Fire Brigade Union general secretary Matt Wrack has described a blaze which destroyed a block of flats in Dagenham, east London, as a national scandal which should not be able to happen.
Mr Wrack spoke to The Independent after touring the site of the disaster in Freshwater Road, Dagenham, with deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, who is also in charge of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
The veteran union boss and former firefighter said he has been at the site of many fires before but described the burnt-out block of flats as one of the worst he had seen.
He said his warning to Ms Rayner was that the blaze was the consequence of years of deregulation on building regulations under the Tories and massive cuts to the council departments responsible for checking building standards.
The fire happened seven years after the nation was shocked by the blaze which engulfed Grenfell Tower in Kensington, killing 70 people and leaving another 70 injured.
But despite an inquiry calling for a change in building regulations to remove dangerous cladding, little progress has been made.
Mr Wrack said: “This is just a completely wrecked building by the fire. Shocking.
“I’ve attended lots of fires and lots of place in my time, and normally the fire will be restricted to one or a couple of windows, and they’re designed to operate like that. What you’ve got here completely destroyed a block of flats.
“It’s shocking, and it highlights the state of the building safety crisis we’ve got in this country that people have thought would end after Grenfell. It’s very, very, you know, the remediation of those buildings is very, very slow, too slow.”
He said ACM (aluminum composite material) cladding remains on buildings, adding: “There are other forms of cladding, and there are other fire safety failures that have been identified, and the pace of removal and correction that is far too slow and a national disgrace.”
Mr Wrack was involved in the aftermath of Grenfell as the FBU general secretary and was assured at the time by Theresa May’s government that the disaster would be “a turning point” in fire safety.
But he said: “If you talk to the firefighters who attended this, they don’t think there’s been any turning points on building safety. Well, they turned up to a fire again, expected it would behave like they’ve been trained buildings will behave, and it hasn’t done that. So it’s only thanks to the professionalism, determination, bravery of firefighters that no lives were lost.”
He added: “They have performed the wonders, the first crew, crews from Dagenham and other local stations. So, yeah, that’s to their credit.”
Around 100 people escaped the fire in the early hours of Monday morning as the blaze took hold of the building, with some having to be warned by neighbours banging on the door because of a lack of fire and smoke alarms.
Addressing his conversation with Ms Rayner, who attended on a private visit with Mr Wrack and the fire commissioner for London, he said: “You know, we’ve got the deputy prime minister here, to her credit – she’s come along to see the site and to listen to people – but we hope to have a better dialogue with the government than we’ve had for the past seven years.”
Laying out the issues which still need to be addressed, Mr Wrack said: “I think it’s a whole combination of issues. The scrapping of regulations, in our view, has had an impact on building safety. If you ask anyone that’s in the street: ‘Should you be able to put flammable cladding on the outside of a building?’ Everyone will say: ‘No.’
“So how come it’s been permitted to happen all over the country? That’s an absolute national scandal. So the regulations should be stricter.
“But then there’s the question of how you enforce the regulations, the role of the fire service, the role of the local authority, building control, all of which have been cut to pieces.
“If anyone recalls the building control officer who gave evidence that Grenfell and his team had been absolutely cut to pieces and they were not able to keep up with the workload. So it’s not surprising that things are getting through that should not get through, but that’s the fault… we’ve always said it’s central government’s responsibility.
“They’re making the decisions to reduce regulation. They’re making the decisions to cut safety critical parts of public services, and that needs to be reversible.”
Mr Wrack warned about the problems of the “sticking plaster system” of posting teams of people 24/7 outside buildings to wake them up if there is a fire – a system that is used in Barking and Dagenham but was not in place for the building caught in the bank holiday weekend fire.
“The fundamental problem is you’ve got buildings now that clearly are being admitted, are not safe in the event of fire,” he said.
“There’s a question, in some cases, of whether people should even be living in buildings in that situation. And then the solution, which in our view, is a very cheap sticking plaster, is to introduce what I call waking watches.
“These are people who we have concerns about the level of training, whether they’re trained to evacuate people, whether they’re trained to evacuate people in the midst of a fire, which is a very scary, dangerous situation. We don’t think that’s the solution to the crisis that we’ve got in building safety.”