The residents of the Grenfell Tower block have been failed and betrayed by the local council, the new Labour MP for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, has said, expressing fury at the way Kensington and Chelsea treats its social housing tenants.
She said residents made homeless by the fire were increasingly concerned that they would be rehoused outside of the borough, in cheaper places far from London such Hastings or Peterborough where the council has tried to rehouse tenants previously.
Having campaigned against poor social housing in the borough for decades and documented the poor quality of estate redevelopment schemes, she said: “I can’t help thinking that poor quality materials and construction standards may have played a part in this hideous and unforgivable event.”
Dent Coad won the historically Conservative seat for Labour by just 20 votes in the general election, on the back of a campaign that highlighted the need to fight against the council’s gentrification agenda. She said there was a clear link between the council’s determination to redevelop the area, to build new, non-social housing, and the tragedy.
“The council want to develop this area full of social housing, and in order to enable that they have prettified a building that they felt was ugly … The idea that that has led to this horrendous tragedy is just unthinkable.”
Dent Coad knows residents of the block, and is so distraught with worry about them that she has to stop speaking for a moment, but her primary response is extreme anger. “People in Grenfell Tower have been complaining that the aesthetic refit hadn’t helped them at all. It was more about making it look better for the people who want to regenerate the estate,” she said.
She said residents’ fear that they would not be rehoused in the area were fuelled by a longer-term conviction that the council’s redevelopment agenda was not motivated by a desire to improve social housing for the borough’s poorer residents. “There is real fear that the development of the estates is part of a social cleansing programme,” she said in an interview in her flat, just a few streets from the block.
She said she would be fighting in the coming days to ensure those affected by the tragedy were given permanent new homes in the borough and “not put in some mucky bedsit”. “People are very afraid of what is going to happen next. They need to be kept within Kensington. The fear I was hearing yesterday was ‘they’re going to send us to Peterborough or to Hastings’, all the other places that the council has tried to send them before.
People want to stay near their networks where their children go to school, where their families are. People are very angry. I don’t want to see social unrest coming from this, but there is a very difficult and angry atmosphere up there with the council,” she said.
She also criticised the council’s immediate response to the disaster. In the hours following the fire she was struck by the absence of official council presence in the refuge centres and churches that volunteers had opened. “There was no council presence. The council has issued press releases and we had the leader of the council and the deputy leader of the council wandering around giving press interviews. They weren’t making sure the relief effort was being coordinated.
“They weren’t making sure that people utterly traumatised who have lost family members and neighbours, or who thought they may have, that there was any kind of support for them. I’ve had people on the phone this morning saying we’ve got to get counsellors down here, people are beside themselves with grief, they are not coping and there’s no social support for them.”
She believes she won the election for Labour for the first time in the constituency’s history because even Conservative voters were fed up with the way the council treats its poorer residents. “We have a very rich council which spent £26m repaving Exhibition Road for tourists at the same time as it was closing nurseries, pruning youth clubs, closing older people’s lunch clubs, not investing in social care. I found that absolutely sickening. We have very large reserves, of around £300m.”
Her concern about building standards for social housing is based on documenting the quality of the recent redevelopment of the Wornington Green estate, where in the past three years she says she has seen ceilings of new houses collapse, plumbing failures, “water leaking through the walls because they hadn’t fitted a waterproof membrane, ceilings collapsing because rain got through the ceiling because the cladding hadn’t been fitted. Their vision for social housing means that they get away with poor construction and we have seen the effect of that elsewhere”.
She is also frustrated at the council’s poor record of listening to tenants’ concerns. “This fire was entirely preventable if they had listened to the people living in the building who had countless times demanded the Tenant Management Organisation and the council address the issues they were concerned about. They wrote to the council countless times. They have to listen to people.”
(TheGuardian UK)
