A Tory housing chief with oversight of Grenfell Tower has admitted that the council “lacked humanity” in its dealings with residents before the 2017 fire that killed 72 people.
Quentin Marshall, chair of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s housing scrutiny committee, told the public inquiry into the disaster: “I don’t think we saw the bigger picture. I don’t think we addressed the emotional side and I think we lacked a little humanity … We could have done better.”
But the admission came after it emerged that he had personally dismissed residents’ complaints about refurbishment works as “grossly exaggerated”.
“We’re spending £100k per flat of public money to improve the building,” Marshall, a private banker, said in the email to Kensington’s Conservative MP, Victoria Borwick, in March 2016. “This is a massive level of support … For leaseholders in particular, this is essentially a £100k gift from the state. I’m therefore not massively sympathetic to general ‘It’s all terrible’ complaints.”
The council spent around £10m refurbishing Grenfell Tower, but costs on key elements such as the new cladding system were cut. Numerous faults in the building’s fire safety contributed to the death toll.
Discussing how to handle a petition from residents about how the works were carried out, Marshall said Ed Daffarn, a 16th-floor resident who predicted the disaster on the Grenfell Action Blog, made “wild and unsubstantiated claims”.
“We need to take some of what has been said with a large pinch of salt,” he told Borwick.
It also emerged that the London fire brigade warned the leader of the council that refurbishments could compromise fire safety and cause deaths, but he did not pass it on to housing officials in charge of works.
The deputy commissioner of the London fire brigade, Rita Dexter, told Nicholas Paget-Brown, then council leader, in 2015 of “a serious risk to the safety of residents” caused by refurbishment and urged the council to devise a “strategy for assessing that risk and taking appropriate remedial action”.
But the Tory leader did not share the warning with his council’s tenant management organisation, its director of housing or the cabinet member responsible for housing, all engaged at the time in the refurbishment of Grenfell.
Paget-Brown said he believed fire safety at the 24-storey block was “being taken care of” because there was a fire safety consultant working on the project team. But he said in retrospect: “Perhaps I should have done that.” As a result, the tenants’ management organisation, which was overseeing the works, did not carry out the audit to check fire safety would not deteriorate as the fire chief had requested.
Dexter highlighted several case studies which showed refurbishments had caused compartmentation failures due to breaches by pipework, problems with smoke extraction and missing fire stopping – all factors the inquiry has already found aided the spread of fire and smoke at Grenfell Tower.
Paget-Brown passed on the warning to the councillor responsible for community safety and the planning department, assuming that planners check whether building works cause fire risks, which is not always the case.
The missed opportunity emerged as Paget-Brown also gave evidence about his attitude towards Daffarn.
The inquiry heard that Paget-Brown met Daffarn but found some of his complaints about the council’s treatment of tenants in the poorer north of the borough “over-hyped” and in some cases “inaccurate and wrong”.
In 2013 Paget-Brown said he was thinking about whether to demolish and rebuild the estate and in one letter to him, Daffarn claimed the council had a “a fascist decant policy”, which Paget-Brown said was “ludicrous”. But Paget-Brown expressed surprise when the counsel to the inquiry, Richard Millett QC showed him that the decant policy in fact did not include an absolute right of return for residents.
Before one of their meetings, Daffarn told the leader’s office that he and other residents wanted to discuss “how the council can allow us to live in near slum-like conditions while spending £30m on paving stones for Exhibition Road and indulging the £1m subsidy of opera in Holland Park”.
“We would wish to talk about how we are treated by your landlord, the TMO [tenant management organisation], and also about the future threat of social cleansing to our community.”
Paget-Brown strongly denied social cleansing. In January 2014 Paget wrote to Daffarn regretting that “we appear to have exhausted constructive dialogue on how to improve the estate” and accusing Daffarn of “wild and inaccurate allegations about what the council is planning to do”.
Eight months before the fire, Daffarn wrote on the Grenfell Action Blog that the KCTMO’s “sordid collusion with the RBKC council is a recipe for a future major disaster”.
Asked by Millet if there was anything he would do differently, Paget-Brown said it was clear councils should be running housing directly and not through “arm’s length” organisations such as the TMO.
Referring to the combustible cladding, he said: “This is a systemic failure, this material is in widespread use everywhere.”
“I am desperately sorry for everybody who was in the tower on the morning of the 14th of June,” he said. “I will never forget what I saw. It was utterly terrible. The memorial to those that lost their lives must be that the work that this inquiry is doing to find out what really happened can never happen again.”
The inquiry continues.
