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Before Grenfell: 4. The path of least intervention in the ‘great unswept corner of English housing policy’: multiple-fatality fires in houses in multiple occupancy in the 1980s and 1990s

Before Grenfell
4. The path of least intervention in the ‘great unswept corner of English housing policy’: multiple-fatality fires in houses in multiple occupancy in the 1980s and 1990s
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table of contents
  1. Title
  2. Copyright
  3. Contents
  4. Acknowledgements
  5. Introduction: Multiple-fatality fires, deregulation and the value of ‘thinking with history’
  6. 1. From byelaws to building regulations: recasting building control in Britain since the nineteenth century
    1. The onset of public health regulation
    2. The emergence of national regulation
    3. Recasting the Building Regulations
    4. Conclusion
  7. 2. How red tape saves lives: the law on fire precautions in Britain since the 1970s
    1. The beginnings of proactive regulation
    2. Towards a fire service-led approach
    3. The deregulatory impulse
    4. Conclusion
  8. 3. The mixed economy of ‘scientific governance’ in twentieth-century Britain
    1. The emergence of fire testing
    2. The ascendancy of jointly funded fire research
    3. The contested nature of fire research
    4. Consumer safety
    5. The era of scientific self-governance
    6. Conclusion
  9. 4. The path of least intervention in the ‘great unswept corner of English housing policy’: multiple-fatality fires in houses in multiple occupancy in the 1980s and 1990s
    1. Multiple-fatality fires in HMOs
    2. Licensing HMOs
    3. Conclusion
  10. Conclusion: The need to learn before and after Grenfell
  11. Bibliography
    1. Manuscript collections
    2. Parliamentary papers and other official publications
    3. Other contemporary published reports
    4. News sources
    5. Websites
    6. Secondary sources
  12. Index

4. The path of least intervention in the ‘great unswept corner of English housing policy’: multiple-fatality fires in houses in multiple occupancy in the 1980s and 1990s

Mohammed was twenty years old on arriving in Britain from Pakistan in 1985 with his younger brothers Idrees and Ikram. His goal was to finish his studies, get a good job and support his family in Islamabad. On the night of 18 November 1987, on his way home from his part-time job, Mohammed died in the disaster at King’s Cross Underground along with thirty other people when an escalator fire ripped through the station. The King’s Cross fire is one of the most iconic and high-profile disasters of the 1980s and, following the publication of Sir Desmond Fennell’s wide-ranging public inquiry, triggered major changes in fire safety and passenger transport. In particular, the legacy of King’s Cross had a significant bearing on the micro-politics of everyday life in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain – from the banning of smoking on public transport and replacement of wooden escalators in stations to the development of plastic surgery for treating burns injuries.1 It is not therefore the focus of this final chapter, which is concerned with the many examples of forgotten multiple-fatality fires from the same era, described by contemporaries as ‘the decade of disasters’.2 We begin with Mohammed because of what happened to his family afterwards.

In an article published two years after the fire in Roof, the magazine of the housing charity Shelter, Idrees describes his brother’s death as ‘a disaster for the family’ as it split them in two, with their father returning to Islamabad to care for their younger siblings. Idrees recounts how the two remaining brothers and their mother were made temporarily homeless before they were housed by Haringey Council in privately owned ‘bed-and-breakfast’ accommodation, otherwise known as a bedsit, with more than 100 residents sharing two kitchens and bathrooms. Their two bedrooms were ‘very small and dirty and the carpets full of fleas’; despite complaining that the appalling conditions made their mother sick, the owners ‘did nothing’ to help them. Idrees also describes how the fire bell in the property ‘was always going off’, which would send his mum ‘into a terrible panic’ as it brought back painful memories of Mohammed’s death. After children set fire to bedrooms in the house, the family demanded to be rehoused; they were offered a basement room in which the windows were nailed shut – hardly reassuring for a grieving family struggling to come to terms with their traumatic loss. Despite living in such conditions, Idrees describes them as one of the ‘luckier’ homeless families in London as they were eventually moved into a self-contained, furnished flat run by a housing association while waiting ‘for something more permanent’.3

While the circumstances surrounding Idrees and his family’s housing situation were extraordinary, it was common for the most vulnerable people in the country – low-paid migrants, students, the elderly, survivors of domestic abuse and homeless families with young children – to live in cheap, poor-quality and unsafe accommodation during the 1980s. They also, as we will repeatedly see in this chapter, lived in a state of perpetual anxiety, waiting to be moved into better housing by a state that was unwilling or unable to help. As a consequence of government housing policies, including the sale of council housing and deregulation of the private rental market, coupled with squeezed budgets for urban local authorities, the market in ‘bed and breakfasts’ – which often involved sub-dividing older properties into small single-room apartments with shared amenities – was booming in central London as well as inner cities across the country throughout the decade. Many private sector landlords built lucrative ‘buy-to-let’ businesses profiting from the growing demand for housing and local authorities’ increasing inability to supply it. As Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei have argued, ‘living with strangers’ in communal housing had a long history from at least the mid-nineteenth century, but its heyday was the decades following the end of the Second World War.4

A succession of reports during this period consistently identified the dangerous conditions of bedsit-style housing, which became known as houses in multiple occupancy (HMOs) from the mid-1980s. Residents, environmental health officers, firefighters and housing charities repeatedly argued that unsafe fire precautions, as a spatialised social problem specific to rental housing, were the main threat to human safety in HMOs: unenclosed staircases providing the sole means of escape, combustible partition walls, a rabbit warren of corridors with poorly fitted smoke-stopping doors, defective or non-existent fire-warning and extinguishing equipment, and a lack of useful guidance for tenants.5 As was learned in the wake of the Grenfell fire, residents’ concerns are rarely taken seriously by housing providers or governments, and the same can be said for those living in unlicensed HMOs during the 1980s and 1990s.

