Reform UK’s housing spokesperson has been hit by a strong backlash after arguing Grenfell-related fire regulations are disproportionate because ‘everyone dies in the end’.
Simon Dudley, a former chair of Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, was appointed as the party’s housing policy chief by Nigel Farage last month.
In an interview with Inside Housing, he was asked whether he considered the 2017 Grenfell fire a warning about the impact of insufficient regulation.
Dudley replied that he considered the raft of new safety regulations went too far, saying: ‘Sadly, you know, everyone dies in the end. It’s just how you go, right?’
Arguing that deaths in housefires are rare if Grenfell is extracted from statistics, he added: ‘You can’t stop tragic things happening.
‘You can try to minimise excesses, but bad things do happen.’
The 2017 fire at a high-rise tower block in west London caused 72 deaths and left dozens of other people injured.
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Calls were made for immediate remediation work after it was discovered that similar unsafe cladding – the culprit for the terrifying pace of the Grenfell fire’s spread – was used on many other buildings.
A report from the Regulator of Social Housing released last week found that 279 social housing buildings in England face a wait of more than 10 years for potentially deadly safety defects to be fixed.
Dudley’s comments in the interview were condemned by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in a post on X.
He wrote: ‘Shameful. Nigel Farage should do the decent thing and sack him.’
Housing Secretary Steve Reed said: ‘If Nigel Farage has an ounce of decency, he will sack his housing chief immediately.
‘These disgraceful comments about those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire are beyond the pale and it is completely untenable for Simon Dudley to continue in his position.’
Green MP Sian Berry joined the chorus, saying: ‘Anyone who has any awareness of what Grenfell residents went through, in fact anyone with any empathy or humanity, will find these comments truly abhorrent.’
In a response to the criticism, Dudley wrote on X: ‘Grenfell was an utter tragedy and quite rightly prompted a wholesale review and tightening of fire regulations.
‘I said it was a tragedy in my interview with Inside Housing and in no shape or form am I belittling that disaster or the huge loss of life.
‘It must never happen again. I reiterate that, and am sorry if it was not sufficiently clear.’
He added that his ‘concern is the introduction of numerous measures that do nothing to protect life and are throttling housebuilding’.
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