The UK government is shirking its duty in the cladding scandal
For the 72 people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire four years ago, the cladding scandal was fatal. For thousands more, it is becoming a nightmare. The government is removing the deadly cladding from some 500 of the most at-risk towers, but beyond that, the residents of an estimated 1,500 high-rise buildings in England considered unsafe – and therefore unsellable, unmortgageable and uninsurable – are on their own, in a perilous financial position. The housing minister, Robert Jenrick, has told them to sue the builders if they can afford it. The taxpayer – by which he means his department – will not bear the cost.
Anyone following the four-year-old Grenfell inquiry will be aghast at the laxity a regulation-obsessed government has shown towards high-rise buildings. Six separate private companies and a maze of Whitehall regulators have passed the blame for Grenfell back and forth, day by day, in an inquiry that has cost £117m in public money – and counting.
By their nature, tall buildings require the most meticulous safety monitoring. In Britain this is lacking. A Commons report on Grenfell came to a clear conclusion last year: “The residents are in no way to blame and it is our view that they should bear none of the cost of remediation.” The blame lies with corporate greed and regulatory failure. The cost of remediation, currently estimated at £15bn, should therefore fall on the builders and the government. Both have spent four years passing the buck.
It stands to reason and justice that the private companies, which made vast profits from building cheap towers in the 2000s, should pay for their now essential repairs. If these were faulty cars or medicines, they would be recalled at the expense of companies, not owners. Any companies that refuse to pay should have their buildings compulsorily purchased by the government at a depressed price, repaired and turned into co-ops or social housing schemes.
Yet the ultimate responsibility lies with government, the inspector, regulator and arbitrator of last resort. The government should be paying for enhanced tower fire protection and insurance until the cladding is removed. The government should be urgently levying the companies to this end. An estimated half a million people are now victims of the cladding disaster – their fate left notionally in the hands of yet another dilatory and extravagant public inquiry. Ministers may not be to blame, but they do hold responsibility.
Since the collapse of Ronan Point in east London in 1968, residential towers have always required diligent safety monitoring. Despite their unpopularity with many families, towers were beloved of politicians (and subsidised by them) as totems of public housing intervention. For a minister to turn round to those forced by circumstance to live in a high-rise tower and say, in effect, “more fool you” is outrageous.
Boris Johnson has squandered public money on his friends and on party donors, on his electoral ambitions, his gimmicks and his vanity projects. Remedying the cladding fiasco would cost just three years of his vacuous HS2 project, which he still lacks the guts to cancel. The one thing Johnson should never be allowed to say is that we can’t afford it.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist