Kensington and Chelsea council is set to spend £3.5m replacing 4,000 fire doors in all its social housing after the Grenfell Tower blaze.
A police investigation found in March that doors used in the tower failed tests and could resist fire for only 15 minutes, instead of the 30 minutes required by building regulations guidance.
Earlier this month, James Brokenshire, the housing secretary, said all Manse doors – the kind used in the tower – across the country must to be replaced, but insisted the “risk to public safety remains low”.
However, a spokesman for Kensington and Chelsea said the council believed the replacement programme must be started “as a matter of urgency”.
“All of the new doors will meet the 30-minute requirement but, given the issue with Manse Masterdor units, the council will send the new doors for independent testing so that we can be 100% sure the doors will resist fire for at least 30 minutes,” he said.
“Saving lives is our single priority. We are taking nothing for granted.”
The final decision to replace doors across the borough will be made by councillors on 6 June.
The news came as the council was heavily criticised in a report commissioned by the voluntary sector organisations that led the response to the blaze.
The review, commissioned by the charity Muslim Aid, concluded that the response of local authorities was slow and lacked direction, and voluntary organisations had had to step in.
The institutional reaction to the disaster was “badly flawed in the first crucial days and the damage that resulted has been difficult to repair”, the report said, adding that the voluntary sector was “very much on the frontline”.
Muslim Aid’s chief executive, Jehangir Malik, who coordinated volunteers in the aftermath of the fire on 14 June last year, said: “I would have expected this chaos in a developing country, because almost always there is poor infrastructure. I honestly thought we had better disaster preparedness and response systems here in the UK.”
The report, conducted in partnership with other voluntary organisations including Notting Hill Methodist church and the Rugby Portobello Trust, concluded: “With many of the consequences of the fire still unresolved, it is vital that future action is informed by what has been learnt from the response so far.”
The disaster “must be a wake-up call to those in a position to effect change,” it said.
A spokesperson for the council said: “We are committed to learning the lessons from the Grenfell tragedy and therefore we welcome this report as part of the learning process.
“However, it is not right for the council to comment in detail at this stage – this is a matter for the public inquiry which is reviewing the events around the council’s response to the tragedy.
“It is our responsibility to ensure that the whole, unvarnished truth is told so that lessons can be learned and to ensure that such a tragedy can never happen again. We will work with the inquiry to ensure this happens.”
Andrew O’Hagan, the editor at large of the London Review of Books, has criticised the fire service’s response, saying it was “not a great night” for the organisation.
He spent 10 months interviewing survivors, council workers, local politicians, firefighters and activists for a 65,000-word investigation into the fire and the political aftermath, which is published in full in the latest issue of the magazine.
“Chief among the failures” of the fire service was its stay-put policy, O’Hagan said.
“People in the emergency services on the phone and in person advised people in Grenfell Tower to stay in their flats long after it became obvious that the fire spread on that night was happening outside the building,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“Anybody inside the building was in fatal danger and the building should have been evacuated as soon as possible.”
He said it had been easy to point the finger at the Conservative-run council for people who did not agree with it politically, but when the evidence was examined forensically, Kensington and Chelsea did its best and “responded as well as they could”.
“Much of that understandable dismay and anger that we all started out with [at the council] didn’t stand up to the evidence,” O’Hagan said.
A London fire brigade spokesperson said: “Due to the ongoing police investigation and public inquiry, we cannot go into details of what happened on the night, as to do so risks prejudicing both investigations.
“London fire brigade is focused on supporting the official inquiry and ongoing police investigation to ensure everyone affected, especially the Grenfell community, understand exactly what happened.”
