Whenever there’s a fire in a tower block, bewildered residents tell the cameras the same thing. “We didn’t hear the fire alarm. I never even knew there was a fire, till I saw the smoke/my neighbour came knocking”. That was the story again, after fire gutted a tower bock in Dagenham, just days ago. But the reality is worse than those residents are aware. There are no alarms, because residents are not supposed to evacuate high rise buildings in the event of a fire.
The policy is called Stay Put.
The Report of the Grenfell Inquiry, published yesterday, confirms that Stay Put was at least partly responsible for the tragic loss of 72 lives. The report warns that, as long as Stay Put is the standard response to residential fires, especially with so many towers being insulated with new and untested materials, the danger of another Grenfell remains. Yet incredibly, it seems that Stay Put will be the standard response for years to come – possibly forever – for hundreds of residential blocks.
The reason is the differences in regulations between residential towers and commercial buildings like offices, hotels and shops. Commercial buildings require intelligent alarm systems, two emergency staircases, firemen’s lifts and sprinklers fitted throughout. Blocks of flats on the other hand are almost always built with just one emergency staircase. Only since 2020 have they required sprinklers in buildings higher than 11 metres.
The argument from developers is that second staircases take up valuable floorspace, rendering some developments not commercially viable. Successive governments bought this thin gruel argument, even though residential buildings present arguably greater risk. Unlike offices, they are occupied 24/7 and they contain children, the elderly and the disabled.
In the event of a fire in a tower block with just one staircase, the problem is this: if residents make their way down, they will impede fire crews trying to get themselves and their equipment up. So instead residents are told to “stay put”, till the fire service comes to rescue them. And no alarm is sounded.
Developers’ justification for Stay Put is that modern tower bocks are built with something called “compartmentation”. Each flat is supposed to be enclosed in its own concrete box, preventing smoke and flames from spreading from one flat to the next, for up to an hour. This supposedly gives the fire service plenty of time to get on site and extinguish the fire or get people out.
But this reckons without several very serious flaws in the process of building and managing modern flats.
First, as Grenfell showed, some of the materials used in construction can accelerate the spread of fire. Composites make up a growing proportion of building materials. New ones are being developed all the time. Can we really trust that the laziness, cost cutting, ignorance and outright deceit that led to the use of ACM cladding on Grenfell and hundreds of other residential towers have disappeared from the building trade?
Add to this an alarming shoddiness in the construction of many of those flats. I am sitting on the 31st floor of one such, marketed as a luxury block and designed by one of the most prestigious names in residential development. A decade ago, the extractor above a grill in a restaurant kitchen on the ground floor caught fire. That extractor was clogged with fat and when a spark drifted up from the grill, the fat caught light immediately. The fire burned for nearly an hour unseen. Within that hour, smoke had begun drifting out of everyone’s light fittings, 30 floors up. The smoke had got into our ceiling voids. Unknown to us, as we sat down to our dinners on that November night and wondered about the strange burning smell, the corridors outside our flats were also filling up with deadly smoke. That couldn’t have happened, had our flats really been the sealed boxes they were sold as. But of course they weren’t.
During construction of a block of flats, a series of trades will follow one another, bringing in services like electricity, broadband and plumbing. Each trade will gouge holes in the walls between flats, common parts and riser cupboards, to accommodate pipes and wiring. Too often no one fills in those holes. It’s quicker and cheaper just to shove some plasterboard over them and paint. Who’s going to know what lies behind?
Eventually that night a neighbour came banging on my front door. I opened it to find, to my shock, he was holding a wet towel over his face and the lift lobby behind him was filled with smoke. We were lucky. Our building is one of a tiny handful where a second staircase has been extended beyond the commercial floors to the full height of the building. This staircase was a few steps from my front door. I believe it saved my life.
From my window I can see a tower completed only a couple of years ago. It is 73 storeys. It has two staircases for the first 11 floors, because these floors contain a hotel, but just one staircase for the hundreds of residents that occupy the 62 floors above. That block has already suffered one – thankfully small – fire.
After our fire, we were assured the problems had all been fixed. The compartmentation was fine. It wasn’t until over a decade later, after the passing of the Building Safety Act and a snap fire service inspection, that we discovered this wasn’t the case. Almost every flat has had to have its compartmentation reinforced. God knows what might have happened if there’d been another fire over those 14 years.
That brings us to the third problem for modern flat dwellers. Almost all flats in England and Wales are sold as leasehold. The leaseholder doesn’t own the flat, just the right to inhabit it for a set number of years and the obligation to pay for all repairs and maintenance. The person responsible for carrying out that maintenance will be your freeholder, who will certainly collect your money, but may not spend it on the repairs you need. And if they don’t, again how are you to know?
