HORROR IN NORTH KENSINGTON

Our Neighbours on Lancaster West

One of my churchwardens lives on the Lancaster West Estate, in the low-rise flats at the foot of Grenfell Tower. In the early hours of Wednesday morning she saw terrible things, and it was obvious from the start that the number of deaths was going to be horrifyingly large. It happened at 1am, when the building will have been full, and really very few people were being treated in hospital. It is inconceivable that a blaze on that scale could not have resulted in scores of casualties, so the small numbers being treated in hospital was always a bad sign. Anyone could see from the television pictures that this was a horrific disaster.

Someone was speaking to me yesterday as though it were my parish, and I realised why that was: the Vicar of St Clement's, Notting Dale, (which is the parish church) is Fr Alan Everett. As far as we know, we are not related. Obviously, he and his people are in my prayers. Curiously, though, there is usually a sort of rivalry between our two neighbourhoods, "Ladbroke Grove" and "Harrow Road", and most local incidents of knife or gun crime are bad boys from one neighbourhood attacking bad boys from the other. People sometimes say this thing is on postcodes, but it's not quite as simple as that, because W10, the Ladbroke Grove postcode, extends way over into Queen's Park, across the canal and the Harrow Road, and the boys from the Mozart Estate in Queen's Park are always fighting the Ladbroke Grove boys. This postcode thing also means that things happening in "our" bit of W10 get described on the BBC as happening in North Kensington or Ladbroke Grove, which is always irritating. No thoughts of rivalry now, though, because people are united in grief and horror. This is a very transient neighbourhood, but nevertheless most people will know someone affected in some way, and the extraordinary and inspiring thing has been how vast and immediate the local response has been. People here really do care about what is happening to their neighbours, and you could see on Wednesday that this was making a real impression on the journalists covering the disaster. I was at a governors' meeting on Wednesday evening, and school parents had already begun bringing stuff to school, but then one of my fellow governors who works closely with one of the evangelical churches in Latimer Road reported that they were already snowed under with donations of stuff, which was remarkable to hear. The response from ordinary people has been magnificent.


K & C, and the TMO

The response from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has not been so magnificent, though. My churchwarden phoned the TMO as the fire was happening to get them to open up the estate's community hall, but after stalling, they said they couldn't locate anyone with the key. Not good. Cllr Nick Paget-Brown, the leader of K & C Council appeared on the "Today" programme at breakfast time on Wednesday and gave a deeply unimpressive performance, not even knowing how many flats were in the block, and seeming disengaged from the whole event. By yesterday K & C had put reception centres in place, but what was totally missing was any sense of co-ordination or leadership.

Cllr Paget-Brown has every reason to be worried, though, and I can understand it if his lawyers have told him to be very careful what he says, because this has happened on his watch, and he and Cllr Rock Feilding-Mellen, who is in charge of regeneration and housing and who (presumably) signed off personally on the plans for the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, and its satisfactory completion, are potentially in a very sticky situation. K & C continue to say that it would be premature to talk about the cladding, but anyone with eyes to see could interpret those television pictures. It is clear that the exterior cladding burnt. It seems very likely that the cladding was responsible for the horrifying speed of the progress of the fire, and the observable "torch" effect. They decided to put the cladding onto the building (yes, in pursuit of energy efficiency, which was a government policy, and to make flats warmer, which is a good thing) and they, crucially, chose which cladding to use and how to do it.

K & C will probably try to deflect attention on to the TMO, since that is the whole purpose of the TMO (and its sister organisations here in Westminster and in other boroughs), to insulate the Council from responsibility and unpopularity. I think they will find that it doesn't work, though, because residents certainly hate the TMO (and CityWest Homes here) but they hate the Council as well. These arm's-length organisations are a product of the (Conservative) ideological hatred of local government,and the belief that local authorities are automatically bad at running things, and a desire to take housing out of the reach of direct local democracy. For the resident, the TMO is just another layer of bureaucracy, and a device for evading responsibility. K & C will undoubtedly say that it was the TMO that made all the decisions, but the TMO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of K & C, which operates under K & C's policy guidelines, so that really won't wash. It is perhaps worth pointing out that building control and inspection is carried out by the local authority, so a K & C official will have certified the safety of this K & C building work; it would not be surprising if K & C tried to push responsibility down to this official, along with the contractor and the suppliers, but that really won't do. It is the contempt in which local people feel that they are held by K & C which leads them to conclude that responsibility rests high up in the chain of command. Local residents have got used to being neglected, and being regarded as troublemakers if they complain or question, and they feel that they are simply not valued because they are poor. People feel neglected and ignored, and they believe the reason is simply because they are not wealthy. If this is a crime, it has got K & C's fingerprints all over it. Now, perhaps, it becomes clear why Kensington elected a Labour MP last week.


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Meanwhile, on the Warwick Estate, we look up at our tower blocks, which were refurbished (by Wates) a few years ago and wonder. Flats got new balconies and kitchens, and there was cladding. Each block has just one staircase. My brother (who is a surveyor) tells me that the question to ask is whether there are fire stops through the cladding at each compartment separation, and what that fire stopping consists of. I expect that we shall be asking exactly that, loudly and often.