Progress on making buildings safe has been too slow and there remains “far too much” dangerous cladding on properties, the Deputy Prime Minister said as she visited the site of a fire in east London.
Angela Rayner, who is also Housing Secretary, said residents and firefighters had faced a “fireball” in Dagenham as an overnight bank holiday blaze broke out – more than seven years on from the Grenfell Tower fire and just a week before that inquiry’s final report is published.
Grenfell United, which represents many of the bereaved and survivors of that 2017 fire, said the incident in Dagenham “highlights the painfully slow progress of remediation across the country, and a lack of urgency for building safety as a whole”.
The group added that, seven years on, “the fact that when a fire happens the best we can hope for at the moment is ‘a near miss’ speaks volumes of the progress made since”.
Cladding on the seven-storey Dagenham building had been in the process of being removed, with scaffolding visible at the site and London Fire Brigade confirming there were “known fire safety issues”.
“I am meeting with the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) this week again to really press home the urgency to make sure that that work is done.”
She said there is a responsibility on the owners of buildings to ensure the work is carried out and insisted funds are available, saying “nowhere near enough” remediation had taken place seven years on from Grenfell.
The Deputy Prime Minister said: “We’ve got to make sure that the regulators are pushing that agenda because we still have far too many buildings that have got this cladding on that needs to be removed and there’s a responsibility to make sure that that is removed as quickly as possible.”
Ms Rayner said seeing the scenes in Dagenham “must have been incredibly traumatic” for the bereaved and survivors of the Grenfell disaster, as she described the “slow progress” on making buildings safe since then.
Ms Rayner also paid tribute to the efforts of all those who helped rescue people and look after them following the latest fire.
She said: “It’s horrific to see the level of damage that’s happened to the building, but it was also heroic to see the way the community and the first responders, the council, and all of the emergency services came together to prioritise, first of all, making sure that everyone got out of the building safely, but then also about bringing the fire under control.
“You can see the level of damage that’s happened to the building, and I’m incredibly grateful for those that responded and managed to make sure that everybody was out of that building safely.”
More than 200 firefighters responded to the fire at the property in Freshwater Road, which was undergoing “remedial” work to remove and replace “non-compliant cladding” on the fifth and sixth floors containing flats, according to a planning application document.
Dame Judith Hackitt, who led a Government review on building safety after the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, said it is “really concerning” that so many people are still living in uncertainty and fear about their homes and that it was “very lucky” nobody died in Monday’s blaze.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s really concerning to me that so many people are left with this level of uncertainty and fear about the safety of the buildings they’re in.
“I mean, we can all take great comfort, I think, from the fact that no-one lost their lives yesterday.
“But, nonetheless, it’s a tragedy that those people have lost everything. They’ve lost all their belongings and everything else, and it could happen to other people.
“So this is a really urgent problem that needs fixing.”
Our statement on the Dagenham fire: pic.twitter.com/vADYMdelhY
— Grenfell United (@GrenfellUnited) August 26, 2024
Dame Judith criticised those who have been “passing the buck” on the issue of fixing buildings seven years on from the Grenfell fire.
She told Today: “The problem of who pays and whether it was Government’s job to fix was resolved, and Government has put up billions to fix the buildings that are rented to people, but in the leasehold case, that also has been fixed now.
“So this is really about people passing the buck, passing it up the chain, a lack of ownership, and actually pinning people down to do the right thing that they know they need to do.”
Dame Judith said the onus is now on Labour to ensure those responsible for remediation are held to account.
“A new Government must find ways, I think, of stepping up the pace on remediation and holding those who are responsible to account for doing so,” she said.
Government figures at the end of July showed that of the 4,630 residential buildings in England of 11m (36ft) or higher that had been identified with unsafe cladding, only around half (2,299) were noted as having either started or completed remediation works.
Of these, less than a third (1,350) overall were recorded as having completed such works.
Dame Judith said that, while there is a “gradation of levels of risk” depending on the height of a building, that “does not mean that those buildings of lower height are not part of that urgent stock of buildings that need to be fixed and made safe”.
Campaign group End Our Cladding Scandal said the idea that remediation needs to be sped up is “very much an understatement”.
It also criticised Sir Keir Starmer for having “chosen to not say a word about the building safety crisis since he became Prime Minister, preferring instead to focus on building new homes rather than rescuing ordinary people from this living nightmare”.
The campaigners also highlighted the “sheer lack of progress” on wider building safety, noting that the so-called Grenfell style (aluminium composite material or ACM) cladding “is only a very narrow subset” which does not take into account “the myriad of internal life-critical fire safety defects like inadequate compartmentation, fire-stopping and fire doors that can also allow fire to spread rapidly”.
More than 80 people were evacuated in the incident at Freshwater Road, with the fire having taken just over eight hours to bring under control.
