KCTMO | >Re-PHOTO

Grenfell Councillors Visited – Five and a half months after the terrible fire at Grenfell tower the local council responsible seemed still to be doing little to rehouse those displaced and there had been no criminal charges brought. A small group of local residents and supporters from the Revolutionary Communist Group took to the streets of North Kensington to try and call on councillors and ask questions. Of course six years later they are still waiting for justice – and it seems unlikely ever to happen. The British establishment has long practised ways of looking after its own.

Protesters visit Grenfell councillors – North Kensington

The group gathered at Latimer Road station in the early evening where they held a short rally. They then set off to march to the addresses of several councillors in the area, though most of the council come from the wealthier end of the borough rather than North Kensington.

I could have told them (and probably did) that they were wasting their time at the first address, that of Councillor Rock Feilding-Mellen, former deputy leader of Kensington Council and their cabinet member for housing in charge of the installation of the dangerous cladding which caused the fire to spread disastrously. He had urged the consultants in 2014 to cut the cost of the cladding leading to the safe zinc cladding specified being replaced with flammable panels – and he only worried about whether they were the right colour. Those making them were labelled as troublemakers (and worse.)

Other councillors were also involved in various decisions and lack of action, including deciding against an inspection of fire doors in properties in the borough that the London Fire Brigade had made a few months before the fire.

Seven major complaints made about safety by residents to through the Grenfell Action Group were detailed in evidence to the Grenfell inquiry; these were simply dismissed by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea officers and councillors and in particular by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) responsible under the council for the management of Grenfell and other properties in the borough.

Feilding-Mellen, elected as a councillor in 2010 was made Deputy Leader of Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) and Cabinet Member for Housing, Property and Regeneration in 2013 with no obvious qualification or experience for either position and began a campaign of social cleansing, to, in his words, “wean people off” living in social housing in the borough.

He cut the council’s housing waiting list in half, removed the right of residents forced out of the borough in redevelopment schemes to return and began an aggressive campaign of removing social assets from North Kensington. Both North Kensington Library and Westway Information centre were sold at cut price to Notting Hill Prep School and the Isaac Newton Centre to Chepstow House Prep School.

Both Feilding-Mellen and council leader Nicholas Paget-Brown were forced to resign from their posts weeks after the fire, though both remained councillors. Feilding-Mellen moved out of his house not far from Grenfell Tower at the end of June, claiming there had been threats against him and vandalism. He was thought to have retreated to the safer climes of Chelsea Harbour, though his wealthy family have quite a few properties around the country and doubtless abroad. Feilding-Mellen’s evidence to the inquiry sickened many as it seemed greatly concerned with getting free publicity for his business interests in psychoactive substances, which includes offering supervised, legal psilocybin retreats in Jamaica and The Netherlands.

The protesters were more successful in their visit to councillor David Lindsay, a locally born Conservative councillor who is said to be genuinely community minded and respected in North Kensington and was elected as Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea for 2022-23. He came out from his home and talked with them, explaining he had no connection with housing before the fire and had gone down to Grenfell at 4am on the morning of the fire to open up a centre for those affected. He told them that the council were trying hard to find suitable accomodation for the survivors and had spent considerable sums in doing so. The local residents told him they felt the council had been and still was failing in its duties and were not satisfied with his answers.

Finally I went with them some way further south into to rather wealthier areas, stopping outside the house of a third councillor in Portland Road. If they were home they were in hiding, but a neighbour came out to to complain that the protesters were waking his children up, and saying that they shouldn’t protest here and shouldn’t protest at night, but should do so in the daytime when no one would be at home and affected by it. He was met with some very angry and rather rude responses – and the protest continued rather longer and much more noisily that it would otherwise have done.

The group then turned around to make its way back towards Grenfell Tower, but I left them. The Royal Borough doesn’t seem to spend a great deal on street lighting and the batteries in my LED light were failing. I’d taken enough photographs and I was cold and tired and needed to eat and get home to work on the pictures.

