Firefighters have rescued 20 people from a burning tower block after it was engulfed in flames.
More than 200 firefighters took part in a “significant search and rescue operation” which involved around 80 people, including children, being evacuated from their homes.
A further 20 people were said to have been rescued by firefighters after what they described as a “significant building failure”.
Speaking on Monday afternoon, London Fire Brigade Assistant Commissioner Patrick Goulbourne added that everyone had been accounted for and the fire was under control.
The block, described as a mixed-use residential and commercial building, was known to have “a number of fire safety issues”, according to the London Fire Brigade, and was covered in “non-compliant” cladding.
Scaffolding surrounding the building was in place to remove the cladding and a fire enforcement notice issued last year highlighted concerns inspectors had at the time.
Image: The scene on Monday morning. Pic: UKNIP
Image: Firefighters tackling the blaze overnight. Pic: UKNIP
Meanwhile, 70 firefighters were sent to a second fire across London, in Blackwall.
Half of a flat and a balcony on the 25th floor of a 45-storey building were burning, producing a large amount of smoke.
‘Major incident’ in Dagenham
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Plumes of smoke could be seen rising into the sky in Dagenham as 40 fire engines and 225 firefighters responded overnight and into the morning.
Emergency services were called at around 2.44am and the first crews arrived at the tower block within five minutes.
Four patients were treated at the scene, and two were taken to hospital, the London Ambulance Service said.
Eyewitness: The time for answers will come, but help is more urgent
By Matthew Thompson, home and political correspondent, reporting from Dagenham for Sky News
As we arrived first thing this morning, the fire was smouldering, but it was a mere shadow of the inferno that had engulfed the building a few hours before.
Many residents fled with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
Those who have nowhere else to go have been moved to a leisure centre a mile or so away.
There, amid a mass of water bottles, foil blankets and plastic plates, families are huddled, shell-shocked, and facing an uncertain future.
Drilon Nezaj, carrying his 17-month-old daughter in his arms, told me his flat was directly above the source of the fire.
He’d been at a friend’s house for dinner when the baby had fallen asleep, so they decided to stay the night. “She saved our lives,” he said.
Another woman, Kasia, said she awoke in the night to “flames climbing up to our balcony”.
She and her partner got out, with their dog. But fighting back tears, she told me her flat is “all gone. The only thing I can think of is we’re safe. The rest can be replaced. We got out, luckily.”
The building itself has known fire safety issues.
It was in the process of having dangerous flammable cladding removed when the fire broke out.
There may well be a time for recriminations.
But for now, there are scores of people, many with young children, who need help, and somewhere to sleep.
The cause of the fire remains unknown. Emergency services had declared a “major incident”, which has since been stood down.
One local said they heard people “screaming” from their home a few hundred yards from the building as it caught fire overnight.
Image: Pic: UKNIP
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0:39
Smoke fills the air after tower block fire
‘I saw flames climbing up to our balcony’
Kasia Stantke, a resident of the building for six years, didn’t hear a fire alarm go off.
Instead, she told Sky News’ home and political correspondent Matthew Thompson she was woken up by banging.
“I got out of bed and looked out the window and I saw flames climbing up to our balcony.
“I woke my partner and said there’s a fire it’s spreading quickly.”
They got dressed, grabbed their dog, and fled.
“There was no fire alarm, nothing went off, when we ran out the flats we just saw some neighbours, we looked at each other, and said ‘are you okay?’ and tried to wake up a few others, but no fire alarms.”
Image: Ms Stantke told Sky News she didn’t think she had a flat left to return to
As she tried to knock on doors, Ms Stantke said she “couldn’t hear one neighbour” and added: “I hope they had gone away for the long weekend.”
She added she thought she wouldn’t have a flat to go back to, following the fire.
Mohammed, a sixth-floor resident, told Sky News he also didn’t hear a fire alarm go off and left the building only with the clothes on his back.
‘My daughter saved our lives’
One first-floor resident was absent at the time of the fire – he said his daughter falling asleep at his friend’s barbecue saved their lives as it meant he decided to stay the night, and not return home.
“I was at my friend’s house, I got a call saying my block was on fire,” Drilon Nezaj told Sky News.
