Grenfell fire and the safety aftermath leave us with our own refugee crisis

In this space last week I used the phrase “internal refugee crisis” of the possible medium-term impact of the Grenfell fire. As I did so, I wondered whether I might not be guilty of over-dramatising things. A week on, I’m feeling a little less cautious.

At the time of writing, 60 tower blocks whose cladding has been subjected to combustibility tests have failed those tests. That is, unless I misread the reports, every single building tested. And those 60 buildings represent just a tenth, so far, of the number that need to be checked up and down the country.

Many of the buildings so far identified are in London: five in Camden, three in Barnet, two in Wandsworth and one each in Hounslow, Islington, Lambeth and Brent. In Chalk Farm the Chalcots estate of around 4,000 people was yesterday being evacuated — chaotically, as accounts have it; with a large handful of residents refusing to leave. What if that is repeated countrywide?

The numbers are guesswork. We’re not going to see 600,000 people suddenly homeless. Most of the unsafe towers are not being evacuated: Chalcots also presented a whole raft of other fire-safety issues. But let us say, for the sake of argument, that that jaw-dropping 100 per cent of all buildings tested figure is, if an outlier, not a complete fluke: that we’re going to be finding that hundreds of buildings are wrapped in firelighters. And let’s say that the fire safety in these buildings will often prove in keeping with the shoddy, regs-dodging, on-the-cheap practices that furnished them with their cladding. Would you bet against it?

That would mean many of these buildings will need to be evacuated for the several weeks it will take to make them safe. Some will complain that this is an over-reaction: what are the chances of another fire so soon? But imagine if that gamble were taken and lost — if another one went up like Grenfell after the council knew it to be unsafe and declined to evacuate its inhabitants. Imagine the human cost. Imagine — which is what the local authorities and the Prime Minister will be doing — the political cost.

So it does not seem alarmist, or even unreasonable, to suppose that in the next few weeks London and other cities across the country are going to see exactly what I described: an internal refugee crisis. That will surely dwarf every other social and political issue for as long as it lasts.

Britain, we were told, is so stretched in its resources that the Prime Minister felt it necessary to scrap the Dubs amendment, reneging on the promise to house 3,000 child refugees from the Calais Jungle and cap the figure at 350. We have more than 10 times that number homeless in Camden alone as of yesterday, and they can’t be written off as foreigners, not our problem, and packed off back to Syria. And that is with only one building in 10 even having been tested so far.

This is a potential emergency way beyond the scope of local authorities to resolve on their own. They’ve had a decade of cuts, they are forbidden by law from running a deficit — and this is going to cost a lot of money. We can hope the little platoons of the voluntary sector will pitch in. We can hope that those with empty houses offer them; that hotels with spare rooms make them available at cost; that the deep-pocketed reach for their wallets; and that the way Grenfell showed London’s community at its best continues. But crossed fingers is not a strategy for housing tens of thousands of people.

The Prime Minister this morning chairs a meeting of the fire safety task force.

There is a hell of a lot — a shell of a lot — for them to talk about.