Post-Grenfell red tape has worsened the housing crisis

Simon Dudley was sacked by Reform UK at the beginning of April. His brief career as housing spokesperson ended when, according to the headlines, he said Grenfell was a ‘tragedy’, before adding that ‘everybody dies in the end’.

Dudley was referring to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, in which 72 people were killed. On the face of it, his comments seem heartless and his dismissal justified. But the problem is that they were very far from his full comments. The real story here isn’t Dudley’s apparent disregard for human life – it is how the 24-hour news cycle, combined with lazy journalism and performative outrage, is destroying careers.

Dudley was speaking to Inside Housing. Asked by the interviewer about Grenfell, he described it as a ‘tragedy’ and a ‘failure’. But he also thought that onerous building regulations, introduced as a response to the fire, had created an unnecessary burden – one that was preventing houses from being built. He made the perfectly reasonable point that deaths from housefires were, statistically speaking, very rare. ‘Many, many more people die on the roads driving cars, but we’re not making cars illegal, so why are we stopping houses being built?’ He has a point.

Dudley no doubt regrets the sentence which has since cost him his political career. But that does not change the fact that a single comment, made in a wide-ranging interview, was clipped and twisted so far out of its context that what came to be reported verged on untrue. Within hours of the interview coming to light, the mainstream media was at his throat. ‘Grenfell was tragic “but everyone dies in the end”, says Reform’s new housing chief’, ran a headline in the i newspaper. Then the prime minister joined the pile-on. Keir Starmer declared the remarks ‘shameful’ and told Reform leader Nigel Farage to ‘do the decent thing’ and sack Dudley.

Faced with this storm in the run-up to council elections in May, Reform buckled. By sacking Dudley (who is not exactly a household name), it successfully killed the story. The outraged Panzer divisions were stopped in their tracks.

But so too was the important point Dudley raised. Two things can be true at once. Grenfell was horrific. But over-regulation is now trapping thousands in buildings as dangerous as Grenfell was nine years ago. It is also dooming a generation to perma-renter status, millions who will never own a stake in the country and their children’s future.

Home ownership remains the surest route to social mobility, providing skin in the game, and the best opportunity to pass on something meaningful to your children. There is no more important conservative cause than putting working people in their own home. Dudley’s long record at Homes England and his success in the private sector showed he had the knowledge and experience to come up with housing policy that might, for once, succeed. He couldn’t have been any more different from the current fourth-rate nobodies that inhabit the government front bench, virtually none of whom have a science, engineering or building background – and almost none have ever had a job outside politics, let alone building houses.

The political hypocrisy has been glaring. Sadiq Khan, who was mayor of London when Grenfell happened and remains in charge today, was quick to call for Dudley’s head. Keir Starmer has elevated Andy Roe – the incident commander on the night of the fire, when the London Fire Brigade’s leadership was heavily criticised by the inquiry – to the House of Lords and made him chair of the Building Safety Regulator. Almost nine years on, there have been no prosecutions of anyone involved in the fire. Meanwhile, the families of the 72 who died are still waiting for justice.

We cannot have an adult conversation about the housing crisis if every attempt at honest trade-off analysis is shouted down as disrespect for the dead. Grenfell was a tragedy. Fire safety matters enormously. But we will never build the homes Britain desperately needs if regulators ignore basic cost-benefit realities and the arithmetic about where people die.

This episode was never about one politician’s wording. It exposed a culture in which gotcha headlines and insincere outrage have made nuance impossible. Everything must be reduced to good or bad, black or white.

Meanwhile, the housing crisis is unsolved. Swathes of the country continue to spend half their wage to live in cramped, run-down rental properties. Who’s the real bad guy – Simon Dudley, or our hopeless MPs who have allowed things to get to this point?

Rory Hanrahan is a writer and a publican.