Angela Rayner has called efforts to remove unsafe cladding from thousands of at-risk buildings “too slow” and said it was her job to ensure remaining works finished as quickly as possible.
The deputy prime minister made the comments during a visit to Dagenham, east London, on Tuesday afternoon, the day after a dramatic fire tore through a block of flats that was undergoing remedial works to remove “non-compliant” cladding.
More than 100 people were evacuated from the eight-storey building and two were taken to hospital. By Monday afternoon, the London fire brigade (LFB) said the blaze was under control and all residents were accounted for.
Taking place a week before the publication of the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry, the incident raised questions about the slow pace of remedial works on unsafe buildings since the 2017 tragedy.
Speaking to reporters while meeting residents in the area, Rayner said: “We have identified 4,630 buildings that do have the cladding on. Over 50% of them have already started the remediation work. This was one of those buildings that had started that but this is too slow for me. We need to hurry it up.”
Rayner said the incident must have been “incredibly triggering” for the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire.
“They spent seven years fighting to make sure that these changes were put in place, and now it’s my job to ensure that that happens as quickly as possible. We can’t continue for another seven years. We’ve got to do this very quickly, because these are people’s homes, and people deserve to feel safe in their own home,” she said.
Calls by Rayner to speed up safety works came after Dame Judith Hackitt, who led a review on building safety after the Grenfell Tower fire, said the government needed to step up the pace of “remediation and holding those who are responsible to account for doing so”.
Speaking about the wider housing crisis, Rayner said: “We’ve had a shortage of housing and we haven’t built enough, but we also need to make sure that these homes are built with people in mind and remembering that these are places where people live and where they raise their families.
“They’re not assets that people can sweat and make money off. These are actually places where people need to live, and the number one issue for me is that people need to feel safe.”
The LFB said the Dagenham tower had known fire safety issues. The i newspaper reported that it was previously an office block that had been converted into flats.
The London fire brigade commissioner, Andy Roe, said it was difficult to investigate the fire because parts of the building had been “declared unsafe to access”, meaning investigators and specialists were “likely to be on [the] scene for many days”.
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) said the fire exposed the “national scandal” of flammable cladding and deregulation in the building industry, adding that the block had been the subject of a fire enforcement notice in 2023.
About an hour after the Dagenham fire was declared under control, another blaze began in nearby Poplar. The LFB were called to the 44-storey Charrington Tower in the New Providence Wharf development at 1.28pm. The fire was under control by 2.50pm.
While that specific block has an EWS1 certificate, which proves wall materials are non-combustible, another block in the same development was ordered to remove its Grenfell-style cladding after a fire in 2021 trapped residents in their homes.
