UK politics is in chaos. Who is fighting for YOU?
Here are some thoughts on the lack of choice facing us in the upcoming General Election.
Tell me what you think needs to change here: Your opinions matter!
Grenfell Half Anniversary 14.12.25
The Grenfell Half Anniversary is this Sunday 14 December 2025. The December commemoration isn’t as big as the well-known Silent Walk on 14 June every year, when 1,000s of us walk silently in solidarity, frustration and – yes – anger. But it’s an anniversary none the less, when local people and others who care, come together to remember our loved ones, and show our community that we still care.
This December will be different. After a lot of debate and upset, the shrouded skeleton of the Tower is finally being ‘deconstructed’; about half of it has gone. As the big green heart has moved further and further down, the dark shadow over our neighbourhood diminishes. There are very mixed feelings. Many will be relieved not to see this triggering presence in the neighbourhood; others believe it’s just another step to ensure we forget what happened, along with all the corporative, local and national government failures that preceded the atrocity.
A year ago on 4 December 2024, a statement on the condition of the Tower was released by then Secretary of State for MHCLG Angela Rayner, along with the structural engineer’s report. I read both. Discovering that there had been an earlier report under the previous government in May 2021, I read that too. The 2021 report stated: ‘..the tower should not be propped for the medium to long-term but should be deconstructed at the earliest possible opportunity, with deconstruction commencing no later than May 2022.’
Nothing had been done, and the community knew nothing about the 2021 report, so clearly the situation had got worse in the interval. By 2024 the Tower was being supported by 6,000 props which were suffering from exposure to wind and rain. It would have been better if the Secretary of State had shared this knowledge, and explained the background. But she didn’t. So when the ‘deconstruction’ works were announced in February this year, it came as a shock, and there was huge upset and anger.
While all of this was ongoing, a competition had been announced by the Grenfell Memorial Commission to find an architecture practice that would work with the local community to bring forward plans for the Memorial. A panel of bereaved, survivors and local residents was chosen to oversee and steer it. Jane Duncan PPRIBA, chair of the RIBA Expert Panel on Fire Safety is architect advisor, working closely with the panel as they progressed through the competition to agree on the final choice of practice to bring the project forward.
As a neighbour, local Councillor, and MP for Kensington at the time of the fire, I committed to watch over but not input in any way into the various consultation events over the past year. It was clear to me that those most affected should make the decisions. It’s a positive that the process was run by MHCLG as there is still, unfortunately, zero trust of anything whatever that emanates from the ‘Grenfell Council’ as it’s become known.
From what I’ve heard – and this is a huge achievement – it’s been the least distrusted consultation related to Grenfell to date.
The presentation of the five practices shortlisted by the panel was courteous, respectful, engaging – and hopeful. Here were five groups of community-minded architects, from diverse backgrounds, presenting their approach in a thoughtful, sensitive and reflective way. It certainly felt that they were presenting ‘with us’ and not ‘to them’, which is still the Council’s fall-back position.
The practice chosen by resident consultation and the panel, announced last month, was Freehaus. They talked, they listened, and they prevailed. It’s a hugely sensitive and controversial project, and I wish them all the luck in the world. We will all be watching closely.
The clock is ticking as we wait one more long year for criminal charges by the Metropolitan Police, who are investigating 19 companies and 58 individuals for criminal acts. Many are hoping for charges of gross negligence manslaughter – which means if found guilty they go to jail. The wait for some is just intolerable.
Undoubtedly some people will object to whatever Freehaus come up with, and given how the community has been treated over the past eight and a half years, many people are just waiting to be betrayed, once again.
But whatever the designs proposed in coming months, we will know it comes with goodwill, respect and care we haven’t dared to hope for.
(Reprinted from Morning Star and Building Design magazine)
Rogue Councillors and Rebel Residents
It is a source of constant frustration for Kensington and Chelsea minority party Councillors – currently eight Labour, three Independent and one Green – that they are so often completely and utterly side-lined by the Tory-run Council. In a recent review of the ‘Charter for Public Participation’ the role, purpose and experience of N Ken Councillors has been barely mentioned. The relationship outlined is purely between the Council and the residents. Yet we are the ones, alongside our residents, who supported our friends and neighbours during and after the preventable atrocity of the Grenfell Tower fire. We are the ones who endlessly chase officers from the Council and housing associations to do their job and support our residents. We are the ones who do our best to scrutinise their work while being denied information.
We were then, and are now, treated with disdain. And sometimes contempt.
I’ll explain.
