Four years after Grenfell, why are people still living in death-trap flats?

Driving along a near-deserted lockdown Westway towards the centre of London is a strange experience at the moment. All seems quiet in the city but the sight of what remains of Grenfell Tower is a reminder that, after the tragedy of the fire in which 72 people lost their lives, a new housing scandal has moved in waves across the city from the streets of north Kensington.  

It is inevitable and correct, when a high-rise block is engulfed by fire because of the flammable cladding which surrounds it, that all similar cases need to be sought out and rectified. Every tragedy leads to a tightening of regulations, usually too late but understandable and desirable. However, when we make retrospective judgments of this kind there are always financial victims. People who bought their homes in good faith are now being landed with bills for repair and remediation that they cannot begin to afford. Though the legal responsibility is murky, the Government has an unanswerable moral case to act.  

Today this issue will come before the House of Commons when the Labour Party forces a vote on an amendment to the Government’s Fire Safety Bill. The opposition is calling for a fund to prevent the costs of property remediation falling wholly on taxpayers and leaseholders.  

All over London and across Britain buildings have been discovered, in the wake of Grenfell, to be encased in flammable aluminium-based cladding, to be held up by cavity walls with inadequate fire breaks, dangerous insulation, timber balconies and evacuation signs and extinguisher systems that do not work. The Government estimates that the problem affects two to three million people nationally and only 30 per cent of the work in the private sector has been done. That means there will be something in the order of half a million Londoners who are facing bills for remediation which could be as much as a third of the value of their property. The homes they bought in good faith are unsafe and unsellable and they are trapped in them with no end in sight.  

They are living in buildings which ought never to have been sanctioned and constructed. Banks and building societies are now demanding fire safety certificates and insurance costs have gone up sharply, even when insurance is available at all. There is a fledgling government scheme. The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government has granted £1.6 billion to help fund the repair work needed but the money is only available to people who live in buildings taller than 59 feet. The majority of affected residents do not, in fact, live in high-rise blocks. Besides, the total bill is likely to be closer to £15 billion, spread over a decade.  

Labour is proposing a national cladding taskforce along the lines of a similar body in Australia and indeed that could be useful for conducting the subsequent investigation which will assign responsibility and recoup the funds. There is a good case for pursuing the culprits for poor regulation and shoddy and unsafe building work but residents cannot wait until that protracted process plays out. They need the costs of the remediation guaranteed and underwritten in the meantime. People are being forced into bankruptcy even though they bought properties which jumped every legal and regulatory barrier at the time of purchase.  

There are no funds available at all, at present, for leaseholders to deal with the very many non-cladding-related safety problems which have surfaced after Grenfell. The law of leasehold, which is such a feature of the London property market, retains many defects from its origins in the common law of the Middle Ages.