The fire that broke out at the New Providence Wharf block in east London on 7 May 2021 shows that no lessons have been learned from the 2017 Grenfell fire. Work has yet to start to remove combustible aluminium composite cladding from the New Providence development’s façade, nearly four years since the disaster at the west London tower block that killed 72 people. Its smoke detection system failed, meaning fire doors did not close and black smoke filled communal areas, reaching as high as the 18th floor. Residents had to go door-to-door to wake neighbours, organising their own evacuation. Hundreds of leaseholders have since staged protests, demanding the builder, Ballymore, put a freeze on all construction until safety issues are sorted out. In 2013, at the inquest into the 2009 Lakanal House fire in south London that killed his wife and three young children, Mbet Uduoka said: ‘We fear very much that lessons have not been learned and that it could happen again.’ And again and again, under a capitalist housing system where human life counts for little in the drive to accumulate ever more profit.
Grenfell: contempt for the working class
The Grenfell Inquiry,* now in its 35th week, has already shown how contractors did slipshod work, demonstrating total contempt for the safety of residents. How manufacturers knowingly marketed dangerous products, using corrupt and incompetent privatised testing agencies to get fake certification. How lax building regulations allowed them to do so. And how at every stage, those responsible for the welfare of the residents of Grenfell Tower failed and failed again, driven by contempt for working class lives, penny-pinching by Kensington and Chelsea Council and its KCTMO housing management organisation, and the greed, negligence and sheer criminality of every contractor and manufacturer engaged on the project.
The underlying fear and hatred of the Conservative council – the richest in the country – for the working class of north Kensington was palpable when the RCG first organised in the area in the aftermath of the 2017 fire. At the first council meeting after the fire, hundreds of angry and bereaved local people were herded into locked galleries away from terrified councillors who hissed ‘Don’t let them in!’ One survivor bitterly accused the councillors of wanting to sweep them under the carpet, ‘like cockroaches’.
It is clear from evidence at the Inquiry over the last two months that the same attitude had characterised relations between those in charge of housing in the borough and the residents of Grenfell Tower for years. Those who attempted to organise collectively to raise concerns about safety and the future of their homes were subjected to systematic intimidation and bullying, in particular the Grenfell Action Group led by Edward Daffarn and David Collins. In 2010 a fire in the tower lobby filled the staircases with thick black smoke. The head of the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders’ Association, Shah Ahmed, whose wife sustained injuries from smoke inhalation, wrote to the KCTMO: ‘With its interior staircase and malfunctioning ventilation, there is certainly a high probability that in the event of another fire the whole building can become an inferno’. He was threatened with the forfeiture of his lease. Other residents spoke of frequent failures of lifts, hot water – sometimes any running water at all – mould, infestations of silverfish and leaks that were never adequately dealt with, alongside an exhausting, unresponsive complaints procedure. One resident, Betty Kasote, told the inquiry that if she complained she was treated like a troublemaker.
The KCTMO refused to recognise the residents’ group formed in response to the refurbishment. When the group presented a petition calling for an investigation into the refurbishment, the KCTMO instead conducted an internal review at the end of which they congratulated themselves and their cowboy contractor Rydon on a job well done. By 2017, the KCTMO’s relationship with Daffarn was so hostile that when he reported a malfunctioning self-closer on a fire door on a neighbour’s flat, they accused him of lying. It was never fixed. The floor filled with smoke on the night of the fire and two people died; Daffarn himself only just escaped. As he told the inquiry, residents who raised concerns faced threats, harassment and lies. As he publicised serious safety issues on his blog, the council and KCTMO suggested investigating his tenancy status in the hope of threatening him with eviction; senior KCTMO executive Peter Maddison sought advice as to whether the blog could be considered libellous. The attitude is summed up by the Conservative councillor Quentin Marshall, who chaired the scrutiny committee that absolved the KCTMO of wrongdoing. The refurbishment, he wrote to the local MP, ‘is essentially a £100k gift from the state. I’m therefore not massively sympathetic to complaints that “it’s all terrible”’. Residents’ concerns, he added ‘should be taken with a large pinch of salt’.
The residents, as the inquiry has shown, were entirely correct to be alarmed. Daffarn asked if the architects in charge of the refurbishment, Studio E, had experience with tower blocks. He was never told it was their first ever high-rise project. In 2013, residents complained about frequent power surges that set off electrical fires in their flats; they were ignored. The Grenfell inferno was sparked by a small electrical fire. They queried the irrational renumbering of floors after new basement flats were added, and the lack of a premises information box containing lists of residents and floor plans – vital for emergency services in case of fire and requested on many occasions by the fire brigade. The lack of such information severely hampered firefighters’ ability to reach residents on the night of the fire. The families of elderly or disabled residents on the 22nd and 23rd floors said whenever the lifts broke down they were completely stranded for hours or days. Yet no evacuation plan for vulnerable residents was ever discussed with them. As one told the inquiry, ‘It made me feel they did not care’.
