London Fire Brigade Commissioner Dany Cotton said the service would respond “differently” to any tower block fire like the Grenfell tragedy in the future.

Ms Cotton distanced the service from the stay-put policy which was criticised in the Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry while responding yesterday to questions at the London Assembly about the report into the fatal 2017 blaze, which was released last week.

“Knowing what we know now about Grenfell Tower and similar buildings with ACM cladding, our response would be very different,” the commissioner told the fire resilience and emergency planning committee. “Knowing what we know now the actions that we would take would mean that we would respond in a different way.”

The fire chief told how the scale and magnitude of the fire in the 24-storey tower, which claimed 72 lives, had never been seen before in the UK.

READ MORE: Grenfell Tower tragedy -  'Systemic' failures in fire brigade's response

She added that the brigade acknowledged all the recommendations made in the report and identified areas where training of its officers was “inadequate”.

Ms Cotton said: “We have identified areas where our training was inadequate and where the information we collected was inadequate.

“We do recognise there are areas where clearly there was insufficient training for both our firefighters, control staff and officers.”

The fire chief told the committee there were 40 fire engines at Grenfell and firefighters were there “in number in a very short space of time”.

“We physically could not have put any more firefighters into the building at one time,” she said, adding the single staircase in the tower limited the amount of personnel that could enter.

Ms Cotton said that although there is now a greater understanding of how fires in buildings with cladding spread, it would be difficult to implement training to respond to such situations.

“Because it is still such an extraordinary event of such a significant scale we still have huge concerns, about the fires in those types of buildings.”

The commissioner was criticised last week when Sir Martin Moore-Bick found more lives could have been saved if the policy of telling residents to stay in their flats had been abandoned sooner.

His report said there was an occasional reluctance of senior officers to believe that a building could ever fail to comply with regulations.

The evidence from the first phase of the inquiry “strongly suggests” that “stay-put” was an “article of faith within the LFB so powerful that to depart from it was to all intents and purposes unthinkable”, he said.

Bereaved relatives of those who died in the fire have called on Ms Cotton to resign.

Labour MP David Lammy, whose friend Khadija Saye and her mother Mary Mendy were among the victims, told the BBC that Ms Cotton should “take ultimate responsibility”, adding: “Leadership was poor – coordination was poor. I think that in all decency some of what she said in inquiry was not just insensitive, it was sort of offensive.”

The next phase of the inquiry will focus on the installation of combustible cladding on the 24-storey tower block in 2016.

A group representing survivors of the blaze said the second phase of the public inquiry must focus on who is to blame for the tower’s “devastating refurbishment”.

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Grenfell United, which represents victims said: “Phase two of the inquiry must now focus on where responsibility for the devastating refurbishment lies. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the tenant management organisation and all companies involved must face serious questions.”

Campaign group Justice4Grenfell said firefighters “have been made scapegoats of Phase 1 while the ‘big’ players seem to have got off scot-free”.

Sir Moore-Bick said: “The building suffered a total failure of compartmentation. How the building came to be in that state is the most pressing question ... in phase two.”