It was an announcement that seemed either designed to inflame the publicor utterly tin-eared in its belligerence. On Thursday, the Kensington and Chelsea council announced in their agenda for that evening’s cabinet meeting that the session would be held in private, with only invited guests allowed.
Residents of Grenfell Tower and surrounding Lancaster West estate told me they were furious at being excluded, seeing the excuse – that there was fear of “disruption” – as an insinuation their anger was unjustified and unseemly. Those who survived and those who still live in the shadow of the tower want answers, and feel the council has been muted, defensive and has kept survivors at arm’s length. This cabinet decision further underlines this assumption.
And no wonder people are angry – the responses from figures of authority were shocking before, and have been appalling afterwards. Delays in finding temporary accommodation for survivors, issuing payments and documents, a lack of council staff on the ground until complaints grew, and few visible after. May’s initial lack of response and her insistence on not meeting survivors on her first visit, fleeing a church on her second, then only meeting residents in Downing Street on her terms, has for some residents, projected an image of either disinterest or contempt. It’s clear that the state, both in terms of the government and the local authority, have let the people down every step of the way.
That anger has spilled out, across the entire country. As councils and housing associations scramble to send cladding and insulation samples to government labs, more and more people are concerned for their safety and are asking how they were put at risk in the first place. There are questions around precisely how the government is testing the panels: they may be applying higher fire safety standards, in which case, why weren’t these standards in place before? So far, the 100% failure rate doesn’t instil confidence in the ability of the building industry to safely house people, or the government to legislate appropriately, or local authorities to actively enforce safety standards.
Understandably, there is now a lack of trust in any institution from anyone affected by this housing scandal around the country. The slow response from the council and government, entwined with the fact that the much-publicised, “bonfire of red tape” (crassly monikered in retrospect) seems to have, if not caused the fire, exacerbated the conditions under which it raged so ceaselessly.
Much has been made of rumours and alleged conspiracy theories around Grenfell, with less regard for where such stories spring from, or why they have captured people’s imaginations. In the absence of clear information, locals filled the gaps with snippets of what they’d heard. Combined with a lack of trust in every agency tasked with coordinating the relief efforts, it’s obvious why official information has been ignored or questioned.
The police count for those dead and missing and presumed dead is under scrutiny at the moment. The Met’s response – that they are using Interpol protocols for disaster response – makes sense in terms of administration, but does nothing to address the uniqueness of the situation, or the feelings of the community. In most disasters, bodies are more easily recovered, or there is a clear record of who was involved. In Grenfell, this is not the case for either. Meanwhile, the community and much of the public understandably feel that the magnitude of the disaster is being downplayed. For the police to break protocol, and issue a parameter of estimates would assuage some of the doubts of those concerned.
It will take a long time to rebuild this lost trust. We already knew the government cared little for those stung by the housing crisis and that making homes fit for habitation wasn’t a priority – now we also know that builders and retrofitters weren’t just refurbishing and constructing on the cheap, but actively risking lives. For every level of government to rebuild trust, a huge overhaul of society’s attitude to housing – especially housing poorer communities – is needed. With every day that passes, and every new revelation, the case for a new promise on housing grows: keeping up the pressure will make it even harder to ignore.
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