The council and KCTMO did not care. They had no interest in the welfare of their working class residents. Indeed, they saw them as an unprofitable nuisance. As the inquiry revealed, what did interest the then leader of the council, Nicholas Paget-Brown, and his deputy, Rock Feilding-Mellen, was ‘estate regeneration’. What they really wanted was the entire Lancaster West council estate razed to the ground, its residents decanted and the area profitably ‘regenerated’. Grenfell Tower itself was seen as ‘a blight’ on the area. Feilding-Mellen was initially opposed to any investment in the estate whatsoever. He eventually accepted the ‘refurbishment’ of the tower as a short-term fix, on condition it did not thwart his longer-term ambition to eradicate the blight of council housing for good. The fatal cost-cutting – the notorious ‘good costs for Councillor Feilding-Mellen’ – were built into the project before it even started. As has been documented, Feilding-Mellen was more interested in the colour of the cladding than in its combustibility. He never read London Fire Brigade (LFB) guidance on the fire risks of refurbishments, based on the recommendations of the Lakanal coroner, that was circulated to councils in 2013. In 2015, Paget-Brown simply passed further guidance on combustible materials and fire hazards to the planning department. He did not, he told the inquiry, feel he needed to flag it up to the Grenfell refurbishment team as work was already underway. The council’s head of housing, Laura Johnson, also admitted failing to act on any of the post-Lakanal recommendations. In addition, the council ignored an LFB directive for councils to check that fire-safety measures, such as self-closing doors, were in place and fit for purpose, following a fire in another west London block. In October 2015, Johnson specifically rejected a fire brigade request to investigate self-closers on fire doors across the council’s housing stock on grounds of cost. In October 2016, senior executives mulled ‘How can we best transfer responsibility for maintenance of fire doors onto the tenants?’
Kensington and Chelsea is not alone in its dereliction of duty. In December 2020, the LFB served a deficiency notice to Labour-run Southwark Council over Lakanal House’s sister block, which still has the same combustible panels under its windows. Councils’ contempt for the safety of their tenants is widespread. Most recently an ITV investigation led to Labour-run Croydon Council being found to have breached statutory housing standards with some of its homes ‘uninhabitable and unsafe’, with tenants at ‘risk of serious harm’. The council was found to have shown ‘a lack of care and respect for residents’. Other councils found to have breached standards in recent years include the Labour-run councils of Lambeth in south London and Gateshead in northeast England.
The cladding scandal
Meanwhile, the ripples from the Grenfell fire spread wide. Four years on, at least 300 residential housing blocks – containing more than 23,000 homes – still have dangerous cladding. Additionally, belated investigations have revealed the dangerous, corner-cutting building culture that continues across the country. ‘Inadequate regulations and shoddy building practices over the past four decades may have rendered as many as 1.5 million – or 5% – of Britain’s residential buildings unsafe’ (Financial Times, 30 March 2021). Many new-build residential properties, for private sale, have been revealed to have neither the built-in firebreaks nor the fire doors required by law. Hundreds of thousands of people are now not only living in dangerous conditions but facing astronomical costs to remedy the problem. MPs voted five times to reject any attempt to amend the Fire Safety Bill to provide financial support for leaseholders facing ruinous costs for the replacement of flammable cladding. There is a fund of £5bn to support leaseholders in taller tower blocks, (although the real cost of replacing the cladding could be three times that amount). For leaseholders in blocks under 18 metres high there is not even inadequate support. While the burden is supposed to fall on the freeholder, many owners are opaque overseas companies that can easily resist their responsibilities; besides, Britain’s leasehold law allows landlords to recover costs for ‘reasonable works’ through the annual service charge; a refusal to pay up can lead to forfeiture of the lease, with the landlord selling the property on to cover the costs. There are options for grants or loans – but only for cladding, not for other fire hazards. There is a growing demand for the country’s biggest housebuilders – which have amassed joint cumulative profits of £9bn since the Grenfell fire four years ago – to meet the costs of their shoddy workmanship. But with the property and construction industry having donated more than £11m to the Conservative Party in the last year, it seems unlikely such calls will be realised. These leaseholders are not, in the main, wealthy homeowners. Two thirds of households affected have an annual income of less than £50,000, and face bills of an estimated £49,000 per flat. These better-off sections of the working class and young middle class professionals were sold the capitalist dream of homeownership, but face instead an interminable nightmare of debt, danger and potential eviction, trapped in homes they can no longer sell.
The housing crisis is squeezing the working class on every side. The poorest are trapped in unsafe council housing increasingly left to rot by councils only interested in demolishing it, or overcrowded, slum-like private rented accommodation. But increasingly even better off sections of the working class, especially the young, are forced into the insecurity and expense of the private rented sector, with home ownership either an unaffordable option or, as we have seen, an unsafe and unsustainable one. Even sections of the ruling class are expressing alarm at the ‘intergenerational and other forms of inequality’ that flow from the housing crisis (Financial Times, 21 March 2021). But their solutions are built on sand. Capitalism in crisis cannot meet the housing needs of the mass of the working class. We have to organise and fight for it.
Cat Wiener
* For a weekly digest of the Grenfell Inquiry, see www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/grenfell-tower-inquiry-diary
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 282, June/July 2021
