Pete Apps

@peteapps.bsky.social

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Inside Housing + freelance elsewhere. Author of Orwell Prize winning Show Me The Bodies - How We Let Grenfell Happen. https://peteapps.substack.com

“And nine years on from the fire, we’re still in the same situation as we were. The present secretary of state [Steve Reed] is probably the worst that we’ve ever had, worse even than [Robert] Jenrick. It’s a low, low bar but it’s the truth,”
“It is really straightforward,” he says. “I would make those people stand in front of the tower. I would make them stand and look at it, because it is the most profound manifestation of system failure. We can’t repeat that, and that is something people are too quick to forget. “I think one of the great advantages of our background is that it’s not hypothetical for us. I have stood next to Charlie in too many awful spaces over the years, on too many streets in London thinking, ‘How do we get to this?’ ‘How did people end up living like this?’ “And while the Building Safety Regulator wasn’t working as it should, that should not be a reason in the short term to just step away and abandon it. The moral imperative is too great.” This afternoon, he says, he is going to a boxing club with his son. Mr Roe has boxed and coached boxing his whole life. When he attended Grenfell, he knew where he was immediately because of the Dale Youth Boxing Club at the base of the tower – a gem in Britain’s feted amateur boxing circuit that has produced multiple world champions from the streets of west London. “When I go into that space this afternoon, I’m going to be with people in an environment I’ve known since I was a kid,” says Mr Roe. “The warmth, the humour, the banter, the energy. And I know there’s estates and blocks all over this country that are exactly the same. And when I think about what motivates me, it’s that, it’s those spaces. It’s protecting them, and making sure they are safe.”
Text extract reading: Working out the way forward isn’t easy, but it is the job of serious politicians to at least try. That requires strategy, trade-offs, imperfect answers, compromise and a willingness to at least hear dissenting voices – not branding everyone who questions you a ‘blocker’ or NIMBY, and hiding behind a slogan that is as childish as it is facile. For Reed, the buzz of his cosplay populism will soon fade. He has had his fun being cheered by delegates and surrounded by sycophantic think tank wonks who share his taste for silly hats. But the reality of the state of the economy and the size of the mess he has inherited will soon dawn on him. In the coming weeks, he is likely to meet with leaseholders whose lives have been turned upside down by the building crisis, as well as survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire. When he attends these meetings, he would be well advised to leave his new baseball cap at home
A list of developments which will likely become 'new towns', but in fact represent a series of existing areas of private sector development which will now receive enhanced government support
There was criticism - it was uniform and monotonous in its architecture - but there was also a lot of hope. In its first years, the town was exclusively social rented housing, mostly houses, with private gardens. To those who were escaping the bombed out slums of east London, it was a paradise. “Some who read these pages at this time may feel almost as if they had wandered into fairyland, that it is too good to be true, that such things can have no relation to the present bleak and troubled days,” wrote the first chair of the development corporation of the first masterplan.
A screenshot of text which show leaseholders raising concerns that Mr Kiziak was copy and pasting between reports and that his assessments were "not worth the paper they were written on"
A clip of text from an article in the FT which lists construction defects with One Hyde Park - one of the most prestiguous addresses in the UK - which may require residents to move out
A passage of text including quotes from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report about the NHBC. It concludes with the panels' view that the firm deserves criticism "in the strongest possible terms"