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Four Years After GrenfellHundreds of Millions SpentYet No Justice Has Been Seen
Kensington and Chelsea council has spent £500 million on Grenfell funding since the fire, yet mistrust abounds as the process of justice drags slowly on, writes former local MP Emma Dent Coad
I was surprised to hear one of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) Council’s leadership team on BBC Radio 4 this week.
In the few moments before they spoke, I wondered if they might say something about the Grenfell Tower fire – the fourth anniversary of which is today – the ongoing struggles of so many North Kensington residents, and the apocalyptic, ongoing crisis of countrywide flammable cladding.
But no. One of the senior figures in a council under investigation for the corporate manslaughter of 72 of my neighbours, a council still struggling to keep its tenants safe from fire hazards, spoke to the nation about – supercars.
It appeared as though the concerns of people living in Knightsbridge and Holland Park, who are driven to distraction by drivers racing supercars around residential streets, are considered by the council to be on a higher plane than my bereaved and traumatised neighbours.
I’m pleased that the council is tackling dangerous drivers and noisy cars, but there are more pressing issues at hand.
Indeed, there has been growing concern since the Summer of 2017 about how Grenfell-related spending has and has not been spent. A number of local groups still put on voluntary services to help struggling people in the area to receive food, clothing and essentials for babies and young children. There are 23 food banks in Kensington and Chelsea, some of which deliver hot food to the most vulnerable people, and one that also runs a ‘baby bank’.
Some of these groups receive some backup funding from the council, some have asked but haven’t received, and others refuse to accept money from the people they see as responsible for the fire. There is a voluntary cast of hundreds, filling in the gaps that local statutory services – and our supposed welfare state – do not provide.
There is also a small army of paid officers providing support to the bereaved and the survivors of the Grenfell fire, and to others in the community who have been affected. The council’s Grenfell team is 300-strong. Yet RBKC is unique in having more than 30 senior directors, whereas the well-run Hammersmith and Fulham Council has 13. What do ours actually do, when we see so little meaningful improvement to the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable?
People have similarly been irked by the huge sums spent by the council on premises for various purposes, many of which have barely been used over the last year. There is a general mistrust of the system, and whether those in most need are actually receiving what they need.
Last month, after a great deal of lobbying from myself and others, the council’s Audit and Transparency Committee, of which I am a member, published a ‘complete’ report on Grenfell-related funding. It was anything but.
Frustratingly, a lot of the detail that residents and representatives were hoping for, simply wasn’t included. We sought a breakdown of staff – how many at which pay grade – information on the use of various offices and sites, some explanation of the various organisations with ‘Grenfell’ in their name and whether they are run by the council, or charities, or campaign groups.
Around half a billion pounds has been spent, yet we still have residents desperate for food, and clothes, and nappies. Innumerable families had no access to IT at home during the lockdown, or even enough funds to pay for broadband.
Who on earth is in charge of strategic overview? Who, indeed, is in charge at all?
I watch as much of the Grenfell public inquiry as I can bear. Some days I’m gripped, other days I reach boiling point too soon, listening to the defensive, possibly misleading witness statements of those who knew, or averted their eyes, in the months and years before the fire.
As the months have gone by, many residents have reached the point of despair. Why has no one been arrested? Why is no one in jail? How can these people sleep at night? Everyone – from former ministers who refused to answer questions on fire safety, to the ‘fire safety assessor’ who lied about his qualifications – is culpable. But will they also be deemed accountable, in the eyes of the Crown Prosecution Service, when the police investigation takes its course next year? Or indeed guilty, when cases go to court?
I visited Scotland Yard in 2018, when I was a Member of Parliament. At the time, there were 200 officers sifting through literally millions of documents, emails and transcripts. The result, often shocking, of that sifting has been seen at the inquiry, where some appalling comments have been aired, and the authors called to account.
The police investigation is estimated to have cost £100 million. While I constantly have to remind people that it is the police investigation that will bring justice, we are, of course, worried that the charge of corporate manslaughter, for an organisation spending a small fortune on legal advice, will be hard to prove.
In the meantime, if the council wants to squeeze any vestige of integrity from its solid record of insolence and disdain, it should refuse interviews on the BBC about supercars, so as not to appear utterly vacuous, in the week before the fourth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire.
Emma Dent Coad was the Labour Member of Parliament for Kensington from 2017 to 2019 and is currently a Labour Party councillor in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea