I’VE NEVER been a fan of tower blocks. When I was a young reporter, my wife (then girlfriend) and I were living on the top floor of a 1930s apartment block when a fire broke out on the ground floor.

We’d had a late night, we both needed to be up early the next day and we were fast asleep when the fire broke out.

By the time we got out of the flat, everyone else in the block was on the street watching firefighters unroll their hoses ready to douse the flames.
There were no smoke alarms, no sprinkler systems and – in those days – no mobile phones.

We heard nothing; no screams of panic, no shouts to get out. No-one banged on our flat door. I woke up either because of some sixth sense or because I smelled smoke.

Our bedroom was at the back of the building but that faint, drifting odour of charring made me go to the front of the flat to look out of the window, where I was greeted by scenes of chaos on the pavement, with people frantically pointing at the block and the first choking clumps of thick black smoke drifting up from below.

I rushed back to the bedroom, shouting to my partner to “Get up – there’s a fire!” as I went. We grabbed the barest minimum of clothes and some shoes and ran barefoot down the fire escape at the back of the flats.

We didn’t really panic but it was a heart-stopping moment and I can feel the sweaty palms and remember the thudding in my chest and tightness of breath as we made it out, to this day.

Looking back, we were never at great risk. The firefighters were on the scene in minutes and they contained the fire more or less to the ground-floor flat where it started.

The two young women who lived there, it turned out, had cooked something to eat after returning late from the pub and had forgotten to turn off the gas flame under the pan they used. Their flat was gutted. They lost virtually everything in it and had to move out.

No-one was hurt. People in the neighbouring flats stayed with friends and relatives until their flats were cleared of smoke damage.

The rest of us went back to bed in the early hours, thanking our lucky stars that we had escaped with nothing more than an unpleasant, acrid stench to live with for a couple of weeks.

It happened about 35 years ago and my wife and I moved out 12 months later to get married and buy our first home We never once contemplated buying in a block of flats. That one small experience was enough to put us off. We had been genuinely frightened.

But here’s the thing: our flat at the top of the building was only on the fourth floor.

I cannot begin, for a nanosecond, to imagine the immense, crippling horror that the victims and, for that matter, escapees from the catastrophic Grenfell Tower blaze, in North Kensington, must have felt. Being on the fourth floor of that block when the fire broke out must have been terrifying; the desperation and suffering of those on the 24th floor can only have been indescribable.

Even without sprinklers and alarms, our pathetic little fire all those years ago was contained in minutes by the fire service and prevented from spreading by concrete floors and external rendering in a building that was, even then, 50 or so years old.

It absolutely beggars belief that a building erected in 1974 could be constructed in such a way that the options for emergency escape – and for access by heroic firefighters – were limited to one internal staircase. Surely, when the fire risk was assessed in more recent and even-better-informed times, that fact alone should have condemned it as unfit for habitation?

There were clearly multiple factors that affected the way the fire spread in Grenfell Tower and we must hope that the Government’s inquiry establishes these very quickly to enable action to be taken elsewhere if required. The quality and type of external cladding fitted just last year and the location of gas pipes in communal corridors will be among the key issues for investigation.

But there is no doubt that the absence of smoke alarms in individual flats, of a general fire alarm for the whole building and the lack of a powerful sprinkler system throughout the tower all contributed to the horrendous and tragic loss of life. We know these things save lives so, surely, it is basic common sense to ensure they are fitted in all tower blocks, be they residential or commercial.

Clearly, those common-sense measures are not already enshrined in legislation retrospectively affecting older developments, enabling developers, local authorities, housing associations and others up and down the country to hide behind “minimum health and safety standards” as the limit of their responsibility.

Regardless of cost, those standards must be raised immediately and property owners and developers held to much tougher benchmarks and specifications with higher penalties for those who fail to meet them.

Hopefully, though, it won’t take legislation to get the ball rolling and authorities – like Bradford Council – can take the initiative and begin the work of raising the bar right now.

And the Government needs to find a way to make money available to get that process underway and ensure there is clear direction and ongoing support to sustain it.

It won’t help the victims and families of the Grenfell Tower disaster – but not to do so will be seen as a gross dereliction of duty by those who continue to rely on the people in the corridors of power to keep them safe.