Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has been warned that righting the wrongs of the 2017 tragedy cannot be ‘ignored’ as she faces worrying question marks over her department’s budget
Fixing the “national scandal” of people living in dangerous homes like Grenfell Tower must be a priority amid tough spending decisions, campaigners have demanded.
Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has been warned that righting the wrongs of the 2017 tragedy cannot be “ignored” as she faces worrying question marks over her department’s budget.
It comes ahead of next week’s major Spending Review (SR), where government department budgets will be set out for future years.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), which has an unprotected budget unlike the NHS or defence spending, is still yet to reach a settlement in SR negotiations.
READ MORE: Repeat of Grenfell Tower fire warning issued as ministers ‘left marking own homework’
Ms Rayner is said to be battling for a bigger settlement amid unhappiness over funding for affordable housing.
Grenfell United campaigner Edward Daffarn, who escaped from his 16th floor flat during the blaze, said it was “a national scandal” that thousands of families are still trapped in homes covered in dangerous cladding ahead of the eighth anniversary of the west London blaze later this month.
“The fact that eight years on, people are still living in unsafe buildings is unconscionable,” he said.
In a message to ministers, Mr Daffarn said: “Cost cutting or budget constraints can never become a factor when life safety is at stake. We all understand the constraints that the government is facing at the moment.
“But the bottom line of it needs to be that the health and safety, the well-being of citizens, needs to be a priority. It’s not something that can be ignored.”
Joe Delaney, a campaigner with Justice4Grenfell, highlighted that money had been found for defence spending, adding: “We can always find money.”
He said ministers were getting “bogged down in the minutiae of how much is going in this particular budget line over here, but they’re not dealing with the bigger problems”.
“Does anyone feel any safer in their homes than they were then? Have things got better, or have they got worse? And I hate to say it, and I’m not normally a pessimist, but I don’t think anything has got much better.
“The only thing that’s increased in the past eight years is frustration, disappointment and disengagement with the political process.”
It comes after Richard Blakeway, the housing ombudsman for England, last week said it was “neither fanciful nor alarmist” to suggest fury over housing conditions could become “social disquiet”. He said the “shock of Grenfell Tower and Awaab Ishak’s death resonate still”.
Joe Powell, the Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater, home to the Grenfell Tower, said there are “some really important” decisions that the Government could announce to help the cladding crisis.
“Remediation has been far too slow. It’s completely outrageous that almost eight years after Grenfell, there are hundreds of thousands of people around the country going to bed in properties which have unsafe cladding and fire defects,” he said.
“What I’m hoping is that the Spending Review will give the department the ammunition to speed up that remediation process.”
He said the affordable homes programme needed to get a “big flag of money”. A £2billion downpayment was announced in March for the next year of the programme but all eyes will be on what the SR sets out for future years.
Elsewhere Mr Powell called for more social landlords to have access to the Building Safety Fund (BSF). It would mean housing associations could use the funding, which has already been committed, to speed up the remediation of dangerous buildings.
Currently social landlords can only apply to the BSF and the Cladding Safety Scheme where the cost of remediating a building would threaten their financial viability, or to cover costs passed onto leaseholders and shared owners.
Mr Powell also said the Government must fully fund personalised emergency evacuation plans for disabled people as a matter of “priority”.
The MP also reiterated calls from the Commons’ Housing Committee, of which Mr Powell is a member, for an independent body to be introduced to oversee the Government’s response to public inquiries.
The committee has called for a national oversight mechanism to be included in the upcoming Hillsborough Bill to hold ministers to account on how they implement change after a major disaster, such as the Grenfell fire.
A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesman said: “This government has been taking tough and decisive action after years of dither and delay, going further than ever before to speed up the unacceptably slow pace of remediation and provide an end in sight for residents who have suffered for too long.
“Through our Remediation Action Plan, we’ve already allocated significant funding, including £5.1billion to address dangerous cladding on medium and high-rise buildings in England.
“As we approach the eighth anniversary since the Grenfell Tower fire, our thoughts remain with the community, families and survivors and we are working at pace to make sure this tragedy never happens again.”
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