A blaze that tore through a residential block in Antwerp early this morning has left five dead and at least a dozen injured, sources confirm. The fire, which broke out on the fourth floor of a 1970s tower block in the city’s Kiel district, rapidly spread due to what local officials are calling ‘inadequate cladding and firestopping.’
Witnesses described scenes of panic as families scrambled down smoke-filled stairwells. Fire crews battled the inferno for three hours before bringing it under control. The dead include two children, aged six and nine. A further ten people remain in hospital, two in critical condition.
This tragedy comes less than three months after the Grenfell Tower inquiry concluded its final report, exposing decades of regulatory capture and corporate negligence. Now, Britain is using the Antwerp disaster to push for an EU-wide building safety overhaul, leaked diplomatic cables reveal.
Sources inside the Foreign Office confirm that British ministers have already contacted their counterparts in Brussels, demanding mandatory third-party testing for all cladding systems and a ban on combustible materials in buildings over 18 metres. ‘This is not a national issue. It is a European crisis,’ one senior official told me. ‘The same companies that supplied Grenfell supplied blocks in Paris, Berlin, and yes, Antwerp.’
The demand comes amid growing evidence that the Belgian building had been fitted with a type of aluminium composite material (ACM) strikingly similar to the one that fuelled the Grenfell inferno. Documents obtained by this paper show that the Antwerp block, built in 1974, was refurbished in 2018 with a cladding system manufactured by a subsidiary of the same multinational firm that provided Grenfell’s facade.
Critics have long accused EU regulators of dragging their feet. The European Commission’s proposed Construction Products Regulation, watered down after heavy lobbying from the chemical and construction industries, remains stuck in debate. ‘The industry has had a decade to clean up its act and has done nothing,’ said a fire safety expert who has advised the British government. ‘Now bodies are piling up.’
In a statement, the mayor of Antwerp called the fire ‘an unacceptable catastrophe’ and promised an immediate audit of all high-rise buildings in the city. But for the families of the victims, that is cold comfort. ‘We moved here because we thought it was safe,’ said a resident who lost his wife and daughter. ‘They told us the building was fine. They lied.’
The British push for reform is likely to face fierce resistance. Industry groups have already warned that mandatory testing would ‘cripple the supply chain’ and ‘drive up costs.’ But after five more deaths, the question is no longer whether the system is broken. It is how many more have to die before the regulators in Brussels finally act.
As one firefighter put it, standing amid the charred wreckage: ‘Every building with that cladding is a potential coffin. And we keep filling them.’
