The Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 was a tragedy. Preventing its repetition is a fiasco. The latest National Audit Office (NAO) report suggests that 60% of similar towers have yet to be identified, leading to a total cladding removal cost that could reach a staggering £22.4bn.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s best estimate is that the programme to remove dangerous cladding from towers over 11 metres tall will cost an estimated £16.6bn – £5.1bn of that from the taxpayer – and so far only a third of the blocks that have been identified have been completed. The NAO reckons completing all the rest could take until 2037. The intention is to to recoup another £3.4bn from developers over 12 years from 2025 – though of course, Grenfell’s bereaved and survivors can expect to wait until at least 2027 before those suspected of being responsible for the disaster could face criminal trials. This is a bad joke.
How on earth are the people still living in these “unsafe” towers supposed to feel? So far, 4,771 towers have been identified, containing 258,000 flats, and up to 7,200 towers are apparently awaiting identification. This means owners are trapped in flats they cannot sell. Others are in social housing they cannot escape. All are prisoners of history, the history of poor regulation, weak planning and architectural fashion.
When a tower block in the East End of London called Ronan Point collapsed in 1968 it was widely regarded as the end of high-rise living. It was too dangerous to herd people, and especially families, into tall buildings with only one safe means of escape. For the next decade towers mostly disappeared from council plans. A number of tower and slab estates were even demolished in Glasgow, Liverpool, London and elsewhere. Grenfell, which was built between 1972 and 1974, was an exception.
Tower blocks more or less died out. Though beloved of architects, they were rarely loved by their tenants. Britons have long preferred to live low-rise in streets or at high density in “mansion flats”. Towers did return to fashion at the end of the last century, primarily for young first-time buyers and second homers wanting a luxury pad in a city centre. London’s skyline is the result.
Clearly living high entails risk. With Ronan Point the risk was structural collapse. With Grenfell it was fire. The problem is not risk but the scale of risk. Towers actually suffer few accidents. After Grenfell councils did not clear every block that had the same cladding. Some installed fire safety officers for a while. Recladding proceeded at a snail’s pace. What the government did do in 2022 was impose new fire regulations on all blocks above 11 metres – about five storeys – high. It virtue-signalled hyper-safety, and kicked the issue of recladding down the road.
So what now needs to be done? Must everyone involved wait for some future chancellor to cough up another £17bn from a back pocket, possibly into the 2040s? Hospitals would have to go unbuilt, care homes would be closed and schools neglected. The evidence of the NAO report is that this will not happen because recladding is simply not regarded as a priority.
The sensible way forward must be to redefine the risk. Blocks that are genuinely dangerous should be reclad, but for the rest the government should underwrite a risk it clearly regards as minimal, essentially insuring blocks against cladding fires, so that whole towers or individual flats within them can be bought and sold. Meanwhile, we should stop building stupid, ugly, family-unfriendly towers that blight Britain’s townscapes. Instead, erect low-rise houses and flats to high densities, which is what the market is building everywhere. It builds them because they are what residents want.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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