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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
World
Jacob Phillips and Ellie Ng

Fire brigade chief pleads with London building owners: 'Get the cladding off'

The London Fire Brigade commissioner has said Grenfell-style cladding must be stripped from 1,250 high-rise blocks across London.

Andy Roe has pleaded to building owners and managers to “get the cladding off” as he warned some high-rises are still clad or have “serious deficiencies,” nearly seven years after the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people in North Kensington

He said firefighters were sometimes “operating in very high-risk buildings that should have been fixed by now".

Speaking at Old Kent Road fire station, Mr Roe said a fire of the scale of the Grenfell Tower blaze could happen again in London.

He said: "I would take this opportunity to implore building owners and managers, who are ultimately the only people who can fix this, to do the right thing - to get the cladding off, to fix the faults in your building and ensure your residents are safe.

"We have two high-rise fires a day in London, which is more than the rest of the country put together."

London Fire Brigade’s commissioner Andy Roe has asked for building owners and managers to “get the cladding off” (Belinda Jiao/PA) (PA Archive)

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) has now completed all recommendations made to it by the first stage of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and Mr Roe said the change is "owed" to the bereaved and survivors of the tragedy.

He insisted the brigade's response to an emergency like the Grenfell Tower blaze would be "so different" today.

The recommendations were made in October 2019 and the last one - which involves new breathing apparatus sets - comes into force on Wednesday.

Grenfell United, which represents the bereaved and survivors, told the BBC: "The London Fire Brigade’s announcement today is a small step forward in the change sorely needed after Grenfell."

Mr Roe called the completion a "very significant milestone" which has made "hundreds of thousands of Londoners" living in blocks safer.

He added: "As much as today is about us completing those recommendations, it's also about recognising the loss and the pain of the bereaved and the survivors, and making a promise to them that this change ... is owed to them.

"We owe it to them to keep on listening, to keep on learning, to keep on making that change."

The London Fire Brigade has now completed all recommendations made to it by the first stage of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (Steve Parsons/PA) (PA Archive)

He explained the LFB’s response is “so different” since the Grenfell fire.

Mr Roe said: "I am confident that at the earliest point my colleagues, these fantastic officers and crews, would recognise the danger signs and would do everything to get people safely out that block."

He insisted the LFB is in a position to assure itself, and the public, that it would handle a similar incident better than it did nearly seven years ago.

"We can point to multiple real-life examples of where we've responded to very challenging incidents that if we hadn't responded in a different way could have developed into the most tragic sort of incident you can imagine," the fire commissioner said.

"We have rescued hundreds of Londoners as a result."

He said the changes made in the service have "already saved hundreds of lives" as procedures and improvements have been implemented on an ongoing basis since 2020.

Mr Roe continued: "My promise, though, to anyone ... and particularly the bereaved and the survivors, is that doesn't mean we've ticked a box and the job is done.

"This place is always changing. This amazing city is always changing. We have to change all the time too in response to that."

Mr Roe said the biggest change implemented in the LFB is the training given to firefighters to recognise when a building might be failing and, "at the earliest point", lead an emergency evacuation to save lives.

This involved a recommendation around managing a transition from a "stay put" instruction to "get out".

In 2019, Sir Martin Moore Bick, chairman of the Grenfell Inquiry, suggested there would have been fewer fatalities if the LFB and 999 operators had reversed the strategy to tell residents to stay in their flats sooner.

The instruction remained for nearly two hours after the blaze broke out at just before 1am, until 2.47am.

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