by Pete Mason, Newham and East London Socialist Party and chair of Barking Reach Residents Association
At 3am bank holiday Monday, a major fire consumed another London tower block covered in flammable cladding.
Residents pounded on their neighbours’ doors to get them to flee, reporting that no fire alarms could be heard.
80 people fled into the street in Dagenham, east London, relying on each other for their safety. Firefighters risked their own lives to save 20 more survivors from the seven-storey building. Many have lost all their possessions, their children traumatised for life.
fought for safety. Photo: Pete Mason
The London Fire Brigade shed 27 fire appliances, closed ten fire stations and cut 552 firefighters when Boris Johnson was London Mayor. Labour’s Sadiq Khan has not reversed these cuts during his time in office, vital response times have increased to a record high.
A “horror movie”, as one resident called it, has become reality once again due to the negligence of landlords and the big home building companies, and the criminal lobbying from major building firms and suppliers to get the government to relax fire safety requirements again and again.
The displaced residents from the almost totally burnt-out building must be properly housed immediately in empty properties such as nearby new builds, which should be co-opted from the landlords for the purpose. This is what we won after the Samuel Garside House fire on our estate in nearby Barking Riverside, after a mass-based residents’ association battle. We had another massive battle to get cladding removed without cost to residents of other blocks on our estate.
The Labour-run council, Labour Mayor and Labour government should ensure those battles aren’t necessary for these residents, and set about immediate remedial works to remove unsafe cladding nationwide.
It has been over seven years since 70 people died in the Grenfell tower block fire, and five years since our fire yet, despite the known dangers, a great many buildings have yet to have dangerous flammable cladding removed, including this one in Freshwater Road.
Scaffolding had gone up to replace non-compliant cladding in Dagenham. But so have the profits of the home building companies as they delay and prevaricate, and attempt to get residents to pay for remediation of a problem not of their making.
Developers’ deadly games
The boards of directors of the top ten home building companies, and the big landlords and their managing agents, have long since proven themselves to be guilty of playing a deadly game with people’s lives. They need to be sacked.
The Socialist Party says: immediately nationalise the big home builders and landlords, with compensation paid only to those shareholders who can prove need. Elected bodies of tenants, housing workers and representatives of trade unions should democratically control and manage home building and planning.
All the land, the so-called ‘land banks’ held by big homebuilders and used to speculate up the price of both land and homes would become available.
Home prices could be based on actual material and in-house labour costs, slashing new home prices and rents. A plan for a genuine mass, nationwide home building programme could be developed to meet our needs, not for the profits of a few.
Safe, well-built, spacious, carbon neutral, and genuinely affordable homes could be built. In-house labour would remove the massive subcontracting profit element that multiplies prices and reduces both fire safety and the build quality — and would create thousands of well-paying building jobs.