Yet residents found a sympathetic ear in the form of voluntary organisations – charities, law centres, tenants and consumer groups – who spoke out on behalf of the millions of people like Idrees and his mother living in unsafe housing. It is to this ‘third sector’ – as the voluntary and community sector became known during the twenty-first century6 – that this chapter turns. National charities like Shelter and umbrella organisations such as the Campaign for the Homeless and Roofless (CHAR) and the Campaign for Bedsit Rights (CBR), as well as local community groups and law centres, worked tirelessly over a number of years to convince government to improve safety in bedsits, bed-and-breakfast ‘hotels’, lodging houses and other premises where the residual poor lived, eventually achieving reform after a long campaign. This is a story that has been replicated in recent years with ‘activist communities’ composed of charities, grassroots organisations, trade unions and housing campaigners serving as the fulcrum around which demands for improved safety in tower blocks have coalesced. As was the case with HMOs, it is only with sustained pressure that the 2017 proclamation that ‘Grenfell changes everything’ can be realised by holding the state to account for its responsibility for public safety and reversing its disastrous deregulation of fire precautions.7

The efforts of voluntary sector organisations and activists coincided with growing support for privatisation and deregulation within the public and private sectors. Successive governments rejected the notion, spelled out in the Conservative Party’s 1983 general election manifesto that ‘the State can and should do everything’, and placed a renewed emphasis on the role of individuals and community groups in tackling the so-called ‘dependency culture’ that existed at the start of the decade.8 The Thatcher governments and their successors increasingly relied on the market as the main agent of economic and social change and provider of welfare services.9 Housing policy was viewed within central government as the natural preserve of market forces and a succession of acts during the 1980s and early 1990s deregulated the rental housing sector by removing government controls over the provision, cost and regulation of housing and allowing for an enhanced role for private and voluntary providers. Eighteen years of Conservative rule, argue Peter Malpass and Alan Murie, produced ‘a more fragmented housing system with more dramatic differences between tenures, between urban and rural areas, and between estates and between communities’.10

Despite the centralising trend in housing policy, and the general mistrust from ministers towards local authorities throughout the period, central government also failed to tackle systemic defects in HMOs until the turn of the present century. Successive fires – many but certainly not all occurring in London, which faced a growing ‘crisis’ in the private rental market11 – exposed the contradictions of central government policy in insisting that local authorities had sufficient discretionary powers to enforce minimum safety while failing to provide the resources to enable them to do so. This echoes recent challenges faced by the third sector in influencing policy change at the national level post-Grenfell, as well as in exposing the systemic neglect of some local authorities towards those it had a duty of care to protect. Repeated calls by professional and voluntary bodies for state intervention within the private rental housing market were at odds with government policy, which favoured an incrementally deregulated approach that prioritised the financial interests of landlords and mortgagees over and above any responsibility for safety or security. In the end, when government occasionally acted it did so by following the path of least intervention. Landlords and building owners were expected to take responsibility for their own properties with the responsible local authority stepping in to enforce the law as a last resort, which in every case followed avoidable disasters.

Multiple-fatality fires in HMOs

In the early hours of 18 March 1980 neighbours were woken by screams from a burning hostel in Kilburn, north London, which was run by the Catholic Order of the Missionaries of Charity, headed by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Neighbours rushed to help the residents, all women, to safety from the three-storey terraced house. Firefighters eventually discovered the bodies of eight women on the top floor; two more later succumbed to their injuries. A month before the fire London Fire Brigade had inspected the premises and recommended various improvements, including enclosing the single staircase used for exit in the event of a fire, but these had yet to be implemented by the owners. An internal review by Brent Borough Council revealed that the nuns had been awarded a licence for ten beds the previous year, but firefighters found twenty-one occupied beds.12

With one exception, the victims were residents and aged between thirty and seventy years.13 All were single, though some still used marital names; being part of a transient community to which a great deal of stigma was attached, some gave pseudonyms such as ‘Peggy’ or ‘Rose’.14 Most of the victims were described by members of Brent Women’s Aid Group as ‘battered women’; that is, they were survivors of domestic violence who had been forced into emergency accommodation and were awaiting rehousing.15 One of the residents was later arrested for starting the fire as a grudge against the nuns. At the trial, her lawyer unsympathetically told the court that the hostel catered for ‘inadequate alcoholics and those who were mentally disturbed’ and considered that ‘any one of these women could have started the fire’. The defendant was acquitted of all charges.16

The victims were part of the ‘hidden homeless’, marginalised by a society and government that abandoned those without a fixed abode despite the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act prioritising vulnerable women such as these for rehousing. Local authorities acted inconsistently, and sometimes indiscriminately, in prioritising families at the expense of single persons.17 They also suffered from cuts in government subsidy which forced poor boroughs like Brent to close their housing priority lists because of over-subscription. Single older women thus faced limited housing options and many were forced into direct-access hostels even though these were disliked: ‘I couldn’t bear to live in one of those places – it would make me feel I’d reached the end of the road, with nowhere further to go’, claimed one woman interviewed for a contemporary study.18 A spokesperson for Brent Women’s Centre reported that public expenditure restrictions made it ‘much more difficult for women and children to escape from violent homes by finding a place of their own’.19

The Kilburn fire horrifically exposed the need for action in what had become a crisis in the safety of emergency accommodation for society’s most vulnerable citizens. It was the latest in a growing number of fires since the late 1970s: in 1978 alone, thirteen people died in hostel blazes across the country, including in Birmingham, Leeds and Clacton.20 The night after the Kilburn fire, seven people were rescued from a fire in a mission hostel in east London. A spokesperson for CHAR, a parliamentary lobby coalition, said, ‘It is appalling that there are second-class standards for people regarded as second-class citizens.’21

These fires occurred against a backdrop of major changes to housing policy from the recently elected Conservative Government. By giving council house tenants the ‘Right to Buy’ their homes, Thatcher’s flagship housing bill revived the party’s longstanding commitment to building a property-owning democracy through introducing greater choice in housing ownership and limiting the responsibilities of the state.22 While benefiting those in a position to purchase their home on generous terms, it was not lost on Brent councillors that such a move would do nothing to help those who dreamt of living in a council house; in fact, by limiting the supply of houses, government narrowed the already slim options open to the most vulnerable people living in one of London’s ‘worst areas of housing deprivation’, according to a report published later that year.23 In mid-1980, Brent Council housed 220 families in bed-and-breakfast accommodation in neighbouring boroughs at a cost of over £100 each per week.24 Moreover, ‘drastic cuts’ to its budget meant that the council was unable to improve its existing housing stock, with the leader of the local Labour group blaming central government: ‘We even made a special plea to Government to allow us extra money to at least carry out fire precaution works … but no help was forthcoming.’25 The council’s review recommended bringing the regulation of hostels in line with the law on hotels and boarding houses, introducing enforcement powers to close down premises ‘where there is excessive risk to persons’.26

