Nigel Humphreys MSc Cert Ed FCIPD AMBCI, Director of Education at Skills 2 Share, an organisation who specialise in providing a wide range of professional training programmes to organisations in Emergency Procedures, Crisis Management & Business Continuity.
1. The Argument
Whenever a major incident exposes an emergency command failure, the emergency sector’s reflex is often to call for more training. This can be the wrong reflex, or at least an incomplete one. Evidence suggests the recurring failure is not that commanders are untrained, but that organisations cannot tell whether they are competent. Training is visible, procurable and easy to point to. Competence is a harder thing to prove, and it is proof, not provision, that associated inquiries keep finding to be absent.
This article draws on three inquiries, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (Phase 1, 2019; Phase 2, 2024) (1) (2), the Manchester Arena Inquiry (Volume 2, 2022) (3) and the Cranston Inquiry (2026) (4), to make a single analysis. Across three different sectors and three very different events, the common thread is not a training gap but an assessment gap. Each organisation could describe what training it offered. None could demonstrate that the leader it deployed was competent to exercise that command. It can be argued that until the emergency services sector treats those as separate questions, it will keep answering the easy one and failing the hard one.
2. Grenfell: The Brigade That Could Not Tell
The Phase 1 report (October 2019) examined the London Fire Brigade (LFB) response to the fire of 14 June 2017, in which 72 people died (1). Its findings on training were stark: senior control room staff were not trained to manage an incident of that scale, and operational commanders on the ground were not trained to recognise when an evacuation was needed or how to organise one. Read alone, Phase 1 looks like a training story, and that is how much of the sector received it.
Phase 2 (September 2024) tells a deeper story, and it is arguably the single most important finding across all three inquiries. The inquiry found not merely that incident command training had been less than adequate, but that, at the time of the fire, the Brigade could not accurately determine the competence of its incident commanders (2). This is not a statement about a shortage of courses. It is a statement that the organisation had no reliable way of knowing whether the people it was placing in command could do the job. Training may have been delivered; competence was never established. That is therefore an assessment failure, and no amount of additional training would have closed it.
It is telling that Phase 2 reached past training for its remedy. It recommended that HMICFRS inspect the Brigade’s arrangements for assessing incident commander competence and continuing competence “whether by a process of revalidation or otherwise,” and that government establish an independent College of Fire and Rescue to set national standards of competence with regular assessment against them (2). The fix therefore was a system for measuring competence, not simply more input. LFB accepted the Phase 2 recommendations in full in October 2024 (5).
3. Manchester: Deployed Without Anyone Confirming He Could
The Manchester Arena Inquiry (Volume 2, November 2022, chaired by Sir John Saunders) examined the response to the bombing of 22 May 2017, which killed 22 people and injured hundreds (3). The most direct finding on command competence concerned Greater Manchester Police’s Silver (Tactical) Commander. Superintendent Arif Nawaz told the inquiry he did not have the training to carry out the role, and Debbie Ford, Gold Commander on the night and later the force’s Deputy Chief Constable, agreed he was “not the right man for the job,” not having been given the training or knowledge the role required (3). He was replaced as Silver Commander during the course of the night.
It may be tempting to file this under “training gap” and move on. A closer look suggests the deeper failure was one of assurance. The problem here was not only that Supt Nawaz lacked the training; it was that the organisation deployed him into a Silver command role without anyone having confirmed he was competent to fill it. Somewhere in the system a judgement was made that he was suitable, and that judgement appeared to rest on nothing that could withstand scrutiny. A functioning assessment regime should not let an unprepared commander reach that chair. Based on the inquiry findings, Manchester is not a story about one under-trained officer; it is a story about an organisation that could not tell, in advance, that he was under-prepared — the same failure Grenfell names explicitly.
The wider findings reinforce the point. GMFRS’s command structure did not map onto the standardised Gold–Silver–Bronze model; it did not deploy tactical commanders away from the scene; and it consistently failed to include North West Fire Control in exercising, so tri-service communication was never tested against the JESIP principles it was meant to satisfy (3) (6). Exercising is where competence is observed under pressure. An organisation that does not exercise has removed its main opportunity to discover, before an incident, that its commanders cannot yet do what is claimed of them.
The Phase 1 report (October 2019)
4. Cranston: A Review That Never Happened
The Cranston Inquiry (chaired by Sir Ross Cranston, report published 5 February 2026) examined the deaths of over 30 people attempting to cross the English Channel on 23–24 November 2021 (4). Its findings reach well beyond the maritime sector. Operational staff at Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) Dover had received no training tailored to small boat search and rescue or to the new procedures for that work (4). The Maritime and Coastguard Agency said training had been held, but it does not appear to have reached the staff most involved. In the vacuum, individual working practices developed that no procedure endorsed and no one had assessed.