He said his flat was located above the nursery in the building, where he was told the fire broke out.
Image: Drilon Nezaj and his young daughter
He continued: “I got invited to my friend’s barbecue yesterday, I didn’t want to go but he said ‘please please please’, so I said let’s go.”
He brought his 17-month-old daughter along and when she fell asleep, he decided to stay the night so he didn’t have to wake her up.
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1:54
‘I saw flames climbing up our balcony’
“So thank god, she saved our life. You couldn’t have gotten out from that fire from what I saw, no chance,” he added.
‘We have no clue what happened’
Dinesh Raj’s daughter was at a sleepover in the building with a friend’s family when the blaze broke out.
Speaking to Sky News, Mr Raj said he got a call at around 3am and drove over and picked his daughter and friends up.
Image: Dinesh Raj, speaking to Sky News
“They had a six-month baby as well, so they managed to grab the baby and my daughter and get out of the building,” he said.
He added: “I think the majority [of residents] managed to step out before the fire started spreading.
“But everything they have is back in the building and we have no clue what happened.”
Image: Pic: UKNIP
A full evacuation
London Fire Commissioner Andy Roe said: “I am immensely grateful to the crews and officers who have operated in the most dangerous conditions to both rescue people and bring the incident under control despite being faced with a significant building failure.”
He added that drones and 64-metre turntable ladders were being used to tackle the fire.
A rest centre has been set up in the Becontree Heath Leisure Centre and residents in the surrounding area were advised to keep their windows closed due to smoke.
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Home Secretary Yvette Cooper issued a statement following the fire.
She said: “My thoughts are with all those affected by the major fire incident in Dagenham.”
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he was in close contact with the fire brigade, who he praised for acting “swiftly”.
He added: “I urge local residents to follow LFB’s advice to keep windows and doors closed and for people to avoid the area where possible.”
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Image: Smoke continued to billow into the sky even as the fire was slowly brought under control
The cladding around the tower block is understood to be high pressure laminate (HPL) panels.
It was deemed non-compliant in July 2019 and is a compressed wood fibre which releases heat 25 times faster and burns 115 times hotter than non-combustible products, according to a study by the University of Central Lancashire, published in January 2019.
Merseyside Police knows – better than any force, perhaps – that in a social media age, an information vacuum can become a misinformation cauldron.
They have learnt from the aftermath of the Southport stabbing attack, where the force was criticised for being too slow to release information that could have calmed the riots that followed.
So, it feels like things have been done differently this time.
Image: Police tents surrounded by debris at the scene in Water Street. Pic: PA
The incident happened just after 6pm on Monday.
Videos – captured by fans on their phones – were online within moments. Shared and speculated upon, with guesses as to the attacker’s identity and motive.
But alongside the huge and immediate police investigation, the communication machine moved equally fast.
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Within a few hours, police released a description of the man they had arrested – a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area.
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Moment car drives into crowds in Liverpool
A few hours after that, we had an extensive press conference during which police ruled out terrorism as a motive.
Again, they appealed for videos not to be shared online and for people not to speculate.
Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram said Merseyside Police “handled the situation fantastically” given how quickly footage of the incident was shared online.
He told Sky News that online misinformation can set “a lot of false narrative”.
The mayor added: “And we all know that speculation and social media are a wildfire of different vantages, and some of it is for nefarious reasons.
“So, it was right, of course, that the police reacted as quickly as they did to dampen down some of the types of posts that we were witnessing, you know, saying that there were other things happening throughout the city.”
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Police commentator Graham Wettone also told Sky News the force had done well to quickly combat misinformation spreading online.
He said: “That’s always a problem in today’s day and age, social media taking over so much news reporting, with so many people as well present at the scene where that awful incident took place, mobile phones out, people recording it, and then posting it almost straight away.”
Dal Babu, a former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent, also highlighted it was “unprecedented” that the force “very quickly” gave the ethnicity and race of the suspect.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, he said: “I think that was to dampen down some of the speculation from the far-right that sort of continues on X even as we speak that this was a Muslim extremist and there’s a conspiracy theory.”
Mr Babu agreed that Merseyside Police appears to have learned lessons from what happened after the Southport stabbings.
