THE UK HAS “far too much” dangerous cladding on properties, the country’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said as she visited the site of a fire in east London.

Rayner, who is also Housing Secretary, said residents and firefighters had faced a “fireball” in Dagenham.

It came seven years on from the Grenfell Tower fire and just a week before an inquiry’s final report into Grenfell is published.

Rayner, who was meeting residents in the Dagenham area today, spoke of how “horrifying” it must have been for them to wake up to smoke and flames in the early hours, and said it had been “incredible” that no-one had been killed.

Grenfell United, which represents many of the bereaved and survivors of the 2017 fire, said the incident in Dagenham “highlights the painfully slow progress of remediation across the country, and a lack of urgency for building safety as a whole”.

The group added that, seven years on, “the fact that when a fire happens the best we can hope for at the moment is ‘a near miss’ speaks volumes of the progress made since”.

Cladding on the Dagenham building had been in the process of being removed, with scaffolding visible at the site and London Fire Brigade confirming there were “known fire safety issues”.

Speaking at the scene in east London, Rayner told reporters: “Remediation work is still too slow, and we need to continue that.

“I am meeting with the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) this week again to really press home the urgency to make sure that that work is done.”

She said there is a responsibility on the owners of buildings to ensure the work is carried out and insisted funds are available.

“We’ve got to make sure that the regulators are pushing that agenda because we still have far too many buildings that have got this cladding on that needs to be removed and there’s a responsibility to make sure that that is removed as quickly as possible.”

Rayner said seeing the scenes in Dagenham “must have been incredibly traumatic” for the bereaved and survivors of the Grenfell disaster, as she described the “slow progress” on making buildings safe since then.

Acknowledging the fear many people are living in, she added: “There is still far too much cladding on these buildings.”

Rayner also paid tribute to the efforts of all those who helped rescue people and look after them following the latest fire.

More than 200 firefighters responded to the fire at the property in Freshwater Road, which was undergoing “remedial” work to remove and replace “non-compliant cladding” on the fifth and sixth floors containing flats, according to a planning application document.

London fire commissioner Andy Roe said there are some 1,300 buildings across London which need remediation work done “as a priority”, a figure he said gives an idea of the scale of the challenge the fire service is facing to hold building owners to account.

Judith Hackitt, who led a Government review on building safety after the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, said it is “really concerning” that so many people are still living in uncertainty and fear about their homes and that it was “very lucky” nobody died in yesterday’s blaze.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s really concerning to me that so many people are left with this level of uncertainty and fear about the safety of the buildings they’re in.

“I mean, we can all take great comfort, I think, from the fact that no-one lost their lives yesterday.

“But, nonetheless, it’s a tragedy that those people have lost everything. They’ve lost all their belongings and everything else, and it could happen to other people.

“So this is a really urgent problem that needs fixing.”

UK government figures at the end of July showed that of the 4,630 residential buildings in England of 11m or higher that had been identified with unsafe cladding, only around half (2,299) were noted as having either started or completed remediation works.

Of these, less than a third (1,350) overall were recorded as having completed such works.

Cabinet Office minister Ellie Reeves earlier said around 88% of remedial works have been completed in tower blocks with Grenfell-style cladding.

Campaign group End Our Cladding Scandal said the idea that remediation needs to be sped up is “very much an understatement”.

It also criticised UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer for having “chosen to not say a word about the building safety crisis since he became Prime Minister, preferring instead to focus on building new homes rather than rescuing ordinary people from this living nightmare”.

The campaigners also highlighted the “sheer lack of progress” on wider building safety, noting that the so-called Grenfell style (aluminium composite material or ACM) cladding “is only a very narrow subset” which does not take into account “the myriad of internal life-critical fire safety defects like inadequate compartmentation, fire-stopping and fire doors that can also allow fire to spread rapidly”.

More than 80 people were evacuated in the incident at Freshwater Road, with the fire having taken just over eight hours to bring under control.