Residents still caught in cladding crisis after Grenfell

The sight of a London building ablaze last month highlighted the danger in which Mike Daine, 75, still lives.

Mr Daine’s building in Cheshire was assessed as having flammable cladding in 2019, but repair work has yet to begin. “When Dagenham was built, it reminded us of all of this,” he explained.

Residents of Spectrum House in Dagenham were forced to flee their burning homes in the early hours of Monday 26 August, with some describing being evacuated as thick black smoke filled their flats and their belongings were engulfed in flames.

The building had safety issues and was undergoing remediation work to remove and replace non-compliant cladding on the fifth and sixth floors.

Seven years after the Grenfell disaster sparked safety concerns, 4,630 residential buildings of 11m and above still have unsafe cladding.

Rehabilitation work has only started or been completed in 50% of cases, according to government data. New statistics, due to be published on Thursday, will provide the first update on the number of residents still affected by the building safety crisis since the Grenfell Inquiry report was published.

Mr Daine, who lives in The Deck apartment block in Runcorn, is among those still living in fear.

He said The Independent:“Without the grace of God, we would make it. It could happen tonight, it could happen tomorrow. We have our things packed and we hope to be able to get down the stairs pretty quickly. But there is a 91-year-old lady who is partially deaf. How is she going to get out?”

Render cladding, timber cladding and high-pressure laminated panels all need to be replaced in The Deck building, and missing cavity barriers also need to be installed. The current schedule for the work calls for the final block to be repaired in May 2026. New fire alarms and sensors have been installed in the building, but Mr Daine and his partner Rachel Bose, 56, are still very concerned.

Ms Bose said: “We don’t want to be like the tainted blood scandal or the postal scandal, where we wait for justice and people die in the meantime.”

“There will be another Grenfell,” she warned.

Developer Taylor Wimpey said the safety of residents was its top priority, adding: “As advised to residents, the delays are due to the unforeseen need for additional but necessary survey work, which is now in its final stages. We apologise for the time it has taken to commence the remediation work, which is now expected to start in October.”

The company has pledged to complete the work “as quickly as possible without compromising quality”. It said it had no control over day-to-day fire safety on the site, but added that collective alarms had been installed in the buildings.

Neera Soni, 68, lives in King Edwards Wharf in Birmingham and is also waiting for renovation work to begin on her building.

“The cladding and insulation are flammable,” she explained. “We have wood on the upper floors, but we also lack internal firestops. So the fire spreads from one apartment to another and there is nothing to stop it.”

The problems were first detected in 2020, but it took four years to find people willing to take on the work. The building manager will soon submit the work proposal to the government’s Cladding Safety Scheme and they then hope to start work in the first quarter of 2025.

On the risk of the fire spreading rapidly around the building, Ms Soni said: “We have all learned to live with that risk. After Grenfell, everyone was terrified, but we learned to live with it. But now, with the fires that have happened this week, that risk has come back to the forefront of our minds.”

“I wonder how I’m going to get out of here. We’re on the fifth and sixth floors. How are we going to get down if we can’t reach the fire escape?”

“This may sound stupid, but yesterday I was sitting here wondering if I took all the cushions off our outdoor daybed and threw them on the ground, and if we put rope ladders up, would it be soft enough to land on? I know it may sound stupid, because I know we’d die either way, but that’s what I was thinking.”

The huge increase in building insurance premiums was also a major problem: the cost of building insurance had risen from £58,000 a year to £483,000, Ms Nori said.

“This is a significant amount of money that could have been spent on securing the building. Our service charges are now so high that we cannot increase them to carry out further work on the building,” she added.

Her husband, who is 70, has returned to work as a part-time optometrist so he can continue to pay the high service bills.

Rob Burberry, 50, managed to leave his flat in Eastgate House in Woking after it was discovered the building had unsafe rendering and insulation.

A fire in the block in April 2020 prompted Mr Burberry to start lobbying the developer to make changes and his apartment was eventually bought back from him in January 2021.

While initial problems have been resolved, around 100 of its former neighbours were relocated to temporary accommodation in December 2023 after separate investigations found the building to be structurally unsafe.

Mr Burberry said: “These families had saved up, they were first-time buyers and now they’re in emergency housing. It’s causing a lot of mental health problems because people are desperate.”

Councillor Anne-Marie Barker, leader of Woking Borough Council, said she was “deeply concerned about displaced individuals and families remaining in temporary accommodation”. She urged housing association Southern Housing to provide details of the tests that have taken place to assess structural problems at Eastgate House.

Southern Housing said its structural engineers were still reviewing the test results. They added: “It is essential that our engineers have the time they need to complete this detailed analysis. The tests carried out to date indicate that it is not safe to allow people into the building. We understand that this is frustrating for residents, but their safety remains our number one priority.”

Thrishantha Nanayakkara, 53, knows all too well what the residents of Spectrum House in Dagenham will experience. In 2019, her home at Richmond House in Worcester Park, southwest London, was destroyed by fire.

In total, 60 residents lost their homes and Mr Nanayakkara said his life and that of his family were only saved after a neighbour knocked loudly on his front door to get them out.

An investigation following the incident found that the building’s protective partitions were faulty and had failed to prevent the spread of the fire. However, developers claimed the building had performed as intended by allowing people to escape safely.

Five years after the fire, Mr Nanayakkara and his family are only now considering returning this month.

Her children were 17 and 13 when the fire happened and it impacted their education.

“The most important thing is the impact it has had on our children: their mental health and the disruption to their education,” he said. “They have lost simple things like memories, toys and certificates.

“Other kids at school would bully my son about being homeless and teachers wouldn’t do much to help him. This really affected his education later on.

“We still haven’t received any compensation and we have tried to talk to the government’s housing ministers. I lost hope in their ability to help us after one of the housing ministers referred to the chairman of the developers as ‘his friend’.”

Mr Nanayakkara, professor of robotics at Imperial College London, added: “We need proper regulation and regulators. The Dagenham fire shows that the problems persist: low standards across the housing stock are pervasive.”

Housing Ombudsman data shows that 100 complaints have been received since 2021, with the main issue being cladding. In the 2023/24 financial year, 23 complaints were received and the Ombudsman found maladministration in 80% of cases.

Deputy First Minister Angela Rayner said supporting these residents was “mission critical” to the government. She vowed to “put an end to the slow pace we have seen since Grenfell”, adding: “People should not have to wait years for work to begin on removing dangerous cladding – and it goes without saying that fire safety should be a central priority for buildings that have not yet started remediation work.”