A man raised in Norris Green now runs a multimillion pound company fighting the cladding crisis.
As a boy playing football in the streets of Norris Green, Adam Gallagher never had a "driven ambition to be a Richard Branson or anything like that". But now the 42-year-old executive director of Intelligent FS, a construction company he co-founded, which has roughly £30m worth of contracts to remove and replace cladding deemed unsafe after a fire engulfed the 24-storey Grenfell Tower, killing 72 people, in June 2017.
Despite first being aware of the fire hazard posed by polyethylene-cored cladding used on Grenfell in 2002, the government only banned such aluminium composite cladding on buildings over 18 metres tall in the fire's aftermath. The Grenfell Inquiry found 486 of these buildings, and despite government plans to remove it all by June 2020, there are still 58 left five years later. On Wednesday, June 1 this year, the government extended the ban to all new buildings of any height.
