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Many residents are still living in buildings with fire safety defects.  

I still say aside from cladding every building needs to be risk assessed on its merit.  There are very few buildings in the whole of the UK that don’t have a single fire safety deficiency.

The current highlight is cladding.  We didn’t know about this until Grenfell.  Now that has exposed a huge number of buildings with similar problems.  So the next massive issue is compartmentation and fire breaks missing etc.

What about what we don’t know? What will it take to expose the next fire safety issue?   My point is every building has its issues and it should be down to a competent fire risk assessor to look at every building independently.  Of course dangerous cladding should be removed.  That’s obvious from every angle.

What shouldn’t be obvious is the need to treat every building the same and sometimes make improvements costing huge amounts of money when the risk could be controlled more sensibly.   Of course every serious fire safety defect should be rectified.  And a fire risk assessment should identify those in a priority order to deal with them.

But we now have residents facing mental health problems with flats rated at zero, no garden to use, high rents and huge fire safety bills.

I have updated our tenant information sheet to include more specific advice for residents in blocks of flats.  In particular, the advice focuses on safety tips when you have escape balconies.  More important now than ever with more people locked in their flats with nowhere to go.  If you would like a free copy, email me at info@whalefire.co.uk