The residents of Grenfell Tower were alarmed to discover smoke pouring from their electrical appliances in May 2013. Laptops, televisions, washing machines and fridges were damaged by an unexplained series of power surges that prompted the frightened occupants of the 24-storey tower in west London to descend on their estate office, demanding action and answers.

In an email to Robert Black, CEO of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), which manages the 1970s social housing property on behalf of the local authority, one resident explained “we had numerous power surges in the space of a minute, and in that process my computer and monitor literally exploded, with smoke seeping out from the back”.

According to the July minutes of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s housing and property scrutiny committee, KCTMO “carried out some repairs and continue to monitor the situation. It is too early to say whether the problem has been fully resolved and here responsibility lies for the cause. It is possible that the fault that has been rectified is not the primary cause.”

The cause of the surges, which are now likely to be reviewed following claims that last week’s blaze started when a resident’s fridge went up in flames, were just one of many concerns about fire safety that the residents have raised with KCTMO down the years. As far back as 2004 they flagged up issues with the building’s emergency lighting system, which was supposed to activate in the event of a fire.

KCTMO denied there was a problem. But an independent consultancy it hired to look into the matter disagreed and issued a series of urgent recommendations for how the system had to be improved. An assessment five years ago suggested monthly inspections of fire extinguishers were not being carried out. In some cases, the extinguishers had not been tested for years.

Cladding for Grenfell Tower was cheaper, more flammable option Read more

More recently the Grenfell Action Group (GAG), which represents the interests of the largely immigrant tenants who lived in the tower, warned about the fire threat posed by discarded rubbish, and complained that parked vehicles were blocking access for the emergency services. The council’s much-vaunted £10m two-year transformation of the tower – completed in 2016 – was another source of concern.

In an email sent in 2014 to the chief fire officer at Kensington fire station, a member of GAG said that residents feared the improvement works had turned the building into a “fire trap”. He wrote: “There is only one entry and exit to the tower block itself and, in the event of a fire, the London fire brigade could only gain access to the entrance to the building by climbing four flights of narrow stairs. On top of this, the fire escape exit on the walkway level has now been sealed. Residents of Grenfell Tower do not have any confidence that our building has been satisfactorily assessed to cope with the new improvement works.”

Angry that their concerns appeared to be falling on deaf ears, in June 2016 the residents association attended the council’s housing and property scrutiny committee and let rip. They presented a survey suggesting that 90% of them were unhappy with the improvement works and that 68% of them believed they had been lied to, threatened or pressured by KCTMO, which they accused of serial incompetence.

In a horribly prescient blog post, written last November, they said that they had “reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation”.

Time, and a public inquiry, will help establish whether a lax fire safety culture was operating at Grenfell Tower. But it is clear that the failures that resulted in last week’s catastrophic loss of life are not confined to one organisation or one London borough. Tragically for the victims, they were manifold, the consequences of systemic tensions that spring from trying to provide that most basic of needs – shelter – at a time when budgets are stretched and politicians’ priorities lie elsewhere.

On New Year’s Eve 2016 a huge fire ripped through Dubai’s luxury Address Downtown Hotel, a 72-storey tower that stands opposite the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. The Downtown blaze followed fires at two other landmark Dubai buildings, the Marina Torch and the Tamweel Tower.

As with fires that devastated buildings in other parts of the Middle East, China, France, Turkey, and now Grenfell Tower, the building’s exterior cladding is believed to have been a factor in the spread of the flames. But concerns about the increasing use of cheaper, synthetic composites in place of conventional construction materials, such as steel and concrete, are not new.

In 1991, the flammability of cladding was a key factor in the fire that destroyed an apartment block in Knowsley Heights, Liverpool. In 1999, expert witnesses to the environment, transport and regional affairs committee, including the Fire Brigades Union and the Loss Prevention Council – the technical advisers to the insurance industry – suggested that the guidelines on cladding were inadequate.

The Building Research Establishment, which advises the government on safety and carries out tests on construction materials, agreed that the existing guidance was “far from being totally adequate”.

Alarmed at the implications, the committee wrote to councils asking to “receive from you assurances that any cladding systems which may be used on any buildings, particularly multistorey tower blocks, in your area are not in any way susceptible to the risk of serious fire spread on the face of, or immediately behind the cladding”.

But this latest alarm bell – clearly ringing – did not stop the trend for cladding the outside of Britain’s ageing tower blocks. Not only did cladding help insulate the towers, allowing governments to meet energy-saving targets, it transformed the concrete behemoths that mushroomed across urban Britain in the 60s and 70s and were viewed as unsightly compared with their glass-and-steel successors.

Grenfell Tower’s £10m makeover saw it encased in aluminium composite panels that have a synthetic core and are manufactured by a subsidiary of a US firm, Arconic. Some of the more expensive cores are more fire resistant but Grenfell was fitted with a cheaper version, banned in the US for taller buildings because of safety concerns. Some estimates suggest that the additional cost of fitting the fire-resistant product would have been as little as £5,000.

Rydon, the contractor that oversaw the renovations, having taken the contract from another firm, Leadbitter, whose original £11.6m quote for the job was considered too high, insisted that the work met all fire regulations. And Harley Facades, the company that fitted the panels, said in a statement shortly after the fire: “We are not aware of any link between the fire and the exterior cladding to the tower.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Firefighters inside the charred remains of Grenfell Tower on Saturday 17 June. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

But David Sibert, fire safety adviser to the Fire Brigades Union, said: “It appears from what we’ve seen that the cladding certainly did play a part. It may be fully compliant with the legislation and the problem may be with the tests that are linked to the legislation.”

