Last week a block of flats on Elm Road in my Brent North constituency caught fire. It took five hours, 125 firefighters and 20 fire engines to bring the fire under control. Thankfully, it was not another Grenfell – all residents were evacuated to safety – but the reason the fire spread so quickly was because, six years on from that tragedy, this building still had Grenfell-style combustible cladding on the outside.
Octavia Housing, who own the block of flats, attended a residents meeting which we held three days later. The acting Chief Executive was keen to assure everyone that Octavia’s “top concern, was residents’ safety”. However, the truth is that for the past three years Octavia have known about the combustible cladding but have instead engaged in a protracted dispute with the original developers, Vistry, rather than get on and remove the cladding themselves and argue about who ought to pay for it, later.
This is the very sort of legal wrangling that Michael Gove’s Building Safety Act was supposed to stop. It hasn’t. In reality, the Act has trapped thousands of residents living in Leasehold apartments with multiple fire safety defects. They are prisoners in their own homes.
Read Barry’s full op-ed in ByLine Times here.