Inside the capital's shameful cladding crisis

Today’s Grenfell report has called for urgent work on fire safety, but those stuck in London’s 1,300 unsafe buildings say there isn’t time to lose. Katie Strick reports

- Katie Strick

WHEN the fire alarm went off inside Gurpreet Sanghera’s eighth-floor flat in west London last week, she couldn’t help but think of the images she’d seen of residents fleeing a burning tower block in Dagenham a few hours earlier. “My partner had just left the building with our son and he wasn’t answering his phone... It was very scary,” says Sanghera, 42, a litigation partner at a leading London law firm who owns a flat at the Arc Tower in Ealing.

The two-bedroom apartment that the lawyer shares with her partner and oneyear-old son is surrounded by dangerous cladding, just like the seven-storey Dagenham block to which 40 fire engines were sent to tackle a “devastating” fire on Bank Holiday Monday.

All 80 residents in the Dagenham blaze had a “very lucky” escape, according to Dame Judith Hackitt, who led a government review on building safety after Grenfell — but reports of residents trapped in a burning building that had known safety issues is a chilling reminder of the Grenfell Tower blaze in 2017 which killed 72 people, the final report on which was published this morning.

Safety advisers are now calling for “urgent” work to replace unsafe cladding across the UK, and London fire commissioner Andy Roe wants the work on the capital’s 1,300 unsafe buildings to be made a “priority”. But for Sanghera and the thousands of others stuck in those buildings, warnings mean nothing while they remain in homes that could catch fire any day.

“We are trapped... I feel abandoned by the government,” says Michelle Robinson, 55, who owns a flat which has cladding in Lewisham.