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Sam Bright speaks to survivors and the bereaved, who believe that funds allocated to help them following the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire have been squandered by a council they compare to the ‘Mafia’
Mariko was physically dragged out of her home on the morning of 14 June 2017, her legs pounding against the exit stairway of the building.
A fire had started not long after midnight in flat 16, situated on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower, which in a few hours turned into a deadly inferno. By the time the sun rose over north Kensington, west London, the block of flats had been incinerated – with only a smouldering shell remaining.
The fire had been allowed to spread due to several defects with the building, it is claimed – flammable cladding and insulation, the absence of a sprinkler system, and insufficient cavity barriers.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, there was an unrivalled outpouring of collective grief. Families across Britain stared at the news in horror, as reporters informed the nation that 72 people had died in the blaze, stranded on stairwells or trapped in their flats, with countless more injured. Within 48 hours, two crowdfunding campaigns for the families of the victims had received a total of £2 million.
“I have fixed a deadline of three weeks for everybody affected to be found a home near by,” the then Prime Minister Theresa May said on 17 June. “The fire at Grenfell Tower was an unimaginable tragedy for the community, and for our country. My Government will do whatever it takes to help those affected, get justice and keep our people safe.”
But this has not been the experience of Mariko.
Like many others, she was housed in a hotel while the rubble still steamed in her old home. The hotel room had two beds for a family of five – Mariko, her husband and their three children. Mariko, who is disabled and is unable to use her legs, was forced to sleep in her chair.
Hers was a disabled room, but it wasn’t fully adapted to her needs, meaning that she couldn’t take herself to the toilet. She regularly soiled herself.
Moved to a second hotel, a leak had sprung in Mariko’s room, tripping the electricity. She sought refuge in a local Chinese restaurant, after the council asked her to stay with a friend or relative, she says. Originally from Japan, with broken English, she had no one to call.
This process repeated over and over again, with Mariko’s family forced to live in hotels for 18 months after the fire.
She is now in a permanent flat, having moved in a year ago – but even that has come with problems. There have been five fires in the flat due to faulty appliances – including a sheet of paper lodged in the hob extractor that set alight one meal time. The smoke stains on the ceiling are traumatic for Mariko, who lives with the memories of the Grenfell Tower fire.
“Eventually I couldn’t go in my own kitchen,” Mariko says. “It was too upsetting.”
Responsibility for helping the bereaved and survivors has fallen on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) Council – an authority that is the subject of corporate manslaughter allegations, for its role in the structural defects that incubated the fire.
Yet, as political and public attention has slowly dissipated, many victims are still engaged in a belligerent, exhausting war with the council to provide for their basic needs.
Byline Times has spent the past fortnight speaking to the bereaved and survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, as well as the wider community. They claim that the RBKC has been squandering funds, ostensibly devoted to victims, while steadily marginalising dissenting voices.
The Grenfell Recovery Fund is a five-year £50 million budget, to be spent by the RBKC until 2024, designed to provide “services for bereaved and survivors and the wider community”.
The fund is roughly split into two pots: one for the bereaved and survivors, known as the Dedicated Services budget; and one for the wider community.
In 2019-20, £2.56 million of the £4.5 million Dedicated Services budget was spent on council staff salaries and council property costs. £601,000 alone was spent on “management” salaries, with a council spokesperson telling the Evening Standard last year that just two managers were employed with this budget.
Aside from managers, the staffing budget pays for dedicated workers who – in theory – act as personal agents for the survivors and the bereaved, fielding their requests and chasing up enquiries within the council. These individuals are paid in the range of £40,000 a year.
In contrast, the bereaved and survivors are granted a £1,000 budget every year if they are an adult, and £2,000 a year if they are a child. This money is not simply deposited in the accounts of the victims on a monthly or annual basis, however. The council controls how and when this budget can be spent.
“My dedicated worker gets paid her salary for supporting me, and she can spend it however she wants,” Maryam, a survivor of the fire, says. “Yet I don’t get to spend my money how I want. How is that fair? This causes all of us so much pain and grief.
“England is supposed to be the fairest country in the world, but here I have no rights. I feel like a slave, because a slave has no rights.”
The council has repeatedly insisted that survivors and the bereaved requested dedicated workers in the aftermath of the fire, and that feedback about the dedicated staff members is generally positive.
“The Dedicated Service provides tailored support to bereaved and survivors and we worked closely with them to co-design the service,” a council spokesperson said. “We heard clearly that people wanted named, dedicated workers to provide personalised support in recovery, including through the current pandemic. 97% of bereaved and survivors are accessing the service and 86% of people rated the support from their worker as good or very good over the last six months.”
A large chunk of the Dedicated Services budget, £595,000, is spent on property costs – namely two floors of office space in 17 Old Court Place, just a couple of minutes walk from Kensington High Street, yet nearly 40 minutes from the Lancaster West estate which housed Grenfell Tower.
17 Old Court Place is the epicentre of the council’s Grenfell operation, situated among luxury flats and corporate office blocks – a world away from the circumstances of the Grenfell community. What’s more, the building is adjacent to the local fire station. If you search for ’17 Old Court Place’ on Google Maps, you will see a fire truck within metres of the front door, as pictured below: