Cladding will form part of an investigation after a multi-storey building in Dagenham went up in flames on Monday morning, the London Fire Brigade has confirmed.
This will form part of a wider probe into the cause of the fire, which saw over 80 people evacuated from the commercial and residential building on Freshwater Road in the early hours. All people inside were “accounted for,” the Brigade has since said.
Criticism of the government has subsequently emerged, with London Fire Brigade noting the building had known fire risks and was undergoing remediation work over “non-compliant cladding”.
Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack said the fire was the latest case in a “national scandal” over building safety.
He slammed ministers for putting the “interests of big business above human life” and argued warnings over “deregulation in the building sector” had repeatedly been ignored.
“Hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in buildings like it, with various failings in fire safety,” he said in a statement.
“As we saw at Grenfell Tower, this can have horrific and tragic consequences.”
Judith Hackitt, who led a government review into the 2017 Grenfell disaster in which 72 people were killed, added remediation work needed to "be ramped up".
"This really about people passing the buck, passing it up the chain and the work has to be done,” she said on BBC Radio 4.
"This must be about identifying those responsible and making them pay."
Some 88% of remedial work is said to have been completed on dangerous cladding since Grenfell, according to Hackitt, leaving there "further to go".
Housebuilders took a hit on Tuesday following the incident, with developers sitting among the FTSE 100's biggest daily fallers.