LONDON – Nearly four years after a fire killed 72 people by destroying London’s Grenfell Tower – a skyscraper lined with flammable material – Britain’s opposition party demands that the government help hundreds of thousands of people living in dangerous places apartments and buildings with similar coating.
On Monday, the Labor Party called on a national task force to address the issue and urged the government to establish the extent of the dangerous coating still on buildings across the country. The measures are part of a proposal amendment to a Fire Safety Bill to help people in homes still wrapped in treacherous coverings. It would prioritize high-risk buildings, apply for financing to remove the flammable coating immediately, and seek protection for tenants and taxpayers to prevent costs from being borne.
Keir Starmer, the opposition labor leader, said in a statement ahead of a debate in Parliament on the question that the measures need “to be a turning point for those affected by the coating scandal”.
“Millions of people have been sucked into this crisis due to years of hesitation, delays and incomplete solutions by the government,” said Starmer. “For many tenants, the dream of home ownership has become a nightmare. They feel abandoned, locked in flammable houses and facing ruinous costs for repairs and interim security measures. “
The rapidly spreading and devastatingly deadly fire at the Grenfell Tower in June 2017 was caused by the coating on its exterior, an initial investigation into the fire found, with combustible aluminum composite material, or ACM, the main cause of its unshakable spread.
Cheap flooring has long been banned in many European countries and the United States because of the fire risk it posed. But in England, it was released for wide use. After the Grenfell fire, the government promised to remove the material from similar buildings.
But in the years that followed, and despite numerous government promises, there are still dozens of buildings lined with the material used in the Grenfell Tower, and even more are believed to be wrapped in another flammable coating. Some of these materials were banned from the new buildings, but remained in the existing ones.
More than 400 skyscrapers with the same coating have been identified by the government. Finally, it directed funding to remove the cladding from public housing and pledged to finance the remediation of high-rise private residential buildings.
But according to the latest data, released by the government in December 2020, there are 165 skyscrapers with unsafe ACM-coated exteriors across England, most of them in urban areas of Manchester and London.
In addition, it is estimated that some 200,000 skyscrapers, which house about 700,000 people, are involved in some kind of flammable coating, according to the London Times.
The Labor Party estimates that coating problems could affect up to 4.6 million properties, based on its analysis of numbers from the New Build Database and the Office for National Statistics.
In England, most private apartments are sold as long-term rentals, with the building itself being owned by a “freeholder”, usually an investment group, and it has been difficult for residents or the government to hold building owners accountable by using low quality material.
The cost is often passed on to apartment owners and, in the case of many of the fuel-coated buildings, these owners were mostly first-time buyers, retirees, immigrants and the poor. Housing experts say the situation could take years to resolve.
Tens of thousands of people are living in apartments that they cannot sell, with banks reluctant to offer new mortgages on properties that may have combustible materials. Others, in buildings where the material was identified but not removed, were left to pay for nightly fire patrols to ensure their safety. With the cost of some of the necessary remediation work on buildings being passed on to tenants, many say the situation is untenable.
And with the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent national blockages forcing people to spend more time at home, many say they are under even greater pressure.
Paul Afshar, 37, an activist with End Our Cladding Scandal, a group that advocates a government effort to resolve the crisis, owns an apartment in East London in a low-rise building that has not yet been fully assessed.
He, like many affected by cladding problems, bought his home through a government shared ownership program. He owns only 25% of his property, although he is responsible for 100% of its maintenance. This means that the cost to him personally for removing the coating can amount to tens of thousands of pounds. Others in similar situations had to declare bankruptcy.
It is not yet clear what type of flooring your building has; he is waiting for an evaluation. He has tried to sell his one-bedroom property twice in the past 12 months. But no lender would give its prospective buyers a mortgage for fear that the building would have a combustible coating.
“In my case, and in many other people’s cases, not only are you trapped inside an apartment with a flammable coating, you cannot go out, you cannot sell,” he said. “You are effectively trapped in a fire trap.”
Last year, the government announced a £ 1 billion, or $ 1.4 billion, expansion of a non-ACM building security fund, and on Sunday announced a £ 30 million rescue fund for residents who had to pay for night patrols. But those affected say it is simply not enough.
The government said on Monday that these measures and two laws – a building safety bill and the fire safety bill – were the right approach. A separate amendment to the fire safety bill, introduced by conservative lawmakers in recent weeks, has attracted widespread support, putting more pressure on the government to ensure that costs are not passed on to lessees.
The lawmakers behind this move criticized Labor lawmakers for using Monday’s debate, and a largely symbolic vote in their proposal for a task force, to score political points.
Chris Pincher, the housing minister, speaking in Parliament, defended the building safety bill and the fire safety bill, adding that the issue was complex.
“There is no quick fix; if there were, we would have done it a long time ago, ”he said.