BY BARRIE CLEMENT


SAFE AS HOUSES


Grenfell highlights UK’s housing emergency


Dead of night By Joy Johnson


We lived and breathed Put our children to bed We had great views below Posh houses with white stucco


We lived and breathed Tended our grandmothers Teased our sisters Looked up to our brothers


We lived and breathed They wanted us to be pretty Gentrification stalked the city


No need to avert your eyes We have a disguise Concrete covered and clad


It struck in the dead of night We tried to fight We couldn’t see


Our voices had been silenced We lived and breathed Do NOT avert your eyes. No longer a disguise.


Entombed in a shroud. Twenty fourth floor to the ground.


That was in the past We’d breathed our last.


The Grenfell Tower catastrophe in west London has drawn attention to a housing emergency throughout Britain.


There has been a massive reduction in the availability of genuinely affordable housing of a decent standard and – above all – accommodation that is safe.


Tory ministers’ mania for cost-cutting, deregulation and privatisation has taken its toll.


No wonder Kensington and Chelsea council are struggling to rehouse the survivors of the disaster. Since 2014, 46 council houses have been sold in the area, but not one has been built. Nationally council houses are being sold off three times as quickly as new ones are being built, according to official figures.


And the drive for deregulation has clearly undermined safety standards. As uniteWORKS went to press at least 200 buildings had failed fire safety tests in the wake of the disaster, including a children’s hospital.


Assistant general secretary Steve Turner said the government’s political obsessions had added to a ‘toxic cocktail’.


He believes there should be a return to putting people before profit and a restoration of a proper system of local accountability.


19 uniteWORKS Summer 2017


“There should also be an increase in the resources and powers available to local government to build and maintain homes in their locality,” he adds.


And Unite national officer for construction Bernard McAulay says Unite had repeatedly warned that public spending cuts as well as the weakening of safety laws and building regulations could have ‘catastrophic’ consequences. “Sadly those concerns have been shown to be entirely correct.”


Unite has called for an urgent government


regulations with safety as the priority.


As well as a ban on flammable materials, the union is calling for the installation of sprinklers in all social housing and public buildings and a licensing system for all construction trades.


Unite national officer Siobhan Endean points out that the union’s housing sector members, “have been raising the issues for years and have been ignored. Unite has consistently highlighted the government’s failure to address the growing housing crisis.


“Independent of the Grenfell fire, we continue our call on the government to urgently end the chronic underfunding of social housing and address the housing crisis which affects all our communities.”


review of building


Mark Thomas


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