For a fleeting moment, the ‘hidden homeless’ became visible to a government whose own housing minister had described hostels as ‘the great unswept corner of English housing policy’.27 Spurred into action by pressure from religious leaders and homelessness charities, government agreed to amend its housing bill to strengthen local authority powers for dealing with large HMOs.28 But it rejected extending the Fire Precautions Act to cover hostels, with the home secretary, William Whitelaw, explaining that they ‘do not represent a risk to life serious enough to justify the burden which would be imposed on owners, occupiers and fire authorities’.29 The government’s own evidence did not support this hard line since official statistics collected by the Home Office revealed the risk of a fire in an HMO to be three or four times higher than in a single-occupancy house, while the risk of serious injury or death was nine or ten times greater.30

A few months later, the jury for the inquest into the Kilburn victims returned a verdict of unlawful killing and called for urgent clarification of the law on means of escape. Noting the brief period in which a policy window opens following multiple-fatality fires, the coroner Dr David Paul complained that ‘the spur and urgency of this newsworthy tragedy lost its impetus’ amidst the cumbersome procedure of government review and obfuscation.31 The fact that few newspapers even bothered to report on the verdict substantiates his point and shows how little national media interest was shown in the lives of ‘battered women’. It also resonates with comments made by Sam Webb about his memories of the Ronan Point inquiry, which, owing to the fact that ‘it took an hour and a half to get to East Ham from … central London’, attracted little attention from the national press ‘after the first few days’.32

Ignoring the coroner’s criticism, government opted to take the path of least intervention. A duty was placed on local housing authorities requiring means of escape from fire in large HMOs of three storeys or more and with a combined floor space exceeding 500 square metres.33 Guidance would clarify the law on means of escape in other HMOs, eventually being published several years later.34 The decision to devolve responsibility to housing authorities seems to have been influenced by party-political antagonisms in London where the Labour Party had recently taken control of the Greater London Council (GLC), which had responsibility for the London Fire Brigade, as well as a general resistance to arming fire brigades with additional powers given they were regarded as being tougher in enforcing fire precautions. While the Order was welcomed by campaigners as ‘a long overdue safeguard’, it was also noted that less than 2 per cent of all HMOs were covered by the law and that only 1 per cent of all improvement grants went towards the provision of fire escapes. With a gross floor space of only 226 square metres, the Kilburn hostel was too small to be included, making ‘a mockery of the new duty’, claimed the director of CHAR Nicholas Beacock, who predicted ‘further tragedies’ before the law was properly updated.35

And so it proved. In December 1981, fire gutted a large property on Clanricarde Gardens in west London, killing eight residents and injuring many more. Notting Hill Gate was an area notorious for cheap, low-quality housing and illegal landlord practices: the ‘slumlord’ Peter Rachman had operated in the neighbourhood during the 1960s and little had improved, judging from this latest disaster. The properties comprised fifty-six bedsits across three converted Victorian terraced houses. The figures on occupancy ranged widely: whereas the landlord incorrectly claimed that only fifty-three tenants resided on the premises, first responders estimated between 150 and 200 persons in occupancy on the night of the fire. The housekeeper, who lived on the ground floor, later confirmed the figure to be ninety-three residents, the majority of whom were low-paid migrant workers and the elderly. By lunchtime, all the refugees from the fire, some dressed in their nightclothes with their belongings wrapped in bedsheets, were given shelter, with food and clothing generously donated by market traders. The local authority, Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council (KCLBC), provided temporary accommodation in hotels, from where its staff interviewed survivors to determine which families should be given priority for rehousing before Christmas. The bleak prospects for rehousing led to twenty-five tenants accepting accommodation owned by the same landlord, with some even moving into the house next to the burnt-out shell that remained.36

In the aftermath of the fire, the attention of voluntary and community groups turned to the poor standard of safety within the property and the fears of residents living in similar accommodation across the borough. Kensington and Chelsea was described as having ‘some of the poorest housing conditions in the country’, with HMOs comprising between a quarter and a third of its housing stock. A survey by a local race and housing action group revealed that the borough also had the highest rents among its council housing stock and the lowest average rate of pay in the capital.37 It was also claimed that KCLBC had not acted upon residents’ complaints about safety six months before the fire. One report, compiled by an environmental health consultant on behalf of Shelter and the North Kensington Law Centre (NKLC), concluded that ‘the arrangements to limit the spread of fire and secure the safe evacuation of occupants are inadequate’. After it was further revealed that KCLBC maintained no register of HMOs within the borough, the leader of the Labour Opposition demanded an internal inquiry into ‘what went wrong’. KCLBC was later found guilty of maladministration by the local government ombudsman and in direct contravention of race relations legislation, having ‘failed to follow up complaints over a number of years’.38

Fire investigation officers discovered a litany of safety defects, including combustible partition walls, unprotected staircases and a dangerously high electrical loading. At the inquest at Westminster Coroners Court, an ‘independent’ expert, Keith Gugan, who was acting on behalf of the insurers and landlord, claimed that the fire had been maliciously started by a tenant, which attracted greater media interest than the identities of the victims.39 Gugan’s findings were challenged by experts appearing on behalf of London Fire Brigade and the Metropolitan Police and the coroner, Dr Paul Knapman, rebuked him for failing to produce forensic evidence to substantiate his claim. The landlord was called to give evidence but refused to answer questions.40

The main issue, according to counsel acting for the bereaved families, was that the fire had broken out in ‘slums without the most elementary fire protection’, which demonstrated ‘reckless’ negligence by the landlord and warranted a verdict of unlawful killing. Knapman replied that the job of an inquest was ‘to find out where, when and how a person met their death – not to apportion blame’.41 After nine days, the jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure, finding no evidence of negligence. Furthermore, Knapman declined to add recommendations on safety to the verdict, claiming that the need to reconcile cheap accommodation for homeless people with ‘expensive’ fire precautions was an ‘insoluble problem’. This decision angered campaigners. Michael O’Dwyer, who represented bereaved families for the NKLC, called the decision an ‘outrage’ and criticised Knapman for failing the victims, before adding: ‘We will go on pressing for more resources, for better fire precautions to be introduced into houses in multiple occupation and for landlords to own up to their responsibilities – we will not stop until we reach that.’42 Survivors were still pursuing a claim for damages several years later.

