Grenfell Tower: Inside the never-ending nightmare of Britain’s building security crisis Business News

“The past few months have been the most painful and stressful of my life,” says Giles Grover, a tenant tenant campaigning to end Britain’s building safety scandal. Hundreds of thousands of residents are going through what Grover describes as a “living nightmare”, involving huge bills, years of stress, dark houses covered in plastic sheeting and the ever-present danger of their building being engulfed by the flames.

Five years after the deadly fire that killed 72 people at Grenfell Tower, it’s a nightmare that shows no signs of ending soon.

“I’m good at compartmentalizing things,” says the activist. “But recently it’s been really difficult.”

For the past few weeks, Grover has been in India caring for his dying mother during her final days. Despite the most difficult personal circumstances and being thousands of miles from his flat on the outskirts of Manchester city centre, the coating is rarely far from his thoughts.

When he’s not at his mother’s bedside, he frequently hops on calls with senior civil servants, and sometimes Housing Minister Michael Gove – the man tasked with fixing one of the worst public policy failures of memory of man.

“I would rather focus on my personal life right now,” Grover says. “But until Michael Gove keeps his promises, I won’t stop harassing him.”

Nothing would have changed, it seems, had it not been for the tireless campaigning of Grover and many others.

Tenants have walked an exhausting journey, fighting for every inch of progress against a government that seems ideologically opposed to accepting the inevitable: that the only justifiable solution to this crisis is for the state to guarantee that it will pay all costs that cannot be recovered from the developers.

As things stand, tenants still have to pay up to £15,000 in costs, plus any money they’ve already spent on things like smoke detectors and fire safety patrols. Landlords who own multiple properties, as well as people living in high-value flats, have to pay for their own sanitation, which can amount to over £100,000 per property in some cases.

The government’s proposed solution also forces developers to shell out money, which many are unwilling to do. Years of lawsuits loom. Other developers have gone bankrupt or are based overseas, beyond the reach of UK laws.

“We warned the government that the developers would just push back and say, ‘No, we don’t want to do that,'” says Grover.

“What we have now is four or five different programs. It is extremely complex. How long will all of this take?

Government procrastination has meant that work has not even started on most of the blocks covered with hazardous materials. Today, massive price increases for building materials and a drastic shortage of labor means remediation costs are skyrocketing and lead times are getting longer.

The official figures published each month relate to a very limited category, that of the few hundred blocks which have the worst coating: the aluminum composite material (ACM).

Essentially, the ACM is a piece of highly combustible plastic with a thin ribbon of metal on the outside. When a fire breaks through metal, it finds a rich tank of fuel and licks the side of a building with alarming speed, creating an inferno of staggering ferocity.

According to the calculations of a fire engineer, cladding a high-rise building with ACM is comparable to securing a 19,000 liter tanker to its walls.

Arconic, the company that made the panels used on Grenfell, knew this but chose to continue selling the panels for use on high-rise buildings anyway, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has learned.

But the security scandal is much, much broader than the ACM. There are many other combustible materials used in construction, and the government’s initial focus on a particular material was a fallacy that attempted to hide the almost incomprehensible extent of the safety flaws that have been discovered.

More recently, it has been recognized that the problem is not just ACM and that “exterior wall systems” including cladding, insulation, window frames and cavity barriers need to be assessed. in their whole. But even that ignores the fact that there are still more problems uncovered behind the facade.

Tens of thousands of blocks are affected, but the government still doesn’t know exactly how many or how dangerous each one is.

Combustible cladding was banned in 2018 on buildings over 18 meters high. Under new rules finally announced this month, only certain types of combustible materials will be banned on blocks between 11 meters and 18 meters. Grenfell style surfacing will no longer be permitted on any new development.

“Everything from…