The fire in Dagenham adds urgency for action on next week’s final Grenfell Inquiry report

And it will add to pressure on the government for more action, both to hold those responsible to account and to accelerate the pace of remediation work to make other buildings safe.

Work was apparently already underway to fix ‘non-compliant’ cladding and other issues at Spectrum House in Dagenham, which was surrounded by scaffolding. The former office block was converted into flats in 2015, with two extra floors added to create 60 apartments.

It was therefore presumably among the 949 buildings where official figures released last week say remediation work is underway. The fire demonstrates only too clearly that ‘underway’ is not the same as ‘finished’.

“At least half a million people are living in buildings with unsafe cladding, and three million in flats that are either unsaleable or uninsurable”

Work has been completed on 1,350 buildings, including most of those with Grenfell-style aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding.

But that still leaves 2,331 buildings where work has not even started. It cannot be stated often enough that, more than seven years after Grenfell, more than half of the blocks with unsafe cladding still have it.

To put a human face on that, according to campaign group End Our Cladding Scandal, at least half a million people are living in buildings with unsafe cladding, and three million in flats that are either unsaleable or uninsurable (possibly even more so after the Dagenham fire).

Spectrum House joins a long list of other buildings that have had major fires since 2017. As after those incidents, fear will be followed by relief that everyone is accounted for and anger that this keeps happening.

That will require more funding and much better co-ordination of what amounts to a huge construction project that is happening on thousands of individual sites all over the country.

“Ministers must also address the wider crisis, fill gaps in the current safety regime, tackle issues with non-qualifying leaseholders and accelerate the pace of remediation work on all those other buildings”

More funding does not necessarily mean more public money, but it must surely mean the extension of the Building Safety Levy, or something similar, beyond developers to the rest of the construction industry.

It’s now two-and-a-half years since then-housing secretary Michael Gove promised “tough new measures” to “make industry pay for building safety”, but the problems continue and the fires keep happening.

In its final policy platform published last October, Labour stated unequivocally that “leaseholders should be protected from the costs of remediating cladding and non-cladding defects in all buildings irrespective of circumstance”. 

The manifesto in June was vaguer, but the party promised “decisive action to improve building safety”. It also pledged to “review how to better protect leaseholders from costs and take steps to accelerate the pace of remediation across the country” and to put “a renewed focus on ensuring those responsible for the building safety crisis pay to put it right”. 

Publication of the final report on Grenfell next week was always going to demand a decisive response from the Labour government. The Dagenham fire will only increase the pressure.

Jules Birch, columnist, Inside Housing