Peter Apps

There are too many middling politicians in this country who look at Donald Trump with envy. I might not like his politics, they think, but isn’t he such a great communicator? Don’t you see how good he is at speaking to normal people? What could we learn from this? The answer, of course, is nothing. History tells us that governments can ask for huge increases in the volume and speed of house building, or a proper focus on quality and safety, not both. Trump succeeds at being Trump because he is nothing like most politicians. He has built a character over decades of TV series, pro-wrestling cameos and a flashy, moneyed, highly public life of excess. Staid, serious politicians on this side of the Atlantic only embarrass themselves by attempting to ape his style.

‘Grenfell is a story about a failed evacuation.’ These are the words of Professor Ed Galea, an internationally respected expert in fire safety and evacuations who, among other things, wrote a pivotal study into the attempted evacuation of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. But this is something the British state, and particularly the Home Office, appears utterly unable to accept. For decades, this country has relied on telling residents in burning tower blocks to ‘stay put’. This has been baked into the way we build our high rises: we require walls, floors and ceilings to effectively break the building up into a series of small, fire resisting boxes.

This month, five years after the Grenfell Tower fire and four years after the inquiry began, ministers will finally be called to account for the government’s failure to prevent the awful fire. Four former Conservative ministers and one Liberal Democrat will be cross examined – with the inquiry focusing on the years following the Lakanal House fire, which killed six in south London in 2009. But the evidence heard in recent weeks – from former civil servants and representatives of organisations which advise government on fire safety – has already exposed what looks and sounds like a monstrous abdication of the state’s duty to protect the lives of its citizens.

‘The further a person is from one of our great capitals—whether it is London, Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast – the tougher life can be,’ Michael Gove told the House of Commons on Wednesday. It is his mission, as the first holder of the ludicrous title of secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, to fix this situation. But is it true? It may come as some surprise to the people of Barking and Dagenham in east London, where 48 per cent of children live in households considered to be experiencing poverty, that they are among the most privileged in the UK. It may also be surprising to the occupants of, for example, the Shankill Road in Belfast that their postcode offers them privileges not available to the market towns of northern England.

The Number 10 Christmas parties during lockdown have dominated the news agenda in recent days – and for good reason. But there has arguably been an even bigger government scandal brewing, one which has largely been overlooked in Westminster. On Tuesday the government told the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that it was ‘deeply sorry’ for the ‘past failures’ which contributed to the devastating 2017 fire which killed 72 people. Apologies always come in varying forms of breadth and sincerity and this one (as is often the case when delivered by an expensive QC) was carefully limited.

Let me start with some statements of fact. The planet is heating up dangerously fast with devastating consequences for everyone that lives on it and if we don’t stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere we have no future as a species. In the UK, a major source of our carbon emissions comes from homes and a large part of that is because we burn gas whenever we put the radiators on. Each UK household emits around 2.7 tonnes of carbon every year heating their home. That’s utterly unsustainable and must stop. To some the answer is to insulate our homes so tightly that we no longer need to use much energy heating them, if any at all.

Today, for the third time in as many months, MPs will vote on an amendment to prevent the costs of removing cladding and fixing other fire safety defects being passed on to residents. For some time now, thousands of British homeowners have been left fearing for their lives and facing ruinous bills after fire safety issues following the Grenfell Tower fire were identified in tens of thousands of tall and medium rise buildings across the country. In most cases, building owners have been able to charge individual flat owners to fix the defects, even though their apartments were signed off as safe under government regulations at the time.

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry has exposed the dark heart of the building safety crisis in recent weeks, as it examined the role of cladding and insulation firms in causing the fire. We have learned that the products used in the tower’s cladding system were known to be severely flammable and that tests pointing this out were suppressed by the manufacturers as they chased lucrative contracts for high rise buildings. There is no underplaying the size of what has been revealed by this section of the inquiry. This is a monstrous corporate scandal, enabled by failures of some of the construction sector’s most respected institutions.

Talk to anyone for long enough about the UK’s building safety crisis and you soon will be asked: why are we in such a mess? Why, in one of the wealthiest countries on earth with a functioning planning and regulatory system, are thousands of people currently trapped in homes built with dangerous and combustible materials? How could we have allowed so many unsafe buildings to be built, signed off, sold and inhabited for all these years? Like all questions of this scale, there are multiple answers which combine to form a complex picture. But while people are quick to draw conclusions about reckless builders cutting corners, there is less awareness of the role successive governments and their industry guidance have played in creating the crisis.