This case illustrates the limited opportunities facing survivors and the bereaved in having their voices heard in formal judicial settings. As the first neighbourhood law centre in the country, opened in 1970 in a former butcher’s shop, NKLC operated on the premise that lawyers failed to act in the interests of those communities in greatest need of help. NKLC provided free legal advice and representation to those who could not otherwise afford it for a range of issues including immigration law and housing rights; they also assisted with claims for compensation following fire inquests. Law centres thus amplified the voices of those communities most directly affected by avoidable multiple-fatality fires, allowing them to seek justice and obtain some closure to a horrific chapter in their lives. But the law centres were also in a parlous situation, as Kate Bradley has shown: they experienced problems with securing a regular income, struggled with under-staffing and were often accused of being politically motivated in their casework. Some were threatened with losing their main funding stream when they openly criticised local authority policies.43

Following the Clanricarde Gardens verdict, the government declined to strengthen the law or give serious consideration to practical solutions. When the Institute of Environmental Health Officers and CHAR jointly submitted a proposal for national licensing, the undersecretary of state for the environment, George Young, expressed ‘serious reservations about the cost implications of such proposals at a time when the Government is concerned to see restraint in local authority expenditure’.44 While the proposal was costed to be self-financing, it would have entailed transferring funds from the Department of Health and Social Security budget to local authority housing departments, which was contrary to Whitehall policy to ‘trim’ local government spending. Moreover, Young warned that licensing ‘would add unnecessarily to landlord’s cost [sic], and discourage them from making accommodation available’, which prompted some to question whether many Conservative MPs were themselves owners of HMOs: ‘there could be some very red faces at Westminster’, suggested one journalist writing for The Surveyor, though such lines of enquiry never appeared in the popular press.45

Although housing charities found themselves frozen out of decision making by a government that was hostile towards single-issue campaigning, they found support among opposition parties as well as the Tory backbenches. Frustrated by government’s ‘neglect and inaction’, in 1983 Labour MP Jim Marshall’s private bill proposed to introduce a duty on local authorities to ensure proper means of escape in all HMOs. Brandon Rhys-Williams, Conservative MP for North Kensington, the constituency in which the fire at Clanricarde Gardens occurred, supported the bill and warned that it was incumbent on Parliament to not allow ‘that horror to be repeated’.46 His warnings were echoed by John Wheeler, Conservative MP for neighbouring Paddington: ‘It is a scandal that people should lose their lives for the lack of a determination in the House [of Commons] to ensure that the law provides the protection that they need.’47 Only with effective and enforceable regulations would lives be saved in future, claimed Labour MP for Swansea East Donald Anderson, who added that this would be ‘the best memorial that the House could give to those who died at Clanricarde Gardens’.48

Despite passing its second reading in February 1983, the bill was dropped after Parliament’s dissolution ahead of the general election and it was not adopted as part of the new government’s legislative agenda. Low rates of house-building for rent, coupled with the acceleration of the sale of council homes, led to an increase in homelessness in the mid-1980s in metropolitan areas. Homeless people had little option but to live in substandard accommodation, while local authorities struggled to provide a satisfactory alternative for single-person households. Chris Holmes, the director of CHAR and one of the draftees of the bill, calculated that the number of claimants in bed-and-breakfast accommodation in England and Wales increased fourfold from 25,000 to 100,000 between 1979 and 1984. Research showed that 81 per cent of those living in HMOs were single, 35 per cent of whom were women and 65 per cent under the age of thirty-five. The ‘worsening crisis of single homelessness’, Holmes argued, demanded three urgent and interlinked actions by the state in order to provide ‘a safe, secure and satisfactory home for every member of the community’: additional social rented housing, security of tenure and the enforcement of minimum standards of fire safety, amenities and management of HMOs.49

In 1985, a consolidating act made tentative steps towards improving standards but disappointed campaigners who expected quicker progress. This followed the death of a Bangladeshi mother and her children in a five-storey bed-and-breakfast fire in Gloucester Place, Westminster, which finally prompted Dr Knapman to write to ministers urging that ‘action be taken to prevent the occurrence of similar fatalities’.50 This fire exposed the racial inequalities in London’s rental housing market, with this particular ‘halfway house’ grossly overcrowded with Asian families who should have been priority cases for rehousing; the family had lived in a single room at the top of an unenclosed staircase for the past nine months, while firefighters found as many as seven people sleeping to a room and rescued a baby sleeping in a cot in a bathroom.51 The inquest again revealed ‘totally and hopelessly inadequate’ fire precautions, including a wooden ladder used in lieu of an escape, but the landlord – who had received £356,000 in rent to house homeless families from neighbouring Camden – ignored warnings from frightened tenants. One resident reported that he had tried to fight the fire but all the extinguishers in the house were empty.52

Survivors from the fire decided that direct action was the route to escaping the squalor of halfway houses. Assisted by the Camden Committee for Community Relations, a local pressure group funded by the borough council, up to seventy homeless people, many with young children, organised a three-week occupation of Camden Town Hall until the Labour group agreed to permanently rehouse them in council houses. Two heavily pregnant women slept on the chamber floor for over a week, deeming it preferable to staying in their death-trap bedsits.53 While local press coverage was consistently detailed, national media interest was virtually non-existent, with few newspapers reporting on either the fire or the town hall’s occupation. Eventually, the novelist Salman Rushdie wrote an excoriating piece for The Guardian in which he argued that Black and Asian families, who made up between a third and half of all families living in London’s halfway houses, were being victimised by racist slumlords and councillors. With evidence emerging that the fire was started deliberately, Rushdie likened it to the 1981 New Cross Massacre, in which thirteen young Black men, women and children died in a suspected racist attack on a house party, but in neither case did the Metropolitan Police pursue the cases seriously. ‘Presumably not enough people have been burned to death yet’, Rushdie wrote before demanding that ‘it is time people stopped having to die to prove to local authorities that they live in hideously unsatisfactory conditions’.54

Despite the best efforts of campaigners to raise the plight of homeless families, ministers did the bare minimum. Firstly, an HMO was defined as ‘a house which is occupied by persons who do not form a single household’, creating more legal ambiguities than it solved. Secondly, local authorities were awarded discretionary powers to establish registration schemes in their area, but few took advantage of these. Thirdly, a ‘fitness’ test was drawn up for governing HMOs, which provided for regulations to render premises fit for occupants, covering areas ranging from lighting and ventilation to space-heating appliances.55 Despite calls to establish means of escape in the event of a fire as a condition of fitness, this was not originally included despite a government-commissioned survey unearthing ‘disturbing’ evidence that 81 per cent of HMOs lacked satisfactory means of escape; the figure rose above 90 per cent for privately owned properties. In Greater London, where 43 per cent of all HMOs in England and Wales were located, over 80 per cent had defective means of escape, while ‘a substantial minority’ of larger HMOs continued to lack precautions. This ‘hidden housing problem’ was now so visible to policymakers that it could no longer be ignored by ministers.56 But ignore it they did. While the recast Building Regulations specified mandatory rules for means of escape in case of fire for dwellings and flats of three or more storeys, these did not originally extend to HMOs, though guidance on fire safety was issued in 1986, four years after it was initially promised, and an advisory standard was adopted two years later.57

