Simon Jenkins: Stop the blame game and just try to prevent another Grenfell fire

I see the problem that Camden council leader Georgia Gould faced last Friday night. Her party colleagues, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, were living it up at Glastonbury, calling Kensington councillors Tory murderers. Gould realised that she had dodgy cladding on the Chalcots Estate in her borough, and a badly fitted gas supply. Would her Labour council be next on the hit list as murderers of the poor?

Other affected councils across London were planning to alter their blocks and reassuring residents with fire wardens. Camden panicked. It sent a heavy mob in to the Chalcots at two in the morning, banging on doors, coercing tenants from their beds and dumping them in the nearest library. It looked like political flank-covering.

People should be got out of bed only when disaster is imminent. Otherwise, you balance cost and inconvenience against minimal risk. As one tenant pointed out, if the Chalcots had been safe for a half a century — and for a full week since the Grenfell disaster — Camden could surely wait six more hours to change its mind? No one closed down the Underground after the King’s Cross fire. No one stopped the river bus after the Marchioness sank in 1989.

The Chalcots Estate is a cut above normal Seventies housing. It was designed by Dennis Lennon for mixed public/private sector use, after the abandonment of a crazy plan for an urban motorway through the area. The private housing was low-rise, the public housing high-rise, which spoke volumes for where people would rather live if allowed to choose. The towers were named after Thames Valley villages such as Burnham, Taplow and Bray, in genteel honour of the estate’s former owner, Eton College.

Even though the Chalcots towers failed to meet a host of safety standards, they were of good quality and it is hard to believe they were on the brink of combustion early on Friday morning. Indeed, since every one of the 60 towers inspected over the past week has also failed, it suggests that standards are so stringent that, as often with health and safety, their chief failure was of credibility. When the wood is so dense, the rotten trees get hidden.

This is what happens when politicians cannot resist the oldest trick in the book, which is to capitalise on tragedy. It distorts perception. Theresa May won no votes for doing so over terrorism. I cannot believe it will stand to Corbyn’s credit to have done so over Grenfell.

If one thing emerges from this grimmest of London fortnights, it is that something has gone badly wrong, not with politics but with the professional regulation and inspection of tall buildings. Suddenly everyone is a cladding expert. We know our mineral fibre insulators from our aluminium sandwiches and polyethylene cores.

It surely does not need yet another “judge-led” inquiry to spend months hounding anonymous officials and out-of-depth politicians into the pillory. It needs a quick investigation of what is safe and unsafe. After that the police and prosecutors can tackle the separate issue of criminal negligence. The inquiry issue is not to “find guilty men” and prejudge them as murderers, it is what went wrong and how to stop its re-occurrence.

There is nothing inherently unsafe in a tower block, except the obvious fact that it cannot easily be escaped in a catastrophe. New York saw that on 9/11, as did London in the case of Grenfell. Fires in towers are exceptionally rare. Properly built, of robust, fireproof materials and with secure floors and stairs, the luxury flats going up across London must be near incombustible. I assume someone knows how to evacuate the Shard.

That is a different issue from my own reality: I briefly occupied a tower and hated it. Towers are an anti-social form of urban living — lifts and corridors are not streets and pavements. Towers are unnecessary. London’s housing density — still mostly three-to-five storeys — is among the lowest in Europe. Because the housing market is so imperfect, houses are severely under-occupied, with some of the continent’s lowest occupancy ratios. Unlike in Manhattan or Hong Kong, London towers are built on the Corbusian theory that they must have space around them. This puts them at much the same density as mid-rise terraces and enclaves. It is ironic that, clustered around Grenfell Tower is some of the most attractive high-density, low-rise public housing in London.

People who live in houses and streets, even in mansion co-operatives, can exercise some control over the safety of where they live. They can worry about roofing materials and fire escapes. They can do repairs. Towers, in contrast, are the responsibility of some distant authority, rarely someone who actually lives in them. If Grenfell had been full of Kensington councillors, I imagine some residents’ complaints over the state of the building might have been heard .

The fact is that these towers were long promoted by architects as cheap, utopian residences for the poor. Since they were built, governments and councils of all political persuasions have saved money and clearly cut corners. Towers are a form of housing whose custodianship is, by its nature, at the mercy of distant, anonymous bureaucrats. Poor people, and especially families, should not be shut up in these hutches in the sky. Grenfell should be replaced by a square of mid-rise terraces.

As for the other towers that continue to blight London’s skyline, until they can be demolished they should be sold to people with big pockets and loud voices. The money should be used exclusively for social housing, for those who genuinely cannot house themselves, for needy families where they will be happier and better able to order their own safety. That means closer to the ground.