Three years on from Grenfell, we can see the long shadow of Conservative failure

Editorial: There are still 56,000 people living in tower blocks covered in Grenfell-style cladding

(AFP/Getty)

Three years after the Grenfell fire, 257 tower blocks in Britain, housing about 56,000 people, are still to be made safe. The government missed the deadline it set last year, under pressure of editorials such as this one, to remove all cladding of the kind used on Grenfell Tower by the end of last month.

It is this failure, far more than Theresa May’s apparent lack of empathy immediately after the fire, that condemns the Conservative Party’s record in government. The former prime minister apologised more than once for her and her government’s failings. A year after the fire she said she regretted her failure to meet families in the days afterwards, which had made it look as if she “didn’t care”. She said the residents “needed to know that those in power understood their despair”. But the two ways of doing that were to rehouse them and to make sure that similar dangerous cladding was removed elsewhere – neither of which had been done.

Almost all the families have now been permanently rehoused, but, three years later, 56,000 people are still living in dangerous highrise buildings. Many of them live in fear, paying for “waking watch” schemes to alert them to fire.

This is the result of a persistent failure of the government to get a grip. There have been five housing ministers since Alok Sharma was appointed on the day of the Grenfell fire, 14 June 2017, just six days after the general election. After seven months, he was followed by Dominic Raab for six months, Kit Malthouse for a year, Esther McVey for seven months and the current minister, Christopher Pincher, who has served since February. They have been answerable to three secretaries of state (Sajid Javid, James Brokenshire and Robert Jenrick) and two prime ministers.

Many of them have said the right things, and some of them have even overseen an impressive amount of work to make tower blocks safe, but the overall record has not been good enough.

Analysis by the Labour Party, we report today, has identified 257 blocks with ACM cladding (aluminium composite material of the type used on Grenfell) that are still to be made safe – 178 of them privately owned and 79 social housing. And there are a further 1,700 buildings covered with other, non-ACM flammable materials. Labour says that, at the current rate, it will take 39 years to deal with all of them.

Just as the government’s record has been poor, the opposition has performed a public service in holding ministers to account. Thangam Debbonaire and Mike Amesbury, the two shadow ministers, have been rigorous and factual in detailing the scale of the problem and demanding quicker action.

The legacy of Grenfell has been complicated, as have so many other problems, by the coronavirus. Many of the 56,000 residents of unsafe homes have been locked down in them, which has added to their distress. But the lockdown ought also to be an opportunity: removing and replacing cladding is low-risk outdoor work in Covid-19 terms, and the government should see it as a chance to boost the construction sector and get people back to work.

This needs ministerial leadership: from Mr Pincher, Mr Jenrick and the prime minister. We sincerely hope that The Independent will not be publishing another editorial like this in a year’s time.