In the intervening period, a revised private members’ bill was promoted by opposition MPs, which included prescriptive measures to tackle what had become ‘a national scandal’. Its timing was bad, being promoted during the period of ‘high Thatcherism’ when central government curbed the powers of local authorities through rate capping and the abolition of the GLC and metropolitan councils. Indeed, the government, having failed to block the bill’s debate, disrespectfully sent its minister for sport, Richard Tracey, to present the case that legislation was not required and the bill was timed out through filibustering by backbench Tory MPs.58

Despite their understandable frustration at the government’s intransigence towards housing provision for the poor, homelessness charities learned a great deal about campaigning during the 1980s. One such group was CBR, founded by Nick Beacock following the fire at Clanricarde Gardens.59 As a former director of CHAR who had been active in the writing of homelessness legislation in the 1970s, Beacock enjoyed good contacts across Parliament and with sympathetic newspapers, using these to advocate for an evidence-based approach to policymaking. As Matthew Hilton et al. have shown, the importance of a professional media strategy was increasingly apparent to non-governmental organisations by the 1980s in order to react swiftly to any item in the news and to offer journalists an alternative interpretation on policies.60 Beacock was no stranger to this approach: CBR’s small staff were regular correspondents with broadsheet newspapers and repeatedly quoted in press coverage of bedsit fires and related topics.61 Although the CBR team’s efforts to secure media coverage met resistance from some popular daily newspapers – in 1990 the Evening Standard and Daily Mail both cited CBR as a recipient of ‘daft donations’ by ‘loony left’ councils – it operated a sustained campaign on a shoestring budget, receiving grants from the London Boroughs Grants Committee as well as member subscriptions.62

In addition to its media campaigning, CBR also published handbooks aimed at tenants in an attempt to directly improve the standard of housing in HMOs. These handbooks contained advice and useful contacts about tenants’ legal rights and landlords’ duty of care, as well as fire safety hints and tips. Owing to CBR’s parlous financial arrangements, these publications were generously supported by other voluntary and professional bodies. Organisations such as the Law Society, Crisis, the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux, Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and the Housing Associations Charitable Trust helped to lend CBR a more authoritative voice, illustrating the importance of cross-sectoral groups coming together to form ‘activist communities’ to deal with the problem in the absence of leadership from central or local government.63

At a time when single-issue groups struggled to exert influence within central government, CBR raised standards of safety locally through a dense network of tenants’ groups, local authorities, student unions, law centres and other organisations. Grassroots campaigning enjoyed success in cities with progressive councils, such as Birmingham, Bristol and Southampton, using a mixture of activist strategies to improve housing conditions.64 In Wales, a cross-sectoral approach was agreed following the death of a man in a fire at a Pontypridd hostel in 1986, while the all-party Welsh Affairs Committee unanimously supported urgent legislation.65 Direct action demonstrated that the best route to positive change was from below. Private tenants’ organisations such as the Brent Private Tenants Rights Group, Kensington & Chelsea Private Tenants Rights Project and the Camden Federation of Private Tenants – the latter formed in the aftermath of the successful occupation of Camden Town Hall – built on deep-rooted grassroots activism that dated from the late 1960s, while the effectiveness of the Welsh campaign pointed to what could be achieved with a progressive government in Whitehall.66

Licensing HMOs

While the Thatcher Government stubbornly refused to intervene to protect the safety of those who most needed protecting, the fatalities continued to occur. In the five years to 1991, an average of 168 people a year died and 3,294 were injured in HMO fires according to the government’s own published statistics. One fire in 1988, in a Blackpool hostel, resulted in the deaths of three children and two adults from the same family. The premises were used by the Department of Social Security (DSS) to house unemployed families. Newspapers reported that children smashed windows and climbed onto ledges to escape the choking smoke.67 Shortly afterwards, a flimsy ten-page consultation paper rejected licensing and even had the temerity to recommend redefining HMOs, which would have halved the number protected by existing safeguards. Even the Conservative-controlled Association of District Councils, a staunch advocate of a tougher stance on local authority finances, criticised the report for contradicting the government’s own evidence.68

Instead, government passed the Housing and Local Government Act 1989, which aimed to revive the private rental sector through deregulation while continuing the erosion of local authority provision through new financial arrangements for housing associations. The introduction of shorthold tenancies gave landlords greater controls over properties, including powers to gain possession through eviction notices, either to re-let them on high-rent-assured tenancies or to convert them for sale.69 The promise of a substantial profit from a quick sale – property speculation was rife in Kensington and Chelsea in the late 1980s, for instance, with a pair of vacant properties on Clanricarde Gardens valued at £1.4 million (nearly £4 million according to 2020 prices) – was a powerful incentive for landlords to ‘persuade’ tenants to leave through low-level harassment at the same time that many local authorities cut their housing support services.70

Fire by fire, the campaigners chipped away at policymakers. In 1991, a damning report issued by the National Consumer Council (NCC) described HMOs as ‘deathtrap housing’ and repeated calls for mandatory licensing. Given the ‘Right to Buy’ programme had been framed in terms of giving greater choice to consumer-citizens, so too should the same rights of consumer protection be extended to poorly housed renters. In her foreword to the report, Lady Wilcox, the NCC chair, wrote, ‘Most of us associate deathtrap housing with the squalid slums of our Dickensian past. But this report shows that even today millions of people are renting dangerous housing, often without knowing the dangers until things go wrong.’71 With the widening of the campaign beyond the homelessness charities, it was finally reaching its desired audience as well as attracting sympathetic press attention: while charges for registration schemes had already been introduced earlier in the year, advisory guidance on standards of fitness followed a year later.72 This left one significant obstacle for campaigners to overcome: deregulation.

In 1993, John Major’s Conservative Government launched its Deregulation Task Force to review a raft of regulations dealing with health and safety legislation. The review of fire safety recommended repealing fire precautions legislation and transferring responsibility for oversight to the Health and Safety Executive. The goal was to engender a cultural shift within the fire service away from a prescriptive approach to a risk-based one where self-compliance predominated. An internal review supported repeal and also rejected licensing HMOs on the grounds that it would ‘run counter to the Government’s deregulation initiative’.73 In its response, the FBU warned that repealing legislation would ‘give entirely the wrong signals and could be misinterpreted as a move to lower standards of fire safety’. Instead, the FBU argued for the extension of inspection and certification to HMOs and other higher-risk premises.74 But the decision was a fait accompli: deregulation, claimed Home Secretary Michael Howard, would improve public safety by constituting ‘an approach which places the responsibility for assessing risks, and dealing with them, on those who create the risks’.75 Government remained committed to a path of least intervention, having seemingly learned little from past failures to mitigate against mass fatalities.

