The Grenfell Tower Inquiry published its final report this month. Behind the rightly deserved castigation that the construction companies and other authorities received was a perhaps more surprising figure. Seven years after the fire that killed 72, following the deceit and manipulation of cladding companies, remedial works have still not begun on half of the buildings with unsafe cladding, and other progress continues to be piecemeal.
One would think that £5 billion being pledged to remedial works would almost certainly kickstart removal on all buildings. Yet the government is refusing to allot such money under the excuse that some building sites have “very complex” ownership structures, in the words of Angela Rayner, and that somehow this is an acceptable rationale to leave 2,000 buildings at risk.
Only a third of the total at-risk buildings have completed remediation. That only includes high-rises, nationally it is estimated that there are at least 250,000 residential buildings with unsafe cladding. Only ACM, the type of cladding used on Grenfell Tower, has had any meaningful progress. Then again, it was only on less than 15% of the affected buildings.
To add, despite the Inquiry report explicitly noting that cladding companies Arconic and Kingspan “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent these data and mislead the market”, there have been no prosecutions in any means for these companies who actively marketed materials that they knew would endanger lives.
The Metropolitan Police estimate that they will hand over to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2026, just nine years after the fire. This is for companies and individuals that joked in emails that “alls [sic] we do is lie in here” and that they should “scrap it [the cladding product]”, and then proceeded to supply such a product for use on Grenfell (once again, zero prosecutions).
It’s depressing to see how little progress is made when there isn’t intense media scrutiny of the government. Many of the recommendations made in the initial inquiry report on how the fire spread, published in 2019, have not been implemented; a price tag of £170 million for an inquiry that may very well be deflected from.
Only four of the 29 recommendations made to the London Fire Brigade (LFB) were completed by 2021. Most surprisingly, the LFB has still not fully transitioned away from the catastrophically bad “stay put” advice that it continued to give to those in Grenfell Tower as the fire raged on around them, even when it was clear that compartmentation—the isolation of fire to a specific flat—had failed.
Perhaps there is some hope for actual change with our new government. Already, Keir Starmer has pledged to stop any of the companies involved on Grenfell from winning government contracts (hopefully completed at a slightly more expeditious pace), alongside some other recommendations.
But there is still an overwhelming backlog of work that needs to be completed to even begin to address the failures that allowed these companies to sell these dangerous materials. Returning to those 2,000 unremedied buildings should be the government’s immediate starting point.
Leaseholders, who live in these dangerous flats are, through no fault of their own, unable to sell their flats to live elsewhere. 42 buildings in London continue to have high-risk cladding. This only includes those living in buildings taller than 11 metres, whilst all other leaseholders are mainly left out of government support funds.
It is paramount that the new government implements changes that both acts on existing recommendations and speeds up others to ensure lives are lived in safety.
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