Sarah Williams vividly remembers the night in 2016 when she camped overnight in a car park to put down a deposit on a flat in the newly completed Spectrum Building in Dagenham, east London. This was a year before Grenfell, and the flats market in London was completely crazy.” Four years later, her flat became unsellable when they realised it was covered in dangerous, flammable cladding. Another four years and it, like Grenfell Tower in west London in 2017, had burned down.
It has been two years since the fire at the Spectrum Building on 26 August 2024, which left more than 80 people homeless. They were forced to flee a blaze that broke out in the early hours of the morning, fuelled by the scaffolding that covered the building while the cladding was replaced. Williams, like many leaseholders, is stuck in a legal limbo, paying the mortgage on a flat that no longer exists, with no idea how much she will get back.
The building’s freeholder, Arinium Ltd, went bankrupt shortly after the fire, and administrators are now responsible for distributing any remaining money, including insurance payouts for loss and damages. We’ve still got to pay our mortgages. We’ve still got to pay our rent.
James Allchurch, who owned two flats which burned down in the fire, said the arduous legal process was compounding the trauma many experienced that night. He and his partner ran from their third-floor flat when he woke up by chance and saw embers and blue flashing lights outside the window. Because the last thing you think is, we’ll never go back in our flat,” he said.
I still have nightmares about the fire, I have nightmares about watching our building being demolished, losing everything. There’s an underlying sense of anxiety that has been with me most days since that fire.” Leaseholders are also concerned that if the freeholder is prosecuted over any fire safety breaches and ultimately fined, that money could come out of the pot of money that would otherwise be distributed to them. The day after the fire, the then deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, told reporters at the site that cladding remediation was going “far too slowly” and vowed to “speed up the process”.
But the number of buildings in need of cladding remediation where work has started or been completed has only increased from 50% to 53% in the past two years. I expected fast and urgent action, but I haven’t seen that for the residents of Spectrum and I haven’t seen that for the country.” Giles Grover, from the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign group, said they were still waiting for Labour to keep its manifesto commitments on building safety. But this fire was a warning, and they need to heed it.
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