Failure to learn was brutally exposed in May 1994 when an adult female and two-year-old child died in another coastal resort fire, this time at a Scarborough hostel for DSS claimants; it was subsequently discovered that the owner had failed to comply with an order to upgrade the premises’ means of escape.76 Later that day, Major committed his government to ‘investigating the feasibility of introducing a licensing system to control such establishments’.77 While the subsequent consultation paper accepted that there were strong arguments in favour of licensing (76 per cent of respondents favoured mandatory registration), it also warned that, following the deregulation of the private rental market, ‘it would be introducing too high a degree of licensing’, which could lead either to tenants being charged higher rents to pay for the improvements or landlords withdrawing from the market.78 Ministers concluded that ‘a full-scale national and mandatory licensing system cannot be justified’ on the grounds that ‘it would lead to excessive cost and bureaucracy by forcing every local authority to follow a standard licensing approach’.79 The 1996 Housing Act thus imposed a broad duty of care on landlords in respect of safety and other amenity standards, while also allowing the secretary of state to make model registration schemes for adoption by local authorities.80 Following almost two decades of campaigning, multiple reviews and consultations, legal confusion and hundreds of avoidable deaths, the country was on the verge of a national system of licensing if only a government had the gumption to enact it.

According to Jane Lewis and Pete Alcock, a change in government in 1997 heralded a new era of voluntary action favouring ‘partnership working’ between the state and the third sector.81 Taking its cue from the operation of successful local schemes, the incumbent New Labour Government pledged to resolve the fire safety problem through ‘a proper system of licensing for local authorities which will benefit tenants and responsible landlords alike’.82 The following year, government-commissioned research underpinned proposals for a new code of practice and recommended that the best approach to reducing fire deaths was education coupled with enforcement. As befitted the era, an emphasis was placed on collaborative working across the public, private and third sectors to mitigate the risks. Charities like Shelter and Crisis were consequently brought into the fold to help devise national policy.83 While New Labour completed its predecessor’s policy to increase self-compliance measures, it also recognised that HMOs were ‘a special case’ demanding ‘better regulation’.84

Taking a further six years to get onto the statute books, the Housing Act 2004 finally introduced compulsory licensing for HMOs, the definition of which was widened to include a house of three or more storeys occupied by five or more unrelated persons and sharing basic amenities. This brought a large number of unprotected premises under the law, including house shares of groups of students and young professionals. Landlords would be screened by housing officers, following consultation with fire authorities, to determine whether they were ‘a fit and proper person’ suitable for letting property. Welcomed by many in the third sector as an effective way of protecting public safety, critics resorted to kneejerk arguments that ‘buy-to-let’ investors were being ‘smothered in red tape’ which would result in ‘the better landlords’ deciding that ‘it is just not worth the hassle’ to continue in the rental market. ‘It’s such a hard life being a landlord’, bemoaned one writer in a particularly egregious piece published by The Times on behalf of the National Landlords Association, which was more concerned at the impact licensing could have on investors’ returns than the safety of residents.85 If a reminder was needed that Whitehall had finally intervened to protect the lives of those least able to protect themselves, this came in the form of a hostel fire in Birmingham, which caused the deaths of four residents. This fire provided further proof of the importance of multi-agency partnerships to protect ‘vulnerable tenants’ against negligent landlords, many of whom openly ‘flout legislation’.86 The battle to sweep the great unswept corner of English housing policy was a long one and it would require periodic cleaning to deal with stubborn stains.

Conclusion

This chapter echoes Nicholas Crowson’s contention that the voluntary sector was at the heart of the ‘mixed economy’ of welfare reform during the 1980s and continued to play a central role as part of a widened ‘third sector’ during the 1990s and 2000s. Homelessness charities, law centres and community groups were a continuous source of support for residents and a thorn in the side of governments, holding the latter to account for their reluctance to regulate safety in the private rental housing sector. More importantly, in advocating on behalf of the groups most vulnerable to fire, including victims, survivors and bereaved and grief-stricken families, voluntary and community groups spoke on behalf of the people and communities who otherwise received scant representation within mainstream political, legal or media discourse around housing. They interposed themselves between an indifferent, occasionally hostile, executive on the one side and Parliament on the other, while also creating dense networks of grassroots activists who raised safety standards from the bottom up, often in collaboration with environmental safety and fire prevention officers as well as trade unions. What campaigners lacked in terms of direct influence over policymakers at the heart of government, who generally favoured a ‘top-down’ approach to policy ‘unencumbered by the constraints provided by interest groups’, they more than made up for in perseverance and partnership-building at both the local and national levels of civil society.87

The lessons here for third-sector organisations to work in partnership in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire offer a glimmer of hope for activists and safety campaigners determined to effect lasting cultural and regulatory changes to building safety. That they will have to continue fighting for justice and reform after the publication of the final report into the public inquiry is testament to the courage and resilience of those who have been most directly affected by the events of 14 June 2017 and the consequent ‘cladding crisis’ that has eroded public faith in government’s moral purpose to provide security for its citizens. Having been brought into the fold to deal with the problem of HMOs at the turn of the present century, ‘activist communities’ find themselves at a similar crossroads in 2023 as we head towards a forthcoming general election in which trust in our democratically elected representatives will be tested.