In September 2018 the Kroll Report’s detailed investigation of the secretive purchase of K&C College (Wornington College) stated: ‘KCC and RBKC purposefully limited communications with the local community [due to what they called] the local dynamic’ (my emphases). The report quotes RBKC’s lawyers saying on record in May 2016 ‘… if a rogue Councillor or third party started making noise about RBKC doing deals in secret, they would have to put out a reactive statement’. The Kroll Report concluded: ‘Labour Cllrs were not even informed of the sale, until the deal had been completed.’
Did relations improve after that damning report? They did not.
The years and years of ‘obfuscation’ and ‘misrepresentation’ about the prospect of a Crossrail (Elizabeth line) station at Kensal Gasworks were deliberately maintained, allegedly to raise land values and to tempt developers into North Ken. A station may have been a possibility in the past, but from 2006 to this day – it’s a blatant lie. While officers maintained that ‘an announcement would be made in two weeks’ (for years) in 2012 then Transport Minister Stephen Hammond told the Council that it would never happen and to take it out of the Local Plan. Fellow Councillors and I were told definitively by Crossrail officers that it was a fantasy. However there is still a reference to it and a ‘safeguarded site’ in the latest plans.
In 2020 I commented on the Council Plan and Charter for Public Participation with these words:
‘Council members and officers should be made familiar with The Charter, to counter our concerns about lack of cultural change. In addition, officers should undergo training to better understand the role of elected members given that many senior officers see themselves as the executive, and Councillors (particularly minority party Councillors) as working for them.’
And in relation to endless rounds of policy documents the LGA Review of Governance and Scrutiny of 2020 stated: ‘We were told by a number of people that they felt that the Council uses the act of strategising, and of reviewing and evaluating strategic changes it has made, as a proxy for taking meaningful action.’
Roll forward five years, and minority party Councillors in North Ken are still being excluded from ‘deals in secret’. I mention here the following assets undergoing ‘review’ where the relevant Councillors are kept entirely in the dark: Canalside House; Lowerwood Court; Bays 18/19; Unit 12 Latimer Road; and others I shouldn’t really mention.
From the Council that committed to the Hillsborough Charter in December 2017 there is no openness and transparency; honesty and respect has been by-passed.
We don’t know if officers are simply overworked, deliberately obfuscating, or under strict instructions from the Tory Leadership Team to create yet another magnificent fudge and deliberately by-pass elected Councillors, as they were in the past.
We are not rogue Councillors; we are elected members who live in, understand and serve our communities. Grenfell tenants were named ‘rebel residents’ by the Grenfell Tower refurbishment contractor in 2015: : “We are under massive pressure from the rebel residents about our quality of work … so far their complaints are unfounded, but I need to ensure our finish is good quality, especially on the show areas.”
I feel especially badly for residents getting involved in panels, focus groups and online consultations, in the genuine hope of one more step towards ‘the best Council we can be’.
Sadly, it seems RBKC Council is ‘best Council we can be’ and that just isn’t good enough.
May the rogues and rebels prevail!
5.12.2025
What future for the Left?
What kind of leadership does the Left need?
Grenfell Tower Future
One Kensington
Emma’s book, One Kensington, is out on 22 September. It lays bare the appalling mismanagement and incompetence that has made Kensington and Chelsea a grim symbol of the inequality that we should rightly be ashamed of.
With the atrocity of the Grenfell Tower fire in the heart of the book, it illustrates the neglect by society of our most vulnerable members – but ends with a message of hope from our communities.
Any profits will be given to local charities.
You can buy One Kensington Here.
The most unequal borough in Britain
Revisited Inequality and inequity in Kensington and Chelsea
The Most Unequal Borough in Britain 21.10.20
Sorry, not sorry 26.4.21
As Kensington and Chelsea Council heads for the Grenfell Inquiry, Emma Dent Coad reports on the latest developments
It is truly disheartening to watch Kensington and Chelsea Council position itself in advance of the Grenfell Inquiry in mid-May, for the questioning of former Leadership team members.
We Councillors are sent daily news updates, carefully curated and framed to appear less damaging than they are in reality. We say the Grenfell Tower fire was an atrocity; the Council calls it a tragedy. In a recent Council briefing session on the Inquiry we were encouraged to admire the ‘tone’ of the Council’s QC during his opening statement, in comparison to that of Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation. Let’s be clear – the £5m a year the Council is paying for legal fees will ensure our QC out-performs anything which the vestiges of our former tenant management team could hope to muster.