The key finding here appears to be one about oversight. HM Coastguard’s own system was designed so that the Dover Search and Rescue Mission Co-ordinator’s decisions would be reviewed by a more senior Maritime Tactical Commander. On the night, that review did not take place, short staffing at the tactical level, compounded by a breakdown in information sharing while MRCC Dover was overwhelmed (4). This is assessment failing in real time. The organisation had built the right control mechanism, a competence check on the decision-maker and then allowed it to lapse, a staffing risk that had been identified within HM Coastguard well before November 2021 and left unresolved. A competence assurance regime is worth nothing if it is the first thing to fall away when the pressure rises.
Cranston’s remedies again point past training alone: frequent retraining, yes, but also independent external assessment of HM Coastguard’s effectiveness, a programme of joint exercises, and a mass rescue operation plan (4). The recurring word here is assessment; preferably external, regular, and independent of the body being assessed.
5. The Distinction the Sector Keeps Missing
Set the three inquiries side by side and a pattern appears. In each, the organisation could account for training and could not account for competence. Training is an input: courses attended, hours logged, a certificate on file. Competence is an output: the demonstrated ability to perform the role to standard, under realistic conditions, verified by someone qualified to judge. The two are related but they are not the same, and the gap between them appears to be exactly where these incidents were lost. An attendance record answers the question “was this person trained?” It does not answer the question the inquiries actually pose: “was this person competent to command?”. A commander can attend every course and still be unable to command; the only way to know is to assess, and the evidence suggests organisations do not address this.
More training may be a comfortable response to each inquiry but an inadequate one. It funds the visible input, generates activity and closes recommendations, while leaving the underlying failure, the absence of any means to prove competence, exactly where it was.
6. What Follows for Practice
If the failure is one of assessment rather than provision, the response likely has to change shape. The following are five potential response actions:
- Separate the training from the proof and audit the second. Most organisations can produce a training record on request; few can produce evidence that each commander has been assessed as competent for the role they hold. Start by asking which of the two records you keep.
- Assess against a standard, under realistic conditions. Competence is demonstrated, not attended. Assessment means observing the commander perform the role, ideally in exercise, against defined criteria, judged by someone qualified to judge, not counting the courses they have sat.
- Treat competence as perishable. A judgement of competence has a shelf life; skills decay and doctrine moves. Grenfell’s “revalidation or otherwise” and Cranston’s “frequent retraining” both say the same thing - competence must be re-proven on a cycle, not established once and assumed to endure.
- Use exercising as an assessment engine, not just a rehearsal. Multi-agency, scenario-based exercising is the most honest test of whether a commander can actually command (6). Manchester shows what an organisation forfeits when it exercises without its full team or does not exercise at all: it loses its best chance to find the gap before an incident does.
- Make the decision log part of the competence record. In all three inquiries the quality and availability of contemporaneous decision records were scrutinised. A structured, well-kept log is not administrative housekeeping, it is a commander’s own evidence, made in real time, that they exercised the role competently. It is where competence, if it exists, becomes provable after the fact.
Final thoughts
The evidence from Grenfell, Manchester and Cranston does not suggest a sector that fails to train its commanders. It highlights a sector that cannot prove they are competent, and too often has seemingly not tried. The uncomfortable truth in all three is that the failure was likely knowable in advance, but the means to establish competence either did not exist or was allowed to lapse.
The question every organisation with a command responsibility should therefore be able to answer today, before the next incident occurs rather than in evidence at the next inquiry, is not whether its commanders have been trained. It is whether it can prove they are competent. If the honest answer is uncertain, that is not a training problem to solve. It is more an assessment system to build.
The information is provided here as informal educational content for personal learning only; it is not legal, regulatory or operational advice, and no warranty or liability is accepted so far as the law allows.
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References
(1) Grenfell Tower Inquiry (2019) Phase 1 Report. London: The Stationery Office. Available at: https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/phase-1-report
(2) Grenfell Tower Inquiry (2024) Phase 2 Report. London: The Stationery Office. Available at: https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/phase-2-report
(3) Manchester Arena Inquiry (2022) Volume 2: Emergency Response. Report of the Public Inquiry into the Attack on Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017. Chairman: The Hon Sir John Saunders. HC 757. London: The Stationery Office. Available at: https://manchesterarenainquiry.org.uk/report-volume-two/
(4) Cranston, Sir R. (2026) The Report of the Cranston Inquiry: the Public Inquiry into the Events of 23 to 24 November 2021. HC 1581. London: Department for Transport / The Stationery Office. Available at: https://cranston.independent-inquiry.uk/
(5) London Fire Brigade (2024) Response to the London Fire Brigade Recommendations — Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report. Available at: https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/news/2024-news/september/grenfell-inquiry-report-phase-2/
(6) JESIP (2024) Joint Doctrine: The Interoperability Framework, 3rd edition, version 3.1. London: JESIP. Available at: https://www.jesip.org.uk/joint-doctrine.
