This June marks eight years on from Grenfell and the same deadly combination of electrical fire risk and flammable cladding still exists in buildings across the UK.
It’s set to cost billions to remove the cladding – billions that won’t be spent on building the new homes this country so desperately needs.
The Grenfell Tower fire was the deadliest UK residential fire since the Blitz.
Like so many others, I watched in horror as the fire tore through the building. The speed. The chaos. The disbelief. How could a fire this devastating – started by nothing more than an electrical fault in a fridge-freezer – still be happening in modern Britain?
The answers began to emerge in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s Phase 1 report published in October 2019. It confirmed what many already suspected:
“The principal reason why the flames spread so rapidly up, down and across the building was the presence of the aluminum composite material (ACM) rainscreen panels with polyethylene cores.”
(Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Phase 1 Report – Volume 4, paragraph 26.7)
In most high-rise buildings, internal fires are containable. But when combustible cladding is present, even a small electrical fault can become an uncontrollable inferno in minutes.
And, as we now know, flammable cladding is everywhere.
A crisis unresolved
Since Grenfell, the UK government has taken steps to ensure the tragic events can never be repeated. There was the Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety, led by Dame Judith Hackitt (published in May 2018). It was followed two major new pieces of legislation: The Fire Safety Act (2021) and the Building Safety Act (2022).
Perhaps the most significant government response came in February 2021, when then Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick announced a five-point plan to tackle the cladding crisis.
The plan included a £3.5 billion fund to remove unsafe cladding from residential buildings over 18 metres, with the government covering the full cost in those cases. For buildings between 11 and 18 metres, a long-term, low-interest loan scheme was introduced – with a promise that leaseholders would never have to pay more than £50 a month towards remediation.
At the time, this plan offered real hope. But progress since then has been painfully slow.
While the government’s target is to remove all unsafe cladding by 2029, the National Audit Office now warns it could take until 2035. In the meantime, thousands of families are still living in buildings wrapped in flammable materials – buildings that are uninsurable, unsellable, and undeniably unsafe.
And the crisis runs deeper still.
Post-Grenfell inspections have uncovered widespread safety failings: missing fire barriers, defective cavities, and faulty compartmentation. Even if every cladding panel were removed tomorrow, many buildings across England would still be dangerous. This isn’t just a cladding crisis. It’s a fire safety crisis. And it remains far from resolved.
Story of systemic failure
A powerful BBC podcast, Anatomy of a Fire Trap, lays bare the systemic failures at the heart of England’s building safety crisis. Produced by Inside Housing journalist and long-time campaigner, Peter Apps, the series tells the story of the scandal through a single building: New Atlas Wharf in London’s Docklands.
After Grenfell, a safety inspection revealed combustible Celotex insulation hidden behind the tower block’s external brick slips – a major fire risk. But that was just the beginning.
Experts interviewed in the podcast identified a catalogue of hazardous risks:
– Highly flammable polystyrene insulation lining the escape stairs
– Stacked timber balconies that allow fires to leap from one floor to the next
– Glazed balcony doors that can shatter in high heat, letting external fires penetrate the flats
The most disturbing part? New Atlas Wharf isn’t a one-off. It was chosen for the podcast because it’s typical – just one of thousands of high-rises across England still hiding serious fire risks. This isn’t about one faulty building. It’s a system-wide failure – and it’s still playing out in real time.
How did we get here?
The roots of this crisis stretch back nearly four decades. In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government introduced sweeping changes to the building regulation system in England – all in a bid to accelerate private home construction.
Regulatory oversight was part privatised. The detailed, 306-page rulebook was replaced with just 24 pages of broad, interpretive guidance. In theory, the goal was flexibility – allowing the construction industry to decide how best to meet safety standards.
In practice, it marked the start of a systemic failure – what one cladding manufacturer later described to Inside Housing, in 2018, as “a complete race to the bottom”.
Private inspectors, now in competition for business, faced intense pressure to sign off developments rather than fail them. Enforcement weakened. Prescriptive safety rules gave way to vague interpretations.
Private regulators faced commercial pressures to approve building works rather than fail them. Standards declined. Unsafe practices proliferated. And over time, unsafe materials and poor practices became embedded in the system.
The result? A broken regulatory culture that persisted for decades – hidden in plain sight.
As of March 2025, 2,718 social housing buildings in England over 11 metres have been identified as having life-critical fire safety cladding defects. Of these, 500 – including 232 high-rises over 18 metres – still have no clear remediation plan in place. That’s nearly one in five.
While 857 buildings have completed remediation and 371 more have received building control sign-off, 990 blocks are still waiting for work to begin – despite plans being in place. With deadlines slipping and funding limited, this remains a crisis in motion, not one that’s been resolved.
The human impact
This crisis isn’t just about faulty buildings – it’s about shattered lives.
Thousands of innocent leaseholders still face the threat of financial ruin, despite repeated government promises to protect them. Many are trapped in homes they can’t sell, can’t insure, and can barely live in.
Even where remediation is underway, it often means months of relentless noise, dust, and disruption – with families left living on building sites, and no clear end in sight.
This is not good enough. We can’t undo the failures that brought us here. But we can act – faster, smarter, and more fairly.
For everyone still living in fear inside these buildings – we must.
What needs to happen now
First, we must listen to the people at the heart of this crisis – the leaseholders and residents still living with daily risk.
Since 2019, the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign – led by Inside Housing, the UK Cladding Action Group, Grenfell United, The Grenfell Foundation and others – has fought tirelessly for change.
One of the key demands is simple: make homes with cladding safe – at the speed the people living in them need and deserve.
But if the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s this: we can’t afford to wait.
In my view, this is about more than removing dangerous cladding. To make high-rise buildings safe and insurable, we need to deal with every source of fire risk – especially the ones inside the home.
For too long, electrical fires have been treated as inevitable. But they’re not. At Ci Global, we’ve spent the last seven years developing certified, approved solutions that detect and prevent electrical fires before ignition – technology that’s ready to deploy today.
It’s the first line of defense – smart socket technology that cuts risk at the source and helps prevent electrical fires before they start.
Our aim is to show that when electrical fire risk is brought right down – and combined with in-home fire suppression – even buildings with cladding could be made safe enough to insure. It’s a powerful combination – one that could spare families from unthinkable loss, and help make fatal building fires a rarity, not a recurring tragedy.
We’re calling for a joint effort between government and industry to roll out this life-saving technology across all affected buildings – at a fraction of the estimated £12.6–£22.4 billion cost of cladding removal, in far less time than the 2035 timeline now feared by the National Audit Office, and with far less disruption to residents’ lives.
This wouldn’t just transform life for the thousands still trapped in unsafe homes. It would also unlock billions in public funds – money that could go towards building the new social housing this country so urgently needs, instead of endlessly patching up the old.
That’s why we’re preparing to launch a national proof-of-concept project – to show that a safer future isn’t just possible. It’s achievable now.
This won’t be about headlines. It’ll be about real protection, for real people, in a real building. And it will demonstrate exactly where fire safety needs to go next – not just in high-risk, cladding-affected buildings here in the UK, but in every building, everywhere.
