In June it will be four years since the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Like 9/11 I will always remember where I was when I heard the news. It was just after midnight and I was in a taxi in Dublin, returning to my hotel from a Forest dinner.
Also in the taxi, catching up with the news via text and Twitter, was Claire Fox, director of the Academy of Ideas and our guest speaker that night.
We were both shocked by the devastating reports, Claire even more than me, possibly because she herself lives in a block of flats on a London estate.
Meanwhile (and bear with me, this is not a completely tenuous link), it’s just over a year since my mother moved from a small house in rural Derbyshire, where she lived for 40 years, to a flat overlooking the river Dee in Chester.
Just shy of her 90th birthday she moved because she realised it was becoming impractical to live in a tiny hamlet without a shop or a regular bus service to the local town.
Winters were particularly hazardous. Heavy snow could cut the place off for days because the snow ploughs and salt gritters never bothered to turn off the road that by-passed the village en route to Dovedale, a local beauty spot.
Years ago my old Rover got stuck in snow when it slid off the narrow, sharply descending road out of the village. We had to stay a further night at my parents’ house while we waited for the snow to melt.
A decade later I discovered the downside of having a rear-wheel drive car when the tiny cul-de-sac in which they lived became a skid pan after the temperature dipped below zero.
Ice was the bigger threat to life and limbs, especially elderly ones, so - taking all these factors into account - moving to Chester, where my sister lives, was a no brainer.
In July 2019 I spent the best part of a week helping my mother find somewhere to live. She was happy to downsize to a flat as long as it had a balcony, a half decent view, and could be accessed via a lift.
She had seen several flats already but none met the brief.
I thought it might be worth looking at some Victorian terraced houses and several were absolutely charming but the staircases in those old properties were so steep she would have fallen and broken something within days.
So we abandoned that idea and returned to viewing flats.
The only one she really liked - and subsequently bought - was on the second floor of a modern three-storey block. Overlooking the river, it met her other criteria too.
It was part of a development built ten years ago but what we didn’t foresee was that it would become embroiled in the post Grenfell fallout as many buildings with cladding were deemed a potential safety risk.
Curiously, in hindsight, the cladding issue was not mentioned by anyone during the purchasing process and it never occurred to us to raise it.
It only became an issue last spring, a few months after my mother had moved in, when she and other residents received a letter from the management company.
To cut a long story short, the matter seems to have been resolved, without too much fuss, by the management company which subsequently hired contractors to render the cladding safe.
It does however beg the question: how can flats built in the 21st century be a potential fire risk as a result of their materials, design or construction?
I can understand that older properties might pose a risk, even if they conform to current building regulations, but developments built this millennium?
The good news is that ‘For Sale’ signs are reappearing on the development where my mother lives. (Or so I’m told. Thanks to lockdown it’s a while since I visited her.)
Others are far less fortunate. On the news the other week I watched an interview with a girl in her mid twenties who had bought her first flat two years ago.
Unfortunately she lost her job as a result of Covid. This meant she couldn’t pay her mortgage but she was unable to sell the property because of the unresolved cladding issue.
According to the report she was forced to declare herself bankrupt and is now back home living with her parents.
Thousands more continue to own flats with no prospect of being able to move because, through no fault of the owners, they are currently unsellable.
I’m not, as you know, a huge fan of excessive government intervention in any field but this is one instance, surely, where government action is necessary and justified.
(The current pandemic is another but that’s a completely different issue that I won’t even begin to address here!)
In the meantime I am thankful that the company that manages the flats where my mother lives dealt with the issue so promptly.
Why others, including the government, can’t do the same I’m not sure but I think we should be told.
Update: By coincidence, Claire Fox - with whom I shared that Dublin taxi on the night of the Grenfell disaster - has today posted this comment (and link) on Facebook.
I’ve just seen it and it reads:
This is so interesting on #CladdingScandal post Grenfell and the unintended and devastating impact of the wrong kind of safetyism on the construction industry. Meanwhile one of the consequences of the Grenfell tragedy is the threat of penury or bankruptcy for leaseholders across the country.
Prisoners of Cladding by Austin Williams
I agree. Definitely worth reading.