More pictures at Protesters visit Grenfell councillors.

Like many I woke up on the morning of 14th June 2017 to the news of a terrible fire that had engulfed a tower block in North Kensington with horrific stories of the death of so many trapped in the building, particularly on its upper floors. It had begun early in the morning after I had gone to bed and switched off my computer and phone, so I hadn’t got the text from an agency asking if I could go there. Clearly by the time I woke up to the morning news the area was swamped by the media and I decided not to add to the pressure on the survivors and the local residents who were traumatised by what they had seen and heard.

I was shocked by the news, but not surprised. It came after years when the government – particularly the coalition, but others too – had been attacking health and safety measures as ‘red tape’ and making cuts to the fire service, particularly in London, that I’d reported on. And after years of attacks by local and national governments on social housing. Though I was shocked to find that the London Fire Service, thanks to cuts made by the London Mayor Boris Johnson, now longer had an appliance to deal with fires in such high-rise buildings and had to call on the neighbouring suburban Surrey Fire Services for one.

I then knew enough about the design of such towers to understand that this fire should not have been possible. If design and building regulations had been followed it should have been confined to the flat were it started and quickly burned out. Instead the videos clearly showed its rapid spread up the outside of the buildings.

It took only a few weeks for the basic facts behind the fire to be discovered, with Architects for Social Housing in particular producing a straightforward account of the many faults, The Truth about Grenfell Tower on July 21st. Their report not only identified the various faults in the type of cladding and in particular its incorrect installation, but also of the lack of proper oversight in large schemes such as this and the culpability of local councillors and officers.

An unnamed senior architect stated at the end of a lengthy comment to ASH,

‘Since PFI was introduced by Thatcher we have a legacy of hundreds, if not thousands, of sub-standard buildings – schools, hospitals, police stations, etc – that the taxpayer is still paying extortionate rents for under the terms of the 30-year lease-back deal that is PFI. This is her legacy of cosy relationships between local authorities, quangos and their chummy contractors. It is a culture of de-regulation, of private profit before public good. Thomas Dan Smith, the Leader of Newcastle City Council from 1960 to 1965, went to gaol in 1974 for dodgy dealings with local authorities in property development, albeit from a different motivation; but what the public must demand and get now over the Grenfell Tower fire are criminal convictions, and soon.’
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2017/07/21/the-truth-about-grenfell-tower-a-report-by-architects-for-social-housing/

What should have followed in the next few months was the criminal trial of those responsible, after which there could perhaps have been a public inquiry in particular looking at the lessons to be learnt and the changes in laws required. Instead we got the usual empty rhetoric from politicians and and public inquiry that was set up in September 2017 but only began taking evidence in June 2018. Much of its first phase was concerned with trying to transfer responsibility from the faults of the building and those responsible for it onto the London Fire Brigade, who had acted heroically on the night and managed to rescue many, and in particular to demonises LFB’s Dany Cotton, who shortly afterwards took early retirement.

This report by retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, selected by Theresa May to lead the enquiry should and hopefully will be seen as an incredible indictment of our public inquiry system, which seems to exist to push issues into the very long grass and allow the guilty to escape any real judgement allowing them to spend millions on barristers to muddy the waters and save their skins. The firefighters and the survivors don’t have that protection.

The enquiry continues with some startling testimonies from those responsible for the defective refurbishment and councillors and officers as well as from residents. So far these broadly repeat and support the conclusions of the July 2017 ASH report – but it has taken almost 4 years longer. It’s hard to read some of the testimonies and not think that person should be in jail. But the chances of any justice for Grenfell still seem remote.

In the days after the fire I went on several protests and four days later made my way to see for myself and, like others pay my respects to the dead. The pictures with this article are from that visit. Since I’ve returned for some of the monthly silent walks and other protests in the area, though these have been suspended for Covid.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Tag: KCTMO

Grenfell 4 Years On – Still No Justice