Reform housing spokesperson doubles down on Grenfell ‘everyone dies’ comment

Reform UK’s new housing chief has sparked outrage after claiming housing regulations have gone too far in the wake of Grenfell. He said that while the disaster was a tragedy, ‘fires happen’ and that ‘everyone dies in the end’, so building new houses shouldn’t be slowed by pesky health and safety.

Reforms Housing spokesperson says ‘fires happen’

Simon Dudley, Reform UK’s new Housing and Infrastructure spokesperson, told Inside Housing that regulations put in place following the Grenfell inquiry are ‘stifling’ the housebuilding sector with ‘over-regulation.

Dudley was asked how to balance housebuilding with the regulations. His reponse was typically vile for Reform:

The practical impact of over-regulation is to stop things. Now, people may feel that we’ve done the right thing through introducing this regulation, but on the other side of that, think about all the human suffering of not having a home, not being able to have children and being stuck in your parents’ home in your childhood bedroom. So there is a balance. You know, we can’t, you know, sadly, you know, everyone dies in the end. It’s just how you go, right?

He continued

Extracting Grenfell from the statistics, actually people dying in house fires is 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?

You can’t stop tragic things from happening. You can try to minimise excesses, but bad things do happen. Fires do happen.

Dudley said that the impact of Grenfell on regulation has meant ‘the pendulum has just swung too far the wrong way.’

He continued:

Frankly, for people who are the architects of things, it’s very difficult for them to put them right. And Reform is not the architect of so many of these failures which our country has now. We will put it right, because we’re not emotionally connected with them. They’re not things that we created. We will fix them.

Dudley was appointed Reform UK’s housing spokesperson last month . The party said he would urgently spearhead a review into “Britain’s building crisis”. He’s previously had many board and non-executive roles in development such as with the government’s Homes England. So in a way, he has been an ‘architect in these failures’.

Grenfell wasn’t because ‘fires happen’

72 people died, many of whom were brown or Black and disabled, because of housing companies that wanted to pull up building as quickly as possible to extract rent from vulnerable people. They didn’t care about the safety of the block, despite many warnings and complaints from residents.

What the aftermath of the Grenfell fire showed was how little deaths mattered if they weren’t rich white people.

A Canary editorial responding to the bullshit Grenfell Inquiry report summed it up best:

Ultimately the Grenfell fire was the culmination of years of institutionalised neglect, racism, classism, and discrimination against the predominantly low-income, Black, brown, and disabled residents of the tower.

Racism and classism were the ultimate cause of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Calls for Dudley to be fired came in quick. 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.

But come on, Steve, we all know Farage doesn’t have a single bit of decency in him.

Green MP Sian Berry said:

Reform has sunk to a new low and shown a real disrespect to the victims of Grenfell. 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.

Nigel Farage must sack Simon Dudley for this disgusting outburst.

Reform doesn’t care if poor people die

Of course, instead of apologising, Dudley has doubled down. On LinkedIn, he wrote:

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.

Within the last 24 hours, the Berkeley Group, one of Britain’s biggest housebuilders, has paused new land purchases and announced a hiring freeze. They blame ‘an unprecedented surge in costs and regulation.’
These concerns are felt across the industry. The result? The UK’s long running housing crisis is getting worse.

To address the national housing crisis, we must ensure that regulation remains safe, sensible and proportionate. My concern is the introduction of numerous measures that do nothing to protect life and are throttling housebuilding.

The classic double down is expected from Reform now. It’s the same tactic we saw from Sarah Pochin when she said ‘It drives me mad seeing adverts full of black and Asian people.’ Pochin wasn’t disciplined, but Black MP Dawn Butler was almost kicked out of the House of Commons for calling her a racist.

Dudley’s comments show once again just how little Reform actually cares about poor people. They wouldn’t be saying ‘fires happen’ if it had happened in a more affluent area.

Reform are relying heavily on working class voters who are sick of being ignored by Labour and the other parties. But this should show that Reform will only make life worse for anyone who isn’t rich. And they don’t care how many poor people die.

Featured image via the Canary