Thousands of new buildings are being deemed unsafe as the UK’s flammable cladding crisis worsens

On November 15, 2024By Pranco

If anything confirms that Britain’s ruling elite, like their international counterparts, could care less about the safety and lives of millions of workers, it is the Grenfell Tower inferno.

Not only have the seven-year police investigation and a now-completed public inquiry resulted in exactly zero arrests or prosecutions for the deaths of 72 people in June 2017, but hundreds of thousands of people are still living in tower blocks covered in the same flammable cladding that caused those deaths.

An example of the type of cladding used on Grenfell Tower is shown during a press conference in Philadelphia, Tuesday, June 11, 2019. A lawsuit filed in the United States says defective building materials contributed to the spread of a fire in the Grenfell Tower in London in 2017. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The financial resources allocated for remedial measures are far below what is needed to make thousands of buildings safe. Since the Grenfell fire, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) had spent just £2.3 billion on remediating buildings with unsafe cladding by August 2024.

In September, in the first publication of data since the Grenfell inquiry, MHCLG reported that no work has been done on more than half (2,400) of the 4,770 high and mid-rise buildings in England classified as ‘life critical’. cladding or fire safety defects since 2017. Only 29 percent of works have been fully completed, while a further 21 percent remained uncompleted and unsafe.

Of the mid-rise buildings over 11 meters high, work has still not started on almost all buildings (98 percent). For high-rise buildings over 18 meters with Grenfell-style ACM cladding, remediation work had not yet started at 3 percent. Work on high-rise buildings with other types of hazardous cladding had not yet started in 36 percent.

The problem actually got worse every month, with more buildings needing to be remediated than being repaired. Between the end of July and the end of August, approximately 42 remediations were completed and another 78 started. But another 141 buildings were found in the same time.

Earlier this month, the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed it could cost up to £22.4 billion to protect England’s multi-storey residential buildings from dangerous cladding. That’s the highest estimate, but even the NAO’s lower estimate is a whopping £12.6 billion.

This is in stark contrast to the overall funding provided by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), which agreed to provide £9.1 billion to fund the initial costs. The Labor government plans to reduce this cost to taxpayers to £5.1 billion through a levy – first announced by the Conservative government in February 2021 – on the property sector.

But as the NAO points out, all this remains essentially a pipe dream, as it’s unclear how much the levy could raise at all – on top of the fact that builders won’t start paying it until autumn 2025 at the earliest.

With police saying they need another two years before they can even consider charges for the crimes at Grenfell, the date for completion of repairs on buildings over 36 feet high is pushed more than a decade into the future placed, the year 2035, more than eighteen years later. Grenfell. But the NAU warned in its findings: “The remediation of buildings over 11 meters in height is currently not on track to be completed by 2035 and there are significant challenges to overcome.”

Worse still, “Of the 9,000 to 12,000 buildings taller than 11 meters that MHCLG says require remediation, 4,771 buildings have been identified and included in the portfolio, leaving up to 60% of affected buildings yet to be identified. Of the identified victims, half of the remediation work has yet to start and about a third has been completed. Of all potentially eligible buildings, only 12 to 16% have been completed.”

The government responded to the NAO by stating that “the pace of remediation to make homes safe has been far too slow” and that this would be addressed in its “Remediation Acceleration Plan.” The plan, announced by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner in September, was not accelerated quickly enough to be available at the time of the NAO report.

This is criminal delay. According to the NAO, an estimated 258,000 people live in the 4,771 buildings over 11 meters high that are in urgent need of renovation.

Even that figure is an underestimate. Analysis by the i The paper, published in September, concluded: ‘Seven years after the Grenfell fire, more than a million people could be living in potentially unsafe properties,’ with housing correspondent Vicky Spratt explaining: ‘The analysis suggests that more than double the number of residents could be affected can be caused by dangerous situations. cladding than previously thought.

“This is because the latest official data does not include thousands of properties that have yet to be fully assessed. The government statistics also exclude hundreds of thousands of people living in flats less than 11 meters high who are at potential fire risk.”

Sprat continued: “Currently the official number of apartments in social and private housing blocks with unsafe cladding is 256,000. However, campaigners believe this number could rise to around 600,000 as many buildings have not yet been properly assessed. The average home has two occupants, meaning more than a million people could be living in dangerous properties.”

Fears have only increased following recent tower block fires, such as those in Barking and Dagenham this summer, with flammable cladding once again playing a role.

The London fire brigade will continue to extinguish the fire in Dagenham on Monday afternoon

The crisis has also left thousands of residents in huge debts and unable to sell homes that have been labeled dangerous but have not yet been repaired. An example was given in a Channel 4 News expose.

Leaseholder Racheal Loftus from the Leeds Docks area is still waiting for the freeholder to secure her building, four years after the problems were identified. She held a piece of wall insulation that had been experimentally sawed off and said, “I couldn’t believe that was the only thing it was made of.” The presence of the flammable insulation material was a major safety problem. “As you can see, it’s used to let in light, but actually we were told that if it caught fire, the chance of it melting would actually be problematic. because this is our main escape route in the event of fire.”

When asked if she could sell her property, Racheal noted that it was now ‘valued at zero pounds until the work is finished, but I have to continue paying my mortgage. Everyone in this building is stuck until they decide to take action.” Temporary repairs have already cost her £20,000, with Racheal saying she and other first-time buyers are “constantly living this nightmare.”

There are billions to be spent on war, with the top brass now insisting that the election of Donald Trump as US president means much more will have to be wasted on the military. Conservative and Labor governments have already supported NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine to the tune of more than £12 billion – an amount that would have met the National Audit Office’s lower estimate for all crucial repair work on buildings above eleven meters.

The fight for decent, safe and affordable housing cannot be left to a money-mad and war-mongering ruling class, and its Labor and Tory parties. Housing is a social right that can only be guaranteed today as part of the struggle for socialism.