UK’s Grenfell Tower, site of deadly 2017 blaze, to be demolished

The UK government has opted to tear down London’s Grenfell Tower, where 72 people died in a 2017 blaze, according to a group representing relatives of the deceased.

The advocacy group Grenfell Next of Kin said in a statement that Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner had confirmed the news to a group of victims’ survivors and relatives on Wednesday.

According to The London Standard, the government is scheduled to release a formal statement on Friday.

Some family members want the tower to remain in place until criminal charges are brought against it for the errors that caused the fire, or keep it as a memorial.

According to Grenfell United, a separate organization representing the fire victims’ families, “Angela Rayner could not provide a justification for her decision to destroy the tower.”

“She refused to confirm how many bereaved and survivors had been spoken to in the recent, short four-week consultation”, the group said. No one backed her decision, despite the fact that the majority of the room was bereaved, according to the room alone.

It added: “Ignoring the voices of bereaved on the future of our loved ones ‘ gravesite is disgraceful and unforgivable”.

Following Angela Rayner’s decision to destroy the Grenfell Tower image, our statement follows. twitter.com/9JiB8FDNPA

Grenfell Next of Kin acknowledged that the tower, which is structurally compromised, “cannot be propped up indefinitely due to safety concerns”.

We want to talk about the structural factors that led to this choice, according to Grenfell Next of Kin. “We want a discussion about what will go in the Tower’s place”.

Prior to the eighth anniversary of the tragedy on June 14, the government announced it would not alter the site, which it had been advised to “carefully take down.”

According to a six-year public inquiry into the fire, “decades of failure” put profit before safety as the cause of the disaster.

The inquiry’s report, released last September, highlighted failures by successive UK governments, local council leaders, the fire service and the companies involved in the production and installation of the flammable cladding and insulation that allowed the fire to spread so rapidly.