Seven years on, the scandal of cladding still shames us

A S Britain absorbs the second phase of the report into the Grenfell Tower inferno, with its accumulation of horrors, an event last week serves as warning and a rebuke to the pace with which we have got here.

- Martha Gill

Is it really possible, seven years after that disaster, that the cause of another London tower-block fire could be traced — once again — to flammable external cladding?

This time, when an eight-storey block of flats in Dagenham burst into flames, thankfully all residents escaped with their lives. But there was more than an echo of Grenfell as families fled their flats in the early hours of the morning under direction from the fire brigade, the block blazing behind them. The source of the fire is being investigated, but attention is turning to the cladding on the fifth and sixth floors, deemed “non-compliant”, and due to be removed. Materials on scaffolding are thought to be another possible culprit, too. But why is the hazard of “non-compliant” cladding there at all, nearly a decade on from Grenfell?