Government partly to blame for Grenfell fire, says UK housing minister

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LONDON (Reuters) – The British government is partly to blame for the Grenfell fire that killed 72 people in 2017 because building regulations were weak and could be exploited by developers in a dangerous way, said Housing Minister Michael Gove on Sunday.

In June 2017, Grenfell Tower, a 23-storey council housing block in west London, was destroyed by a fire sparked by an electrical fault in a fridge, Britain’s deadliest fire in a residential building since World War II.

A combustible lining system later installed on the tower’s exterior walls was the main factor in the unstoppable spread of flames, and the disaster sparked a wave of soul-searching about whether the neglect of an ethnically mixed and largely localized community low income had played a role. share in the fate of the tower.

Gove told The Sunday Times that the building guidelines were “so flawed and ambiguous that they allowed unscrupulous people to exploit a faulty system in a way that led to tragedy”.

“I think if you look at what happened to Grenfell there were a lot of factors. But yes the government has to collectively take some responsibility,” he told Sky News separately.

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“There’s a difference between presiding over a negligent system and actively exploiting it. But there’s no denying that the building regulations system was wrong.”

Following the fire, a public inquiry revealed numerous flaws in the planning and administration of Grenfell’s renovation, and hundreds of buildings were found to have similar cladding.

Gove, who sits in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s cabinet of key ministers, said people had been ‘effectively imprisoned’ in hundreds of thousands of flats in buildings identified as having similar flaws to Grenfell, with residents not being insecure but also unable to sell their apartments. .

“I apologized and will always apologize to people that it took so long to sort it out,” he said, adding that progress had been made.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout; Editing by Toby Chopra)

Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.

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