He added: “The difficulty we have is in the olden days, when I was policing, you would have a conversation with trusty journalists, print journalists, radio journalists, broadcasting journalists, you’d have a conversation and say look can you please hold fire on sharing this information and people would listen.
“We don’t have that with social media, it’s like the Wild West and anything goes and so puts the police in a very, very difficult position.”
Meanwhile, the police investigation continues.
In central Liverpool, Water Street is cordoned off with police officers and vehicles in place.
Flags, sprays of paint flares and empty bottles still cover the road. Whereas they have been cleared elsewhere along the parade route, here they remain. Chilling symbols of the party, that within moments became a scene of utter horror.
King Charles and Queen Camilla are being urged to use their visit to Canada to seek an apology for the abuse of British children.
Campaigners have called on them to pursue an apology for the “dire circumstances” suffered by so-called “Home Children” over decades.
More than 100,000 were shipped from orphan homes in the UK to Canada between 1869 and 1948 with many used as cheap labour, typically as farm workers and domestic servants. Many were subject to mistreatment and abuse.
Canada has resisted calls to follow the UK and Australia in apologising for its involvement in child migrant schemes.
Image: King Charles and Mark Carney on Monday. Pic: PA
Campaigners for the Home Children say the royal visit presents a “great opportunity” for a change of heart.
“I would ask that King Charles uses his trip to request an apology,” John Jefkins told Sky News.
John’s father Bert was one of 115,000 British Home Children transported to Canada, arriving in 1914 with his brother Reggie.
“It’s really important for the Home Children themselves and for their descendants,” John said.
“It’s something we deserve and it’s really important for the healing process, as well as building awareness of the experience of the Home Children.
“They were treated very, very badly by the Canadian government at the time. A lot of them were abused, they were treated horribly. They were second-class citizens, lepers in a way.”
John added: “I think the King’s visit provides a great opportunity to reinforce our campaign and to pursue an apology because we’re part of the Commonwealth and King Charles is a new Head of the Commonwealth meeting a new Canadian prime minister. It’s a chance, for both, to look at the situation with a fresh eye.
“There’s much about this visit that looks on our sovereignty and who we are as Canadians, rightly so.
“I think it’s also right that in contemplating the country we built, we focus on the people who built it, many in the most trying of circumstances.”
The issue was addressed by the then Prince of Wales during a tour of Canada in May 2022. He said at the time: “We must find new ways to come to terms with the darker and more difficult aspects of the past.”
On Tuesday, the King will deliver the Speech from the Throne to open the 45th session of Canada’s parliament.
Camilla was made Patron of Barnardo’s in 2016. The organisation sent tens of thousands of Home Children to Canada. She took on the role, having served as president since 2007.
Buckingham Palace has been contacted for comment.
A spokesperson for the Canadian government said: “The government of Canada is committed to keeping the memory of the British Home Children alive.
“Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada deeply regrets this unjust and discriminatory policy, which was in place from 1869 to 1948. Such an approach would have no place in modern Canada, and we must learn from past mistakes.”
The policy means most families cannot claim means-tested benefits for more than their first two children born after April 2017.
Ms Phillipson’s comments are the strongest a minister has made about the policy potentially being scrapped.
Analysis by The Resolution Foundation thinktank over the weekend found 470,000 children would be lifted out of poverty if parents could claim benefits for more than two children.
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However, Ms Phillipson said the government inherited a “really difficult situation” with public finances from the Conservative government.
“These are not easy or straightforward choices in terms of how we stack it up, but we know the damage child poverty causes,” she added.
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2:37
Why did Labour delay their child poverty strategy?
The education secretary, who is also head of the government’s child poverty taskforce, said ministers are trying to help in other ways, such as expanding funded childcare hours and opening free breakfast clubs.
She said it is “the moral purpose of Labour governments to ensure that everyone, no matter their background, can get on in life”.
Her “personal mission” is to tackle child poverty, she said.
Sir Keir Starmer is said to have privately backed abolishing the two-child limit and requested the Treasury find the £3.5bn to do so, The Observer reported on Sunday.
The government’s child poverty strategy, which the taskforce is working on, has been delayed from its original publication date in the spring.
Whether to scrap the two-child benefit cap is one of the main issues it is looking at.