Grenfell tower

Addressing the past Angela Rayner announced that Grenfell Tower will be demolished. What happened to Britain’s other notorious addresses? — 10 Rillington Place: scene of the murders for which Timothy Evans and John Christie were hanged in the 1950s (although many believe that Evans was innocent of the murder of his wife). The street was initially renamed Ruston Close and the house was pulled down in the 1970s. Now a memorial garden, not far from Grenfell Tower. — Ronan Point: east London tower block which partially collapsed in 1968 after a gas explosion. Was rebuilt but demolished in 1986 after continuing safety concerns. — 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester: Fred and Rosemary

Within the next year or two, I could go bankrupt. My mistake: to join a government-backed affordable housing scheme and purchase a one-bedroom flat in east London. For the past four years, it has been my pride and joy — not to mention my savings, my pension and my financial future. I was grateful for the government’s help in getting a foothold in the city. But now another government policy is hurtling towards me, against which I have no defence. Nor do potentially tens of thousands of first-time buyers and the owners of affordable housing in my position. It might be the next big scandal to hit the government. It’s

The inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire could last years. What have been the most expensive public inquiries in recent times? Bloody Sunday £191.5m, 12.5 years Rosemary Nelson (N Ireland) £46.5m, 6.5 years Robert Hamill (also NI) £33m, 7 years Billy Wright (also NI) £30.5m, 6 years Harold Shipman Inquiry £21m, 4 years Chilcott Inquiry £13m, 8 years Leveson Inquiry £5.4m, 1 year  

Last Saturday was shaping up to be one of the best days of my life. Freddie, my ten-year-old son, had been chosen by Queens Park Rangers, our football team, as one of five ‘Local Heroes’ to be honoured at half-time — part of the club’s excellent ‘QPR in the Community’ programme. This was on account of his charity work, believe it or not. After seeing the club’s Game4Grenfell, a pro-celebrity football game organised to raise money for those affected by the Grenfell Tower fire, Freddie was inspired to organise a football-and-netball tournament for under-11s at Club des Sports in Acton. With the help of his mother, he managed to raise

Everyone agrees the Grenfell Tower disaster must usher in a new era of social housing in the UK. The danger is that it sends us back to a very old era, when the council owned, managed and controlled community housing. There is another way forward, one which meets the rightful sense of injustice felt by people living on Lancaster West, the estate where Grenfell Tower stands – not the injustice of a botched refurbishment which (probably) caused the tragedy, but the injustice of residents not being listened to when they raised concerns, over many years, about their safety or quality of life. For decades – indeed, since 1974 when the

It took a spate of air disasters in the late 1970s, in particular the Portland crash of United Airlines Flight 173, for aviation experts to pay attention to something called Crew Resource Management. This is a set of procedures first conceived by Nasa with the aim of minimising human error in flight. UA173 — where the pilots had spent so long fixated with a dodgy landing wheel that they failed to notice they’d run out of fuel — was one of a growing number of incidents in which disaster arose from failures in crew interaction. As with the Tenerife airport disaster and the Air Florida crash in 1982, there was

I was going through my paces in Hyde Park, sweating out the booze, raising the heartbeat with short wind sprints, keeping my mind off the weekend’s debauchery and the ensuing Karamazovian hangover. I sat down on a bench, took off my sweaty polo shirt, opened the Daily Telegraph, and took in some rays. A police officer approached me — but with a smile. ‘Are you by any chance Taki?’ he said. ‘Guilty as charged, constable, but this time I’m clean.’ He smiled broadly and asked if he might sit down. Well, Constable Hackworth turned out to be straight out of The Blue Lamp. A Spectator reader, he somehow recognised my

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s

Home Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged colleagues to make the case for ‘sound money’; he said, ‘We must hold our nerve,’ as he came under pressure to end the public-sector pay cap of a 1 per cent rise a year. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, thought that pay rises could be awarded in ‘a responsible way’; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, did not think that taxes would need to increase to accommodate pay rises. Firemen boasted of a 2 per cent pay rise. The government won the vote on the Queen’s Speech by 323 to 309 after heading off an amendment by the Labour MP Stella Creasy,