Our neighbours at another Docklands estate suffered a serious fire three years ago. It appeared that their fire safety systems had not been properly maintained. Their fire escape filled with smoke because extractor mechanisms weren’t working. Several residents, including two small babies, came within minutes of losing their lives as a result.
All this becomes more urgent because of the new Government’s mad rush to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years. Of course the country needs those homes. But as campaigners have petitioned Government year after year, unless there is proper consumer protection to drive up build quality, and unless leasehold is radically reformed to give flat owners control of the management of their own homes, we will never be sure we aren’t creating yet more death traps.
The Building Safety Act, passed in 2022, is a sprawling, contradictory piece of legislation that puts most of its weight behind trying to prevent fires like Grenfell happening in the first place. Laudable though that may be, fires will happen and the key for any high rise residents is that they can get themselves and their families the hell out, if the worst comes to the worst. Mandating intelligent alarms, second staircases, firemen’s lifts and the retrofitting of sprinklers would have been the way to go. The Act has nothing to say about any of it.
Thanks to tireless campaigning by the Grenfell survivors and others, two emergency staircases will finally become mandatory in residential blocks over 18 metres from October 2026. But even then, any building which has already begun construction, even if it is just basic piling, will not have to comply. If, as seems likely, the bulk of Labour’s new homes are flats, then at 300,000 dwellings per year, by the time the new regulation kicks in, nearly a million more flats may have been built with no second staircase and the Stay Put policy, with all the dangers the Grenfell Inquiry has clearly established, will stay put.
Margaret Rothwell is a pseudonym. The author is a member of the campaign group, Free Leaseholders.
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Not good news. Seems he/Trump caved in to the leftard violence against Tesla. That just emboldens the fascists.
Will DOGE survive? Will the US survive the coming civil war that the Leftards are agitating for, and apparently planning for?
Whitehouse says story is bollox.
Yes don’t see it anywhere else.
Good news if false. It would just show weakness as the leftard fascists gear up to start a civil war.
yep, when a 2nd April article quotes an article written the day before …
I suspect it was his activities in Wisconsin for this week’s election that created the pressure from the Cabinet that put him over the edge.
Meantime, fun while it lasted. And hopefully lessons learned now by Cabinet and some trickle into UK (probably not).
Whatever els3 the Overton window has shifted considerably.
If only Tesla made a petrol powered truck I’d seriously consider buying one.
In the spirit of solidarity.
If Tesla did make a proper car it wouldn’t be possible as a business – the ONLY way it has ever turned a profit is by having greenwashing politicians shower it with money for “saving the planet”.
Musk is a genius, just not in the ways most people think.
Yes, and no. The money was there, and he took it, and spent it saving free speech for sceptics.
I think he is indeed a business and engineering genius.
“I think he is indeed a business and engineering genius.”
Please qualify this statement.
Did that rocket really ‘return to base’?
And in the Private Sector?
Amazing!
Trump has realised what I have known since 2016 at least : Musk is an effing liability and a conman.
No on this I disagree. He is certainly a multifaceted character but amongst the great tech bilionaires he’s a stand out figure.
“Stand out figure”… for what, exactly?
By far the smartest, capable of independent thinking and my gut instinct is he’s broadly on the side of freedom and individualism.
But I also have hunch that nothing I say will change your mind, so there we are.
MDS muchly?
What does MDS mean?
Musk Derangement Syndrome?
Not at all. I know too much about him.
DOGE is bigger than Musk (as it should be). He has shown what can be done and has assembled a good team.
The DOGE concept and it’s underlying principles are sound. I think it is probably a good time for Musk to step back.
Thinking seems to be he’s established it, and him stepping back will remove an obvious hate figure for the left to attack, while allowing DOGE to continue to pursue efficiencies – Tesla share price could do with a little more of Musks focus I’d say as well, so good move
This split is being dressed up as amicable because:
Trump is vain and proud and can’t admit to having been conned by someone he so publicly got into bed with.
Musk has realised the game is up now that Trump has figured him out for what he is and cannot afford to fall out with Trump lest Trump gets angry and tells the world the real reason he has kicked him out.
Mark my words. I have been watching Musk closely since 2011.
And don’t give me all the “Musk has saved free speech” crap. The minute it suits him he will be censoring Twitter/X. He already has, regarding negative events at SpaceX. Heck, the reason he bought Twitter was to silence critics of Tesla. Musk is a very petty person and a megalomaniac and a bully.
I am not happy about any of this. The state, US state included, needs to be shrunk, of course, and I hope DOGE continues.
Reminder: Musk wanted Trump on side to protect Tesla despite Trump’s very necessary war against all things “save the planet” (electric cars being one of those things). Without TSLA being the price it is, Musk is DEAD IN THE WATER.
