The Grenfell disaster: 5 years on
Image by the blowup on Unsplash
Will the ‘Perpetrator Pays’ amendment finally end the UK’s cladding scandal?
A few days ago, Londoners watched with hearts in mouths as a fire grew in the Relay Building in Aldgate. The scene was all too familiar; a number of residents could not hear any fire alarms sounding on the floors of their flats and were alerted by word of mouth. The residents also complained about the building’s ‘stay put’ policy and the high risk of fires on the wooden balconies, but these complaints were unnoticed. It eventually took 125 firefighters to tackle the blaze. Luckily, no one died.
This residential fire falls on nearly the 5th anniversary of the Grenfell disaster, and nothing has been done to change the course of history since then. On the 14th of June 2017, London woke up to a blaze that had ripped through the heart of the residential Grenfell tower in Kensington, only a mile from ex-Prime Minister David Cameron’s house. The fire was started by a malfunctioning fridge-freezer, but it spread up the tower at an unusual and alarming rate due to the flammable cladding that covered it.
The result of this avoidable oversight was devastating; 72 people lost their lives in what became the UK’s deadliest structural fire since 1988 and worst residential fire since World War II. The biggest injustice is that Grenfell’s refurbishers knew that its cladding would fail only two years before the disaster, but their complaints were ignored. Again, this sounds all too familiar.
Nearly five years on from this unspeakable tragedy, and still 40% of buildings in England with the same type of flammable cladding have not been made safe. That is nearly 200 buildings, standing dormant across England, woefully unprepared for a similar fire. Most importantly, justice has yet to be found for the victims of Grenfell, with multiple instances of corporate malpractice leading up to the disaster going unpunished.
Remediation
With such an important matter as fire safety, what has caused this long and unacceptable delay?
The main issue revolves around the cost of remediation, and who pays it. In 2020, the government set aside billions of pounds to remove the dangerous cladding, but only for blocks that were above 18 metres tall. Progress in removing the cladding has been too slow however, and accessing this funding is an extremely complex process.
Currently, there is a Building Safety Bill being debated in the House of Lords. It was originally intended to speed up remediation when it was introduced in July 2021, but it also exposed the leaseholders themselves to the costs of removing the cladding. Some leaseholders have been unfairly hit with costs of more than £100,000 to remove cladding, install fire alarms, and buy insurance. They have been made into further victims of the cladding crisis, being unable to sell their homes until the work is carried out.
As a result of this unfairness, at least 3,000,000 leaseholders are trapped in flats that they bought in good faith but cannot sell or cannot pay to make safe. Cladding action groups have complained that making the leaseholder foot the bill rather than the building developers leaves the current regulatory system ‘inadequate, weak and gameable’.
Recent developments
However, there have been some positive recent developments in 2022. In January, secretary of state for Levelling up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove announced a ‘reset’ to the government's approach to building safety.
To break the current remediation deadlock, developers and cladding companies are going to be made to pay the fees, which are currently estimated at £4 billion. The new idea is to expose the companies at fault for neglecting their leaseholders and make them face commercial consequences if they refuse to fix their buildings.
Gove’s announcement comes at a time when an amendment to the Building Safety Bill is gathering widespread support in both houses of Parliament. The amendment, called ‘Perpetrator Pays’, ensures that liability for remediation is firmly attached to the perpetrators of the cladding crisis. The amendment gives the option for victims of the cladding crisis to pursue developers and contractors in litigation, forcing these perpetrators to make pay-outs and fix the defects. As the Earl of Lytton explains, the ‘Perpetrator Pays’ amendment serves to eliminate ‘perverse incentives’ and ‘poor culture’ in building developers’ ‘race to the bottom on cost-cutting and safety’.
The state of social housing
While a welcome addition to the Building Safety Bill, the ‘Perpetrator Pays’ amendment is the bare minimum of what the government should be doing to fix the UK’s inadequate standard of social housing, which was terribly laid bare by the Grenfell disaster. The Government’s piecemeal attempts at improving living standards aren’t as much examples of ‘levelling up’ as they are of ‘toning down’.
In December 2021 it was announced that the Home Office had awarded a £210,000 contract to a firm to rewrite fire safety standards. This is the same firm who wrote the original safety document, which claims that it is ‘unrealistic’ to prepare emergency evacuation plans for disabled building residents. This is made all the more harrowing when considering that 41% of all disabled Grenfell residents died in the fire, representing 15 of the 72 victims. The Home Office continues to neglect the worst affected by the cladding scandal.
Many activists have recently taken to social media to expose the inexcusable standards of social housing all around the UK. Various videos published on twitter show cockroaches and toxic black mould scaling the walls of tenants’ flats, pipes leaking from ceilings, lifts and doors in disrepair, and elderly tenants suffering through biting cold because of skyrocketing energy bills.
It doesn’t have to be like this. At Find Others, we truly believe that a better society is possible if we all unite and use our voices. If you are angry that little has been done to fix the cladding scandal after 5 years, if you support #perpetratorpays, or if you just want to see the conditions of our social housing improved, Find Others can help you join an online community which champions the same cause.