Council votes unanimously to end contract with body managing Grenfell Tower

By Tess de la Mare and Jemma Crew28th September 2017News EnglandGrenfell Tower, Housing / Homelessness, Local Authorities, News England, Social Housing

Kensington and Chelsea Council has voted unanimously to end its contract with the organisation responsible for managing Grenfell Tower.

The council is to terminate the current contract with the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) and replace it with a new arrangement to manage its housing stock.

At a heated council meeting in west London, deputy council leader Kim Taylor-Smith said: “The TMO no longer has the trust of residents.”

Mr Taylor-Smith said the council was working with the TMO to bring its contract to a close, citing lack of confidence in its fire safety record and a unanimous vote of no confidence from 25 residents’ associations.

“We are listening to residents and consulting on how they want their homes and neighbourhoods to be managed in the future,” he added.

Before the vote, residents heckled council leader Elizabeth Campbell (pictured) as she defended the council’s track record of rehousing survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire.

She said the council was “shamed” by the poorly organised response in the immediate aftermath of the blaze which claimed around 80 lives.

But she insisted “this is not a time for haste, this is a time for getting it right” following criticism it has been too slow to provide families with suitable permanent accommodation.

Twenty families affected by the disaster are now in permanent accommodation while a further 52 households have accepted an offer in principle, Ms Campbell said.

“We are working around the clock to do whatever we can to get people into new homes,” she added.

But there were cries of “shame” from members of the public while another heckler yelled: “You move in to a tower block then.”

Volunteer Loubna Aghzafi, one of those organising the relief effort from the community, brought a bottle of milk to the meeting dated August 16 2017 which she said was recently placed in a box of supplies by council workers.

She said the milk had been given by a mother to her nine-week-old baby before she realised her mistake, and that the child was ill as a result.

Ms Aghzafi said all the council staff that were “solution minded” had been sidelined while those bent on protecting themselves had taken over.

“You are desperate to safeguard each other’s rank and most importantly to further their careers on the back of this tragedy,” she said.

A council spokesman said it was “urgently investigating” the allegation about the out-of-date baby milk, saying it was the first they had heard about it.

Ms Campbell said Kensington and Chelsea Council had bought 120 homes while a further 20 purchases were in the hands of solicitors and 20 more under negotiation.

“I am confident the number of people moving in to new homes will increase dramatically in the coming months,” she said.

Labour councillor Robert Atkinson condemned the slow rate of progress in rehousing survivors, saying: “The council needs to be doing more and needs to be doing it faster.”

Ms Campbell said victims were being advised by the North Kensington Law Centre but a local activist attacked the council for voting to cut the centre’s funding, rendering it “ineffective”.

Isis Amlak, a member of the Grenfell Action Group, said: “What a surprise you are using the North Ken Law Centre. I remember when you cut it and cut it and cut it until it was more or less ineffective.

“It could have been there to represent the disabled people who have been placed inappropriately in a tower block.”

She cited the case of a man forced to abandon his wheelchair-bound father on an upper floor of Grenfell Tower during the blaze.

“These are the kinds of cases that have arisen because of this borough’s history of social and ethnic cleansing – putting privilege and wealth above its residents,” she said.

She branded the council a “bully” in its actions, saying: “Think of all those people that you have employed in the past that have a history of bullying, a history of making cuts, destroying the services that, had they been there, could have averted so much of this.”