Returning to this chapter’s opening example, the thirty-one victims of the 1987 King’s Cross fire are remembered through regular memorial services on significant anniversaries. These have been held at St Pancras New Church (where a plaque was erected by the trustees of the disaster fund) as well as in the station concourse, where a memorial site comprising two plaques and a commemorative clock has evolved as part of its refurbishment.88 This site serves as a reminder of those who lost their lives to anyone who seeks it out, as I do whenever I travel to London. It also offers reassurance and comfort to many of the families affected by the tragedy, as Mohammed’s younger sister, Anila, who was thirteen at the time of the fire, described following the thirtieth anniversary memorial service in 2017: ‘I feel like I am among my own family here … Whenever I pass through the station I always stop at this spot and touch his name on the memorial, but today there is something special about being among the other families and supporting each other.’89 In addition to the memorial providing a space for remembrance, the legacy of the official independent inquiry, headed by the high court judge Desmond Fennell QC, also served to underline that lessons were learned and acted upon by government. Statutorily improved standards of health and safety on the Underground network are a lasting memorial to the thirty-one victims that we all benefit from whenever we travel on the Tube and whether we pause at the memorial or not as we go about our daily lives.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the many victims of fires in HMOs. To my knowledge, none of these fires has ever been commemorated with a formal plaque or a memorial service. As the properties have long since been redeveloped, and the surrounding areas gentrified and regenerated, few who remember these fires remain in the local area and there is unlikely to be little interest among homeowners or renters (least of all landlords) to be reminded of the horrific experiences that took place in their homes. Most fires in HMOs have therefore long been forgotten, only occasionally to be brought up as a reminder of the invisibility and expendability of marginal communities. When I was writing a blog post on the fortieth anniversary of the Kilburn fire in early 2020, I was struck by how quickly the victims were stripped of their identities and reduced to simplistic, incorrect and insulting descriptions (as ‘elderly women’, ‘destitute women’ and ‘inadequate alcoholics’). Doing so renders these women – and the many other victims of the fires discussed here – as unimportant. It removes them from their individual lives. Ultimately, it allows those institutions who have failed them to avoid feelings of guilt towards them. The ‘great unswept corner of housing policy’ was yet another reminder of the human costs of deregulation and the failure of an inhumane state to care for those who most needed our care.

  1. 1  Desmond Fennell, Investigation into the King’s Cross Underground Fire, Cmd. 499 (London: Department of Transport, 1988).

  2. 2  Ewen and Andrews, ‘Media’, 259–60.

  3. 3  Roof, July 1989, 44.

  4. 4  Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, eds., Living with Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

  5. 5  Alistair Cartwright, ‘Rented Worlds: Bedsits, Boarding Houses and Multiple Occupancy Homes in Postwar London, 1945–1963’, University of London PhD, 2020, 58.

  6. 6  Pete Alcock, ‘Voluntary Action, New Labour and the “Third Sector”’, in Matthew Hilton and James McKay, eds., The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 158–79.

  7. 7  Fiona Cornish, ‘ “Grenfell Changes Everything?” Activism Beyond Hope and Despair’, Critical Public Health 31, no. 3 (20021): 293–305.

  8. 8  N.J. Crowson, ‘Introduction: The Voluntary Sector in 1980s Britain’, Contemporary British History 25, no. 4 (2011): 491–2; ‘Conservative Manifesto, 1983’, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, <https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110859>, accessed 6 January 2023.

  9. 9  N.J. Crowson, Matthew Hilton, James McKay and Herjeet Marway, ‘Witness Seminar: The Voluntary Sector in 1980s Britain’, Contemporary British History 25, no. 4 (2011): 499.

  10. 10  Peter Malpass and Alan Murie, Housing Policy and Practice, 5th edition (London: Macmillan, 1999), 78.

  11. 11  See, eg, Paul Harrison, Inside the Inner City: Life under the Cutting Edge (London: Penguin, 1983).

  12. 12  The Times, 19 March 1980, 1; Willesden and Brent Chronicle (hereafter WBC), 21 March 1980, 16.

  13. 13  One of the victims was an eighteen-year-old voluntary care worker on her first shift. Their names are listed in Shane Ewen, ‘The Tragedy of the Hidden Homeless: Living in Death-Trap Hostels in Thatcher’s Britain’, Fire Brigades Union Blog, 18 March 2020, <https://www.fbu.org.uk/blog/tragedy-hidden-homeless-living-death-trap-hostels-thatchers-britain>.

  14. 14  Daily Express, 19 March 1980, 1, 3.

  15. 15  WBC, 28 March 1980, 2, 18.

  16. 16  The Times, 18 December 1980, 3.

  17. 17  Val Binney, Gina Harkell and Judy Nixon, Leaving Violent Men: A Study of Refuges and Housing for Battered Women (London: Women’s Aid Federation, 1982); Nicholas J. Crowson, ‘Revisiting the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act: Westminster, Whitehall, and the Homelessness Lobby’, Twentieth Century British History 24, no. 3 (2012): 424–47.

  18. 18  Sophie Watson and Helen Austerberry, Housing and Homelessness: A Feminist Perspective (London: Routledge, 1986), 160.

  19. 19  WBC, 4 January 1980, 3; 28 November 1980, 7.

  20. 20  CHAR Report (London: Campaign for the Homeless and Roofless, 1982), 17–18.

  21. 21  Daily Mirror, 20 March 1980, 11.

  22. 22  Aled Davies, ‘ “Right to Buy”: The Development of a Conservative Housing Policy, 1945–1980’, Contemporary British History 27, no. 4 (2013): 421–44.

  23. 23  WBC, 17 October 1980, 1; 24 October 1980, 14.

  24. 24  WBC, 22 August 1980, 3.

  25. 25  WBC, 24 October 1980, 3.

  26. 26  WBC, 25 April 1980, 1, 18.

  27. 27  Hansard (Commons), 25 February 1983, 1142.

  28. 28  Hansard (Commons), 6 August 1980, 684–7.

  29. 29  WBC, 26 December 1980, 3.

  30. 30  TNA AT/49/116, ‘Application of Building Regulations to Houses in Multiple Occupation’.

  31. 31  WBC, 30 January 1981, 4.

  32. 32  ESCH 2018_esch_RoPo_04, Interview with Webb.

  33. 33  The Housing (Means of Escape from Fire in Houses in Multiple Occupation) Order 1981. S.I. 1981/1576.

  34. 34  Hansard (Commons), 17 December 1980, 174W; 4 February 1981, 114W.

  35. 35  CHAR Report (London: Campaign for the Homeless and Roofless, 1981), 18–19; TNA AT/49/116, The Houses in Multiple Occupation Group, Briefing Paper, 24 October 1983.

  36. 36  Kensington News & Post (hereafter KNP), 18 December 1981, 1, 3; 25 December 1981, 1.

  37. 37  Roof, March 1989, 10.

  38. 38  KNP, 25 December 1981, 3; 29 January 1982, 3.

  39. 39  Daily Express, 19 December 1981, 5; Daily Mirror, 3 March 1982, 15.

  40. 40  KNP, 5 March 1982, 1.

  41. 41  KNP, 12 March 1982, 1–3.

  42. 42  KNP, 19 March 1982, 8.

  43. 43  Kate Bradley, Lawyers for the Poor: Legal Advice, Voluntary Action and Citizenship in England, 1890–1990 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 162–8.

