https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cft52h89roU&sns=em


Shame on those posters that voted Tory, quite frankly .

In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks.

In their original form, tower blocks are stacks of concrete boxes, insulated from each other. If a fire breaks out in one flat, it will be contained so long as the fire doors remain closed – that is why the advice for other residents is to stay put in their flats and place wet towels under the doors to stop the smoke.

By the turn of the millennium, the post-war tower blocks that are scattered through Britain’s cities had become rundown and ugly. So in 2000, Tony Blair’s government launched the Decent Homes Programme, a huge scheme to update the social housing stock, making it more environmentally friendly, comfortable and pleasing to the eye. For high-rises there were two options – either refurbish them, or pull them down and build new low-rise housing in their place. The slightly cheaper option was to do them up.

Billions of pounds of public funds were handed out to contractors to carry out the upgrades – £820 million in London alone. In almost all cases, the drab concrete was wrapped in brightly coloured plastic. It may look far nicer, but the material used in most cases is also highly flammable, while the tiny space between the façade and the concrete acts as a chimney in the event of a fire, sucking the flames up the building in seconds. Grenfell Tower had been clad in those plastic fascia during its revamp last year – it is looking increasingly likely that that is the reason why the fire engulfed it within fifteen minutes.

These safety flaws were not a secret. The government knew about them. Local authorities knew. Contractors knew – the tip-off that sparked our investigation came from someone working on a tower block refurb in the West Midlands. A previous blaze in 2009 that killed six people in the Lakanal House block in Camberwell, southeast London, spread because fire regulations had been breached. It now turns out that the government had produced and then sat on a report recommending that building regulations be changed in the wake of that fire.

In 2010, we took our findings to the Birmingham councillor in charge of the tower block refurbishments. He was so clueless about the project in his charge that he didn’t even know how many high-rises were being revamped in the city. When we revealed this in our report, he threatened to sue us.

There seems to be little reason for the government’s inaction other than a desire to save money and a head-in-the-sand hope that disaster would never strike. ‘I don’t feel vindicated, I feel angry’, said my colleague, who I worked on the investigation with. ‘There is a price to pay for cost-cutting and austerity’.

Is it just coincidence that the people who usually live in these blocks are the poorest, often most isolated people in our society, the ones least able to raise a fuss and force change? This morning I opened Facebook to see a post from a Syrian friend – a picture of a smiling young man. Mohammed Alhaj Ali, 23, escaped from the hellhole of the Syrian civil war three years ago. He thought he had found refuge in London, in Grenfell Tower.

‘There were so many refugees in that tower, I think the majority were refugees and migrants’, my friend said, distraught. ‘As Syrians we are used to dying. But we never thought we would be dying in London’.

Hannah Lucinda Smith is Istanbul correspondent with The Times. From 2009 to 2011 she was an investigative journalist at BBC West Midlands, where she worked on a report about fire safety in high rises

Darling think of the real estate prices !

Those buildings were bloody ugly , it was millions well spent .

Panorama now

Oh dear.

Anything to the headlines on the BBC website or lots of conjecture and anomalies?

Was that meant to be funny?

Watch it on I player, it's just horrific.

To be fair to bimbo I doubt most people voting tory had any idea the government would wilfully let these tower blocks be clad in flammable blankets

Should we vote labour who put the stuff up in the first place ?

Should we vote labour who put the stuff up in the first place ?

Four separate government ministers were warned that fire regulations were not keeping people safe, in letters that have subsequently been seen by the BBC.
In the leaked letters, experts warn that those living in tower blocks like Grenfell Tower were "at risk".
At least 79 people are dead or missing presumed dead after the fire at the London high-rise last week.
The department that received the letters said work to improve regulation and safety had already been under way.
Leaked letters
The letters show experts have been worried about fire safety in tower blocks for years.
Following a fatal fire in Lakanal House in south London in 2009, a series of recommendations were made to keep people safe.
They were ignored. The government promised a review of fire regulations in 2013, but it still has not happened.
BBC One's Panorama has obtained a dozen letters sent by the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group.
Informed by experts, it warned the government it "could not afford to wait for another tragedy".
Four ministers - all from the Department for Communities and Local Government - received letters but did not strengthen the regulations.
Ronnie King, a former chief fire officer who sits on the group, says the government has ignored repeated warnings about tower block safety.
"We have spent four years saying 'Listen, we have got the evidence, we've provided you with the evidence, there is clear public opinion towards this, you ought to move on this'," said Mr King.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cft52h89roU&sns=em


Shame on those posters that voted Tory, quite frankly .

So much complete and utter shite in that video. Not least the idea that improving the visual quality of the area was only done to help rich people. Improving the external environment is good for everyone, especially those living there. Why wouldn't it be? As an example, look up Broken Windows Theory.

