Thread by @PeteApps

I may be biased, but personally I think the fight a bereaved Grenfell Tower family are taking to the Home Office to ensure inquiry recommendations covering disabled people are implemented deserves to be news outside the pages of a niche trade magazine...

https://twitter.com/PeteApps/status/1399642135264178179

The nutshell is this: after hearing the evidence of the night of the fire in which many vulnerable people were unable to escape, inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick said all vulnerable residents of high rises should be offered personal evacuation plans.

But the govt did not offer this. Instead, they said they would be prepared only for buildings where there is known to be dangerous cladding. This was a very clear watering down of the inquiry recommendation and triggered a legal challenge from a bereaved family

That challenge resulted in the Home Office agreeing to reopen the consultation on this specific point, but they have also fought against various bits of guidance which support the view that it's ok not to produce plans for vulnerable residents

And honestly, this gets to a crucial point within the current fire safety debate which has been inexplicably overlooked: getting people out of burning buildings.

It's been obvious since Lakanal that we need a plan for what to do if and when buildings fails and fire starts spreading. To my mind, this was the fundamental philosophy of the Phase 1 Recommendations: stop treating stay put as an 'article of faith' and get a Plan B

But the government seems to be reinterpretting the Grenfell Inquiry as saying, essentially, that stay put is ok unless there is dangerous cladding on a building. Here's the latest Home Office line:

So while we're making a botched effort to get all combustible materials off buildings, we're doing very little to answer the fundamental life safety question of: if it does all go wrong again, how are you getting everyone out?

I stress: this is a question that is very much about disability and vulnerability. The deaths at Grenfell were disproportionately among disabled and vulnerable groups who couldn't flee the building in the early stages and were then trapped.

Vulnerability in this context is not just disability: five of the six deaths at Lakanal House were mothers and their very young children for whom escape through smoke filled corridors is that much more difficult. What if a PEEP offered a young mother a smoke hood for a baby?

Even go right the way back to Garnock Court in 1999 and the only death was a disabled, older resident William Linton in the flat where the fire broke out.

If and when the next big fatal fire happens, it is more likely than not to be those who can't escape who die

This is not an easy problem to address: we have built single staircase buildings with no staff present. But it can't and shouldn't be simply brushed to one side. It rings of a bad attitude which puts a lower value on the lives of the disabled.

You hear the same attitude at work with COVID when people talk of deaths of 'people with an underlying health condition' as if that somehow makes them an acceptable collateral that we shouldn't try to save

Anyway, my overall point is that a bereaved family and their lawyers are taking this fight relentlessly to the Home Office and I think that's a story which deserves some attention.