The fall out after London's Grenfell towers disaster continued over the weekend,

The blaze in the 24 storey block of flats claimed at least 80 lives after the exterior cladding caught fire. Over the weekend it was revealed that the firefighters had inadequate equipment and communication gear. Their procedures appear to insufficient for any high rise fire. Following the revelations the Mayor Sadiq Khan launched immediate steps to fix the processes rather than waiting for the results of an investigation, which remarkably is not scheduled to even start before September.

I saw all this after I read a letter to the editor in Saturday's Herald. The writer from Epsom noted that Nick Smith had expressed confidence that New Zealand does not have a cladding problem and if it does it could be easily fixed.

But then he pointed out something that's very concerning and that's the state of our internal firewalls. He lived in a multi storey building in New North road, Auckland, until he was forced out for leaky home remediation. The building only had a few leaks but when the walls came down it was found that fire regulations requiring firewalls between apartments had not been complied with.

So instead of fixing a few leaks the whole building essentially had to be re-built internally. He knows of another case in Symonds Street where the problem was so bad that the work was abandoned.

Now I know this. I've talked to planners, council officers and lawyers over past months who have told me the problem is widespread. The real issue is not the absence of firewalls but the quality of the internal cladding which in the opinion of many doesn't come up to standard. The danger in these buildings is not a fire that rages up the outside of the building but one that consumes the interior which would be even harder to escape from.

Now this enrages me. Just as the leaky building issue enrages me. You can point fingers at manufacturers of building products. You can blame council inspectors. You can criticise the architects and the engineers. But at the end of the day it's the guys and girls who build the buildings with their bare hands who I'm angriest with.

If you're a builder or construction worker I would have thought it was a matter of personal pride and responsibility to build homes that don't leak but most of all not to build homes for families that are firetraps.

The leaky building fiasco is the biggest scandal of recent times in my book. It's a failure of our building industry which is a fundamental part of society. If there's a fiery home fiasco looming I'm going to be livid.