Over 13,000 residents evacuated so far!

This blog is an updated version of the original, posted in November 2023 – author: Matt Hodges-Long

The unprecedented tragedy of Grenfell Tower in June 2017 (rightly) led building owners, government and regulators to look more closely at their buildings to see if they too could be the next Grenfell.

This detailed building inspection programme has continued to this day. In fact, it has sped up due to new legislation such as the Building Safety Act and Fire Safety (England) Regulations and tactical responses to well-publicised fires such as Beechmere, Worcester Park, Samuel Garside House and New Providence Wharf.

The sad and inevitable response to identifying serious safety issues in buildings can be the need for emergency evacuation of residents for a prolonged period of time. This action happens when additional mitigations cannot be added to make a building tolerably safe.

Different terms can be used to describe this forced evacuation process and the legal basis for the action, but the most common are: Evacuate, Decant or Prohibit.

In April 2021, I was asked during a live radio interview how many buildings and residents had been subject to prohibition or forced evacuation since Grenfell. Regrettably, I couldn’t answer this question on air, and I couldn’t find a dataset to answer the question afterwards. 

So, as a professional manager of building safety data and compliance documentation, I started researching the subject based on news reporting, as no official data is available. Since 2021, my team has crowd-sourced information on the subject of prohibitions with the sole purpose of sharing this information and spotting trends.

Each prohibition is a human tragedy of displaced families, stress and exorbitant costs. Little is known about what happens to these families once they are forced from their homes. Rarely do the media follow up.

Over the years, we have used our prohibition data to maintain a #Prohibition thread on X (Twitter) and to repeatedly warn the Government, LGA and other stakeholders to prepare for and minimise the human impact.

Our post-Grenfell Prohibition Tracker is frequently cited by the media. Here is how Sky News featured our work in late 2023: https://news.sky.com/story/cladding-crisis-latest-hundreds-of-people-are-being-made-homeless-after-christmas-13038008 

For years now, I have shared our Post-Grenfell Prohibition Tracker (download below) so that others can learn from and better contribute to the Building Safety Crisis conversation. Every time a building is added to the tracker, it is a sad day and, in most cases, a day that could and should have been avoided.

If you know of a prohibition that is missing from the spreadsheet or would like to discuss our research in more detail, email us.