  44. 44  The Surveyor, 11 October 1984, 27, in TNA AT/49/116, ‘Application of Building Regulations to Houses in Multiple Occupation’.

  45. 45  The Surveyor.

  46. 46  Hansard (Commons), 25 February 1983, 1175.

  47. 47  Hansard (Commons), 25 February 1983, 1182.

  48. 48  Hansard (Commons), 5 May 1983, 532.

  49. 49  Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice, 243; Chris Holmes, ‘The Worsening Crisis of Single Homelessness’, in Peter Malpass, ed., The Housing Crisis (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 200–14.

  50. 50  Roof, January 1987, 6. A similar urgency for action was expressed by Assistant Deputy Coroner Frances Kirkham to Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles following an inquest into the six deaths at the 2009 Lakanal House fire, 28 March 2013, at <https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ec-letter-to-DCLG-pursuant-to-rule43-28March2013.pdf>. Pickles’s reply, 20 May 2013, is at GTI, HOM00048299/3, 29 March 2022.

  51. 51  The Standard, 21 November 1984, 2.

  52. 52  Camden New Journal, 27 June 1985, 1, 13, 18.

  53. 53  Camden New Journal, 29 November–20 December 1984.

  54. 54  The Guardian, 3 December 1984, 12; Aaron Andrews, ‘Truth, Justice, and Expertise in 1980s Britain: The Cultural Politics of the New Cross Massacre’, History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1 (2021): 182–209. Two-and-a-half years after the New Cross fire, a young male took his own life, becoming the fourteenth victim of the massacre.

  55. 55  Housing Act, 1985, sections 345, 352, 365.

  56. 56  Andrew Thomas and A. Hedges, The 1985 Physical and Social Survey of Houses in Multiple Occupation in England and Wales (London: HMSO, 1986), 23–4.

  57. 57  Department of the Environment, The Building Regulations: Mandatory Rules for Means of Escape in Case of Fire (London: HMSO, 1985); Department of the Environment, Guide to Means of Escape and Related Fire Safety Measures in Certain Existing Houses in Multiple Occupation (London: HMSO, 1988).

  58. 58  Hansard (Commons), 13 February 1987, 610–38; Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, ‘Varieties of Thatcherism’, in Jackson and Saunders, Thatcher’s Britain, 7.

  59. 59  CBR became a specialist unit within Shelter in 1997.

  60. 60  Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowson and Jean-François Mouhot, The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 154–7.

  61. 61  The Standard, 22 January 1985, 16; The Guardian, 11 April 1988, 18; Evening Standard, 20 August 1993, 14.

  62. 62  Evening Standard, 20 March 1990, 2; Daily Mail, 25 April 1990, 9.

  63. 63  Campaign for Bedsit Rights, Bedsit Rights: A Handbook for People Who Live in Bedsits (London: CHAR, 1989); Roger Critchley, Fire Safety Guide (London: Campaign for Bedsit Rights, 1991).

  64. 64  Bedsit Briefing, August 1987, 4, 7; November 1987, 2–3; Roof, January 1995, 34–5.

  65. 65  Bedsit Rights, spring 1987; August 1987, 5; Bedsit Briefing, June 1987, 5.

  66. 66  Peter Shapely, ‘Tenants Arise! Consumerism, Tenants and the Challenge to Council Authority in Manchester, 1968–92’, Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 60–78.

  67. 67  Daily Mirror, 6 April 1988, 2; The Times, 6 April 1988, 1, 20.

  68. 68  Department of the Environment, Consultation Paper on Houses in Multiple Occupation (London: HMSO, 1988); The Challenges of Multiple Occupancy: A Fresh Look at HMOs (London: Association of District Councils, 1988).

  69. 69  Malpass and Murie, Housing Policy and Practice, 83–4.

  70. 70  Roof, March 1989, 10.

  71. 71  Deathtrap Housing: Tackling Fire Hazards for Tenants of Houses in Multiple Occupation (London: National Consumer Council, 1991).

  72. 72  Daily Mail, 26 September 1991, 12; The Times, 26 September 1991, 2; Department of the Environment, Houses in Multiple Occupation: Guidance to Local Housing Authorities on Standards of Fitness under Section 352 of the Housing Act 1985 (London: HMSO, 1992).

  73. 73  P.R. Edmundson and G.I. Hubbard, A Review of the Fire Precautions Act 1971 (London: Home Office, 1993), 48–9.

  74. 74  Fire Brigades Union, Who Will Pick Up the Pieces? Response to the Government’s Interdepartmental Review of Fire Safety Legislation and Enforcement (Kingston upon Thames: Fire Brigades Union, 1994), 39, 56.

  75. 75  Fire, November 1994, 22.

  76. 76  The Times, 6 May 1994, 3.

  77. 77  Hansard (Commons), 5 May 1994, 841.

  78. 78  Department of the Environment, Houses in Multiple Occupation: Consultation Paper on the Case for Licensing (London: HMSO, 1994), 6.

  79. 79  Department of the Environment, Improving Standards in Houses in Multiple Occupation (London: HMSO, 1995), 3.

  80. 80  Nicholas J. Smith, ‘Bureaucracy or Death: Safeguarding Lives in Houses in Multiple Occupation’, in David Cowan, ed., Housing: Participation and Exclusion (London: Routledge, 1998), 168–88.

  81. 81  Jane Lewis, ‘New Labour’s Approach to the Voluntary Sector: Independence and the Meaning of Partnership’, Social Policy & Society 4, no. 2 (2005): 121–31; Alcock, ‘Voluntary Action’, 173–7.

  82. 82  1997 Labour Party Manifesto, <http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml>, accessed 6 January 2023.

  83. 83  Christopher Holmes, A New Vision for Housing (London: Routledge, 2006).

  84. 84  Home Office, Fire Safety Legislation for the Future: A Consultation Document (London: HMSO, 1997), 24; Department of Environment, Trade and the Regions, Licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation – England (London: HMSO, 1999).

  85. 85  The Times, 6 May 2005, ‘Bricks and Mortar’ section, 16.

  86. 86  Fire, April 2005, 22–3.

  87. 87  Crowson, ‘Introduction’, 491, 496.

  88. 88  BBC News, 17 November 2007, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7099677.stm>. Colin Townsley’s sacrifice has also been remembered through the erection of a Red Plaque outside the premises in 2021 by the Fire Brigades Union: <https://redplaque.org.uk/plaque/colin-townsley>, accessed 16 January 2023.

  89. 89  The Guardian, 18 November 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/18/kings-cross-fire-victims-honoured-30-years-on>.

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