A fire on Slough High Street is a ‘horrific reminder’ of the risks posed by flammable cladding still fitted to blocks of flats, a government minister has said.

Mosaic Apartments on Slough High Street was evacuated after a fire broke out at a top floor flat on August 22. The Observer later revealed that the top two floors of the flat were fitted with Grenfell-style flammable ACM cladding.

Now housing minister Alex Norris has said the fire – together with a larger-scale incident in east London that same week – is ‘a horrific reminder of the risk that unsafe cladding still poses to far too many people’.

The minister made the comments during a debate in parliament on Wednesday, September 11. He said ‘too many building owners’ were ‘not acting quickly enough’ to remove dangerous cladding.

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He added that the government would ‘pursue the most egregious actors who are creating unacceptable delays and we will hold them to account’.

Wallace Estates, which owns Mosaic Apartments, says it has known the ACM cladding was fitted to the building since 2022. It says that it obtained an external wall fire safety assessment that found the cladding to pose a ‘tolerable to moderate (low) risk’.

But the property company also says it is working with the original developer Durkan to have the cladding removed.