Dangerous cladding progress 'far too slow,' says Rayner as she visits site of 'horrendous' fire at Dagenham flats

27 August 2024, 18:54

The Deputy Prime Minister has admitted that progress to remove unsafe cladding after the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire has been “going far too slowly”.

Speaking to LBC at the scene of Monday’s devastating tower block fire in Dagenham, East London, Angela Rayner pledged to get to work in holding building owners to account and making houses safe.

She said: “It’s horrendous to see the scale of the damage that’s happened here. I don’t want to speculate on the investigation but this is a building that was known to have cladding on it that was in the process of being removed.

“There’s still a lot of work to do on remediation and since taking on this role I think that’s been going far too slowly and I will be meeting with the health and safety executive and the building safety regulator to speed up that process.

“Far too many people are living in fear and we’ve got to make sure the work is carried out as quickly as possible and people feel safe in their homes.”

The Deputy PM said around half of remediation work hasn’t yet started on buildings with below-standard cladding since 2017 and told LBC that isn’t good enough.

“These are not blocks of assets, these are people’s homes and I will be pushing those regulators to make sure that the work is carried out.

“People will be really concerned that there are still buildings that have flammable cladding on them but we are identifying those buildings and enforcing the law and making sure that people are held to account.”

Residents of the Spectrum building in Dagenham have been sharing their accounts of escaping the flames that engulfed their homes just before 3am on Monday.

Some have said there were no fire alarms, or sprinklers and one person claimed a fire escape gate was padlocked shut.

Mohammad, who lives on the sixth floor, told LBC: “"If it wasn't for my wife's nose because she's six months pregnant, her heightened sense, I could say it saved our lives. Imagine coming down in that state with her, what our minds were going through, our first child on the way. Just imagine how that was, no fire alarms, no warnings.

“A woman's intuition of what's going on saved three of our lives potentially".

The commissioner of London Fire Brigade told reporters inside the cordon of the scene that the block of flats was one of more than 1,100 in the capital city that he has raised concerns about.

Andy Roe said: “I have 1,300 buildings in London that are in my opinion un-remidated and must be as a priority. This is one of very many of them.

“It is the responsibility of building owners and managers to make sure the systems inside their buildings function properly and in that number, it gives you an idea of the challenge we face as a service to hold them to account.”

It’s understood the cladding on the upper two floors of the block was unsafe, after extra flats were built onto the top of the existing building.

It was in the process of being removed, with scaffolding still surrounding it.

Angela Rayner spoke to LBC in front of the damaged facade, where windows have been blown out to leave a black shell, balcony railings have been left rusted and the top two floors completely gone.

Part of the building has now been deemed unsafe for fire investigators to access, meaning the process of working out how the fire began and spread will take longer to do.

Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades’ Union, told LBC the lack of action around building safety has been “absolutely staggering” ahead of the publication of the final report into the Grenfell Tower fire next week.

“We’re very pleased that the deputy prime minister has attended today and spoken to us and listened to the concerns that the firefighters had.

“We’re saying this crisis has not gone away and is putting firefighters every day in an impossible position because firefighting techniques are designed around buildings that work as they’re expected to work - not ones that completely fail like this one.

“There needs to be a serious discussion about building safety and how quickly we can right the faults in those existing buildings where it’s been identified and how firefighters tackle fires in residential blocks of flats.”