Put simply, small-scale laboratory tests may not be able to reproduce the true effects of a blaze at a tower block. Sibert asked: “Does the way a material is installed in a test replicate the way it is installed in real life? There may be gaps when it’s installed between one piece and another, whereas just one solid piece is tested.”

Grenfell’s makeover, however, was not just an external job. A communal heating system was installed, and new gas pipes were fitted in the stairwells. Did this have consequences for the tower’s communal areas?

“I would be interested to know why it was that the corridors and staircases became smoke-logged,” Sibert said. “If you had a single fire in a single flat, if the building works properly, there should be virtually no smoke in the corridor and no smoke in the staircases. If there is smoke it suggests there is something wrong with the compartmentation.”

A fire last April at another property managed by KCTMO, the 31-storey Trellick Tower, suggests there was something catastrophically different about the design of Grenfell Tower. According to the council’s minutes, the Trellick fire “did not spread and was contained within... indicating that the levels of compartmentation – both between neighbouring flats and also between the flat and the communal areas – are of the required level”.

In a newsletter to residents, dated May 2016, KCTMO and Rydon jointly explained that the tower’s “smoke detection systems have been upgraded and extended”. But some residents claim the alarms failed to go off.

The Metropolitan police last night said that 58 people had either died in Grenfell Tower or were “missing, presumed dead”. The tragedy has raised fears about safety at the rest of the UK’s 4,000 or so tower blocks and, in particular, the 87 that are clad with similar materials to Grenfell Tower.

A fire caused by a faulty tumble drier at a social housing tower block, in nearby Shepherd’s Bush raised concerns about the flammability of modern construction materials as recently as last August.

Last October, the London fire brigade wrote to Hammersmith and Fulham council explaining that it had witnessed tests that raised concerns about the insulation material that had been used in the Shepherd’s Bush tower’s panelling.

“Once exposed, the insulation, as well as the wooden backing, appears to contribute to the combustion process, potentially increasing the size of the flames and fire. Therefore the facade system may have contributed to the external fire spread.”

In a letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the council responded: “We are surprised to be informed of any fire risk associated with the facade panels, as we had no knowledge of this prior to your letter. We invite you to confirm who carried out the testing referred to, as you appear only to have witnessed it.”

Fear that councils were ignorant of the fire risks associated with tower blocks prompted the government’s chief fire and rescue adviser to recommend to the London Assembly in 2010 that “an extensive programme of auditing of ... high-rise blocks should be undertaken to determine whether or not suitable and sufficient fire-risk assessments were in place.” It is not known if the borough of Kensington and Chelsea acted on this advice.

The recommendation followed the 2009 fire at Lakanal House, a tower block in Southwark, south London, which killed six people. In 2013, Frances Kirkham, the coroner who conducted the inquest, outlined several suggestions as to how a similar tragedy could be avoided. in the future.

Kirkham said there was a need to resolve conflicting guidance for those in high-rise blocks as to whether they should “stay put” or “get out, stay out”. Fire safety notices told Grenfell Tower residents to stay put. Several believe they are alive only because they ignored this advice.

Kirkham also recommended that the government encourage councils to retrofit sprinklers in tower blocks. But the government saw this as an unnecessary burden and suggested instead that it be left to the fire industry to “encourage their wider installation”.

This was a tragic missed opportunity, according to Sibert. “If the building had been provided with sprinklers then that fire, if it started in the kitchen, would never have got out of the kitchen and nobody except the firefighters who would have gone there to mop up would have known about it.”

Sprinklers were retrofitted in a similar tower at Callow Mount in Sheffield two years ago at a cost of £1,100 per flat. The Fire Brigades Union claims there has never been a multiple death in a building fitted with sprinklers.

In Wales, any new residential accommodation must have sprinklers, but in England this rule applies only to blocks of flats more than 30 metres high. “And if it’s for students or student nurses it doesn’t need sprinklers because they are classed as ‘other residential’,” Sibert said. “That’s a piece of nonsense that needs sorting out.” In her recommendations, Kirkham acknowledged the need to overhaul building regulations governing fire safety, something others agree is long overdue.

“We have been signalling for years that the building regulations were not robust enough and we were ignored by government after government,” Baroness Brinton, the Lib Dem peer who sits on the all-party parliamentary group on fire safety, told the Observer.

In 2015, the then communities minister, Stephen Williams, told parliament that a review of building regulations would be delivered before the end of the financial, year 2016-17. But three successive housing ministers – including Gavin Barwell, the prime minister’s new chief of staff – have failed to deliver on the promise. “The review hasn’t started,” Sibert explained. “It’s being kicked down the road.”

Whitehall insiders suspect that civil servants have been diverted away from the review to other, ostensibly more pressing issues, chiefly the need to deliver Brexit. In the lacuna, policing the archaic building regulations has been hampered by the need for local authorities to make savings.

A 2014 report by the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority warned of the consequences of councils’ in-house building control teams having to compete against private contractors. The authority said: “The fact that there is competition puts pressure into the system, by potentially diminishing rigour in an effort to win work. Some in-house teams express fear that their own council colleague project officers could choose other providers. Projects are signed off before they should be because of pressure for schemes to be completed.”

Historically, an additional level of oversight has been provided by the fire service’s fire safety departments who carry out on-site inspections. But it is estimated that the number of dedicated inspectors has halved in the last decade as the government has looked to make savings. Sibert said: “In order to protect the front line – firefighters on the engines – fire safety departments were among the first to be cut to save money.”

Now the rationale for those cuts is under scrutiny and the anger being trained on a paralysed Westminster is giving way to fury. As someone tweeted: “Cost of general election £130m. Additional cost of fire resistant cladding for Grenfell Tower: £5,000.”