Grenfell

‘Grenfell is a story about a failed evacuation.’ These are the words of Professor Ed Galea, an internationally respected expert in fire safety and evacuations who, among other things, wrote a pivotal study into the attempted evacuation of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. But this is something the British state, and particularly the Home Office, appears utterly unable to accept. For decades, this country has relied on telling residents in burning tower blocks to ‘stay put’. This has been baked into the way we build our high rises: we require walls, floors and ceilings to effectively break the building up into a series of small, fire resisting boxes. This

The Number 10 Christmas parties during lockdown have dominated the news agenda in recent days – and for good reason. But there has arguably been an even bigger government scandal brewing, one which has largely been overlooked in Westminster. On Tuesday the government told the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that it was ‘deeply sorry’ for the ‘past failures’ which contributed to the devastating 2017 fire which killed 72 people. Apologies always come in varying forms of breadth and sincerity and this one (as is often the case when delivered by an expensive QC) was carefully limited. The government said that it had assumed fire regulations were being monitored ‘at a local

The government’s Building Safety Bill has been a long time coming, but its publication today offers little certainty for residents caught up in Britain’s cladding scandal. For leaseholders, the bad news is this: many will remain trapped in buildings cloaked in combustible external wall systems. Despite the housing secretary Robert Jenrick’s insistence that the new system would ‘reassure the vast majority of residents’, there is little in the bill to alleviate their worries.  To throw more money at it will inevitably lead to more corners being cut and workers without the proper competence being drafted in The bill proposes the creation of a new Building Safety Regulator (BSR), although an interim regulator

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry has exposed the dark heart of the building safety crisis in recent weeks, as it examined the role of cladding and insulation firms in causing the fire. We have learned that the products used in the tower’s cladding system were known to be severely flammable and that tests pointing this out were suppressed by the manufacturers as they chased lucrative contracts for high rise buildings. There is no underplaying the size of what has been revealed by this section of the inquiry. This is a monstrous corporate scandal, enabled by failures of some of the construction sector’s most respected institutions. The effects reach far beyond Grenfell,

Most of the Conservative MPs who responded to Robert Jenrick’s statement this afternoon about an extra £3.5 billion to help with the cladding crisis sounded relieved that the government is finally doing something. But if ministers think that the response in the Chamber means they can relax, they are in for a bit of a shock. The two most active Conservative MPs on this issue are Stephen McPartland and Royston Smith, and neither spoke in the Commons after the announcement. But both have been critical elsewhere. McPartland called the policy – which will only offer loans to leaseholders in blocks between 11 and 18 metres high – a ‘betrayal’ and