Short synopsis? Need a night away from it, so will catch up tomorrow night. The whole thing is absolutely harrowing. I watched an interview with locals on social media, and they were commenting on how the authorities aren't letting the truth out. They referenced their friend who Is a firefighter and was involved in the operation. He stated that they found 42 people dead in the one room. Like WTF is going on?

Really. 42 people in one room?

Suspect they were all coming down when they found a point they could go no further, and found the last bit of....

Fûck me, you're reaching now.

Come on. This idea that cladding was only installed to make the rich people feel good about themselves is just pathetic.

I think you should stfu with your vile party political trolling on these threads ffs
Just for once

Come on. This idea that cladding was only installed to make the rich people feel good about themselves is just pathetic.

It is all very well to blame budget cuts for the fire, They would of made a bad situation worse,

But it seems, the issue was caused by spending 8.5 million sticking what in effect firelighters to the outside of the building and removing fire doors from inside the building..

There was enough money sloshing around to have done the job properly.

I think you should stfu with your vile party political trolling on these threads ffs
Just for once

Why dont you condemn Eugenius and Anon and all the others who have also done it?

There seems to be little reason for the government’s inaction other than a desire to save money and a head-in-the-sand hope that disaster would never strike. ‘I don’t feel vindicated, I feel angry’, said my colleague, who I worked on the investigation with. ‘There is a price to pay for cost-cutting and austerity’.

“The issue is that, under building regulations, only the surface of the cladding has to be fire-proofed to class 0, which is about surface spread,” says Tarling. “The stuff behind it doesn’t, and it’s this which has burned.” He says he recently inspected a new-build eight storey block in south-east London where there was no fire protection in the external cavity walls. “The insulation behind the external cladding is flammable polyurethane. I know because I took a chunk out and burned it.”

Poor cladding regulations are possibly the main cause for this fire.

The cladding is required for insulation reasons (fair enough) but no thought was given to the fire risk. So safe building are being turned into fire risks

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... wer-blocks


This allowed the cladding used to be given the class 0 rating.

There certainly was and that is a disgusting part of all of this. To spend that much money and still not sort out the many safety concerns is disgraceful.

Absolutely spot on.

I posted a link about this pages ago.

There's a loophole that the cladding and insulation don't have a standard when used together or something akin to it.

The loophole is that if it can be proven that the whole cladding system - including fixings, fire breaks and ventilation channels - are tested to a required standard then they comply. Trouble is how do you test a cladding system for a 22 storey tower? it's all theoretical so, in essence, bollocks when placed into the real world.

It's a major flaw in the system. The type of aluminium cladding used here could only have been used if they had convinced the inspector that the entire system complied with regs. In reality those panels should have been banned outright and certainly banned outright on any tall buildings.

Some major reviews are happening right now to check if they are used on other buildings both commercial and residential. Expect a lot of retrofitting to be taking place - good news for the construction industry!

Absolutely spot on.

I posted a link about this pages ago.

There's a loophole that the cladding and insulation don't have a standard when used together or something akin to it.

The loophole is that if it can be proven that the whole cladding system - including fixings, fire breaks and ventilation channels - are tested to a required standard then they comply. Trouble is how do you test a cladding system for a 22 storey tower? it's all theoretical so, in essence, bollocks when placed into the real world.

It's a major flaw in the system. The type of aluminium cladding used here could only have been used if they had convinced the inspector that the entire system complied with regs. In reality those panels should have been banned outright and certainly banned outright on any tall buildings.

Some major reviews are happening right now to check if they are used on other buildings both commercial and residential. Expect a lot of retrofitting to be taking place - good news for the construction industry!

Genius. Theoretically, you could take 2 inert substances and when put together, create something lethal and so the notion of ignoring the complete item and its function is ludicrous. The only other point being they could have rendered the insulation practically inert if they had not built the cladding to create chimneys up the sides.

It's a Tory council. Providing fewer services and cutting costs is part of their mantra. Increasing council tax to replace money that was taken by a Tory government is not something they were likely to do. Any plans to do so would make headlines.

That's completely unrelated. They wanted to raise the C Tax on the tenuous premise that they needed to pay for social care. They needed a mandate from the residents to do so, and thought they would get it because only the old people would bother to vote, but it met such strong opposition they just decided to put it up by 5% each year forever instead.

In 2014, the council decided to hand back £100 to residents paying the top rate of council tax in 2014 after a claimed “overachieving efficiency drive”, a decision criticised in a letter to the Guardian following the high-rise fire.

The rebate was paid weeks before local elections which returned a Conservative council, the author of the letter wrote. “Austerity, K&C style: you give to the rich while taking from the poor (nobody with discounted bills or claiming council tax support was eligible to share in the bounty of the town hall blue-chips).