The survivors and bereaved from the Grenfell Tower disaster will gather on Friday close to the burned-out building to pray, release doves, share food and march in silence in memory of the 72 people who died following the fire on 14 June 2017.
Events marking the second anniversary will begin at St Helen’s Church, North Kensington, where Leanne Mya, a survivor who has reached the final stages of Britain’s Got Talent, will sing in front of a congregation including James Brokenshire, the housing secretary, and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. In the evening there will be a wreath-laying at the base of the tower, a multi-faith vigil and a silent walk culminating in a roll call of those who died.
The events take place in an atmosphere of rising anger at the slow pace of justice and continued risks posed by buildings using similar combustible materials to those which burned on Grenfell two years ago.
The public inquiry has been delayed, decisions on criminal prosecutions are unlikely until 2021, the social housing regulator is yet to be replaced with a system giving more power to tenants and only 69 of the 334 privately-owned and social housing high-rises found to be wrapped in Grenfell-style cladding have been fixed.
“[People] are increasingly feeling a sense of injustice, rather than a walk to justice,” said Yvette Williams, a co-ordinator of Justice4Grenfell, a campaign group. “I think foremost in people’s minds will be: 72 dead, still no arrests, how come?”
Karim Mussilhy, the vice chairman of Grenfell United, the survivors and bereaved group, said that as well as sharing tears, the purpose of the day was to “be a presence to everyone else, show them that we are still here and … we aren’t going to go away”.
On Wednesday night, Grenfell United lit up three tower blocks in Salford, Newcastle and London with projections highlighting a nationwide fire safety crisis that appears to be getting worse rather than better. 12-storey-high messages warned they are still not fitted with sprinklers, feature defective fire doors or are wrapped in dangerous cladding.
The message on NV Buildings in Salford read: “2 years after Grenfell and this building is still covered in dangerous cladding. #DemandChange.” A leaseholder, Peter Brown, said nearly 250 households faced a bill of almost £3m to make their homes safe, and families and children feared for their safety because the building was wrapped in combustible expanded polystyrene insulation.
In London, at Frinstead House on the Silchester estate neighbouring Grenfell, the projection highlighted its lack of sprinklers. And in Newcastle, Cruddas Park House, a council block of 159 homes, was lit up with the message: “The fire doors in this building are still not fit for purpose.”
“We are afraid the same thing [as Grenfell] could happen to us,” said Hannah Reid, 24, a dental nurse on the estate. “The demands of the people of Grenfell were ignored and the same thing is happening to us.”
In Manchester, the city council has identified fire safety problems in 14 high rise blocks not caused by the now-banned aluminium composite cladding but by missing fire breaks and intumescent paint, timber balconies and defective insulation. These could cost even more to fix than dangerous cladding, an official said.
Brokenshire said the government is “determined to improve building safety, to search for the truth and to ensure no such tragedy can ever happen again.” But Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, warned fire and rescue services are unprepared for a similar incident and said: “We risk sleepwalking into another catastrophic loss of life.”
Prime minister Theresa May called on her successor to “do everything necessary to support all those affected and make certain the voices of the Grenfell community are heard”.
It also emerged on Thursday that MPs told ministers in 2014 not to dismiss warnings about the safety of combustible cladding panels and the need for sprinklers in case “a major fire tragedy, with loss of life [should] occur”.
The chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on fire safety and rescue, David Amess MP, told Stephen Williams, then the communities minister, that he was “at a loss to understand how you had concluded that credible and independent evidence which had life safety implications was not considered to be urgent”, according to letters obtained by Inside Housing magazine.
The MPs raised further concerns in 2016 and 2017 about the government’s failure to review fire safety regulations following the 2009 Lakanal House fire in south London, which killed six people.
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