If I was wealthier than I am, I would now be taking out a strong SHORT position in TSLA. It’s something I was considering a while back, thank god I didn’t pull the trigger…
As always, follow the money.
Good luck to all.
But you’re not wealthy he’s the richest man in the world.
That tells me he’s doing something right which you’re not unless of course material comforts are not your cup of tea, which is also an entirely legitimate indeed admirable position.
I have no problem with wealthy people. I consider myself successful enough in this regard and I am very happy with my life and achievements so far. But it’s the manner in which Elon has become wealthy – theft and crony capitalism.
And by the way – despite what is written everywhere (including in the article referenced above), he did not found Tesla, for a start. He stole it, and drove the founder to an early grave.
And his wealth is almost entirely in TSLA paper. Which, if the price crashes, will leave your hero all but penniless.
Musk MUST continue to sell his TSLA, to fund his incredibly wasteful and messed up endeavours (private and professional). But he mustn’t sell too much, because he could trigger a rush by all to sell. That’s already happening, anyway…
Don’t suffer from Hero Worship. If you do, at least choose someone perhaps worthy of it. Your first candidates should be those people you know, first hand.
Correction, I was wrong that Martin Eberhard (co-founder of Tesla with Marc Tarpenning in 2003) died, he has not. Apologies. Not sure why I thought that.
And there’s me thinking it’s because he wants to spend more time with his ever-expanding family.
Is it 14 kids he’s up to now? Does he live with any of them? Where does he even find the time to be a dad?
Kids preferably need a present father growing up, not a mostly absent sperm donor. No amount of money can be a substitute for that.
How do you know he’s not present or doesn’t want to be present?
Has it not occurred to you that perhaps these various mothers simply wanted to have a kid by the most brilliant and virile man in the world?
Do you actually understand human nature?
How can you be “present” in 14 kids’ lives, who are all obviously at various stages in their childhood, reaching milestones and going through the different challenges of child development along the way? Do you even have the first clue what you’re on about?
“Human nature”, as I understand it, generally means a man wants to father children and actually stick around to bring them up. I know, right? Radical.
Do you happen to be privy to the set-up of Musk’s personal family life? Because I never said I was. But if he’s got that amount of kids with several women he can hardly be fully committed to being a dad to all AND a successful businessman of this calibre, can he?
Or perhaps this basic concept didn’t occur to you, given you so obviously idolise the guy and think the sun shines out of his arse.
Jack is suffering from a bad case of Hero Worship where Musk is concerned. I understand he isn’t alone.
Totally. I mean, for sure the guy has done some impressive stuff and I’m not going to deny he’s transformed Twitter compared to what it was, but nobody is beyond reproach. Some people acting like we’ve just insulted their mother because we dare to say anything critical about the world’s richest man that nobody’s ever going to meet..LOL Blimey. Probably a man-crush
“…most brilliant and virile man in the world”
Keep drinking the Koolaid, Jack!
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2025/04/02/fake-news-karoline-leavitt-calls-report-that-musk-is-on-the-outs-at-doge-garbage-n2187426
The Mail story, and this repost, **might** be fake news.
Whitehouse says it is bollox.
I think that one of the main reasons was this:
“…There were mutterings of tension with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Musk was reported to not follow the White House chain of command, which would require him to keep Wiles in the loop more.”
He was trying to do a lot of pioneering stuff, and I reckon the woman drove him out by endless nagging complaints, in order to solidify her own authority, and put the brakes on everything.
Who was organizing all the terrorist attacks on Tesla, we wonder? It’s all very strange.
”Musk is a “special government employee,” which has a 130-day time limit, meaning he was scheduled to go back to business life at the end May anyway.”
Seems highly unlikely; with only a month to go Musk would simply depart with the message “foundations of DOGE well established” and everyone’s egos in tact.
Surprised the Sceptic has fallen for this. Musk has an opportunity to make history. History that will be blurred out in any corporate success. Musk is no Henry Ford in terms of EV’S. My milk float was electric 60 years ago
FAKE NEWS ALERT
Musk is going nowhere, suggest DS corrects its post
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/fake-news-media-says-elon-musk-is-stepping/
Erm, what does POTUS say? Has he said it’s fake?
Draining the swamp was never going to be easy. Elon has made a fantastic contribution to exposing and destroying widespread corruption. We need to do the same in the UK. Vote Reform.
People need to be very careful about supporting Musk.
.
His words are all very splendid but everything he does, from building ridiculous and unnecessary electric vehicles to littering our skies with low orbit satellites, seem tailor made for the digital gulag the so called “elites” are determined to lock all of humanity in.
Right from the beginning it was planned for Musk’s position to be temporary.