The government’s £200m fund to tackle Grenfell-style cladding is two years too late

We know what needs to be done. The workers and materials are there to do it and there’s no argument about the cost – so why no progress?

It is a strange coincidence. Just as an open letter from housing campaigners, MPs, city mayors and various celebs was about to be published, the government announced that it was to spend some £200m to ensure that private sector blocks of flats will have their hazardous Grenfell-style aluminium-based cladding removed.

Of course James Brokenshire couldn’t just ring up HM Treasury and tell them there was an embarrassing letter organised by Inside Housing magazine coming out, and could they allow him to spend, either as “new” funding or extracted from existing budgets, such a vast sum of public money.

But still, it does suggest some longer-term public pressure was being brought to bear. Eventually.

Ministers, and particularly the prime minister, must be terrified that another fire will break out and yet more lives will be lost.

I have no doubt they are personally appalled by the inhumanity of the prospect, but they would not be politicians if they did not, too, sense the political fallout. Brokenshire, communities secretary, and formerly a Home Office mister when Theresa May was home secretary, is one of the prime minister’s few reliable political friends around her cabinet table, and she will have listened to him sympathetically.

The easiest thing to do when the private sector – with honourable exceptions – cannot or will not fix the problem before someone dies is to throw public money at it.

Quite right too, but you wonder why it took such a long time, and such hard lobbying by the campaigners to get the government to shift. We all know they haven’t got much “bandwidth” thanks to Brexit, but not everyone in the British civil service and in local authorities is working on leaving the EU, surely?

It is about more than “bandwidth”: it is a cultural thing. Some governments feel confident and are impatient to get on with their programmes – Tony Blair in ’97, say, or Margaret Thatcher in ‘79.

Others feel dejected, defeated, hopeless, and timorous, frightened of acting, living in fear of the next political disaster, and, thus, end up in a state of paralysis and listless incompetence. Such is the May administration, the habit of kicking cans down the road now ingrained as a way of life.

The scandal of Grenfell goes on and on and on. In a different, parallel, political universe, a strong prime minister would not have allowed the official inquiry to get in the way of immediate action on fire safety.

A more determined set of ministers would have already have stripped all the flammable, lethal cladding off tower blocks, irrespective of their ownership, and asked questions about the funding afterwards.

Why is it, too, that so may families, in private and council/social housing are frightened to go to sleep at night? We know what needs to be done; the workers and materials are there to do it; there’s no argument about the cost – so why no progress?

“Action this day” is a good motto, and yet even now there are many Grenfell residents – surviving victims and their families – who remain without new permanent homes, as the second anniversary of that terrible fire approaches son 14 June.

The government should long ago have appointed commissioners to take over the administration of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

According to Labour, only 4 per cent of London council blocks have sprinkler systems, though it is fair to say they might not have made a decisive difference at Grenfell.

Rather closer to home for the politicians, they haven’t even made proper arrangements to prevent a catastrophic fire in the Palace of Westminster – sprinklers and so on – even after the disaster at Notre Dame.

Parliament is a UNESCO world heritage site, it would cost billions to rebuild, and it has many people working in it who are at risk. It is hard to believe thing ever gets done, but there we are.

Next month, then, again there will be the usual services and acts of remembrance; again ministers and council leaders will mouth the usual obsequies and platitudes, and wear the green “Grenfell Forever in Our Hearts” badges, sing some hymns, say prayers and go home. And that, I am sorry to say, will be that, until the next anniversary swings round.