The current Council Leadership team, carefully trained and groomed to present the ‘acceptable’ face of Kensington and Chelsea Council, are in reality no better equipped with the necessary skills, experience, relevance, or indeed caring, than the bad faith actors of the former leadership who presided over the worst peacetime disaster of our lifetime. We are bombarded with endless empty apologies and empathy posturing. It is unconvincing. We see through it. They are still failing.
In the midst of this anxious period, on 17th April a North Kensington resident was walking past a Council building site for a new primary and SEN school. She spotted something so appalling, so terrifying, that she rushed home and was physically sick. She had seen a large pile of materials stacked outside the school waiting to be fitted; it was Kingspan GreenGuard insulation.
Anyone who’s been following the Grenfell Inquiry will be aware that Kingspan – who supplied materials for the upper part of Grenfell Tower that burned so ferociously when the flames reached it – have admitted publicly that they ‘gamed’ fire testing. In other words, when a test result came back which they didn’t like, they used an earlier test result which said the material was safe to use on high rise buildings.
They lied. 72 died.
When we researched the flammability of Kingspan GreenGuard over that weekend, we all felt sick. It was expanded polystyrene, and the thickness of it, I was informed, meant it qualified as Grade F – even more flammable than the material used on Grenfell Tower.
Anger rose in the community over the weekend, and on the Monday at 8am campaigners held a protest outside the school. After a year of shielding, I was finally vaccinated and free to join them. The Deputy Leader of the Council arrived, spoke to protestors, and went onto the site to find out what was happening.
His account was hardly reassuring: the Grade F highly flammable material was ‘only’ being used under the floors. However he had demanded that it was removed from the site, and started an investigation to find out how many of their recent construction projects may have used this material ‘in error’. He also stated that, while this particular project had commenced in 2018, it had been planned in detail before the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017.
It is a terrifying thought that the new Deputy Leader, the very person who has had oversight of all regeneration and building projects since July 2017, had no notion or perhaps even interest in projects planned before the fire. Didn’t it occur to him that these should be put under the microscope?
There were numerous Council-led construction projects on the go before the fire: new school buildings (with private housing built on playgrounds); office buildings; homes built for private rent to provide an income for the Council. Many of them have proved to be very badly built, causing endless problems with leaks, dodgy drains, ill-fitting fire doors, poor electric wiring. The Council hit the headlines again in August 2019 when homes that Grenfell survivors had been moved into proved to be ‘high fire risk’ due to lack of protection between floors, doors and ventilation, and fire wardens were immediately engaged.
At the time the Deputy Leader was quoted on the Fire Protection Association website saying: “Work is already underway to fix the issues with their building, which we bought from the private sector very recently. Sadly, this is part of a national issue. This council, like many others, no longer has faith in the building industry and checking industry. That is why we carry out our own safety checks for our peace of mind, and most importantly for the peace of mind of our residents.”
Extraordinarily, he omitted to state that the housing was built on Council land in partnership with a developer. It was a Council project, for private sector renting, which they then bought back at market price to house families made homeless by the fire. The duplicity is staggering.
Did someone just think it would be fine? Or did no one think at all?
Two weeks ago I asked the Council’s fire safety officer for a list of residential properties, Council and privately owned, that had fire safety issues. Colleagues in neighbouring Councils have these lists so they can be sure to support residents and signpost them to advice. However, it seems Kensington and Chelsea doesn’t have such a list. This is shocking.
The North Kensington community is sick of apologies from a Council that seems doomed to repeat its past mistakes. It seems to be stuck in a loop of incompetence, uncaring and denial. We are calling for commissioners to take over the Council, and will continue to do so until we are heard.
Image: Grenfell Tower. Author: Carcharoth, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Grenfell council tries to sue 1.2.21
It is beyond ironic that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council, facing possible criminal manslaughter charges in relation to the Grenfell Tower fire, is attempting to sue two manufacturers of products involved in the atrocity of the Council’s own making.
One is Whirlpool, the manufacturer of the fridge that overheated and started the fatal fire. The other is Arconic, the manufacturer of the cheaper flammable cladding that RBKC first specified, and then turned a blind eye to, when it was fitted so badly that fire spread through unstopped gaps creating a chimney effect up and around the building, creating a 26 storey fireball.
This legal action, announced on 17th December, gives the Council the option to pursue Whirlpool and Arconic for compensation if they are subjected to civil claims. With convenient timing, a week later, 13 civil claims were lodged against the Council by a group of bereaved and survivors against a number of contractors and sub-contractors, including the Council.
Never mind that survivors of the fire say there had been occasional kitchen fires in Grenfell Tower over the years, and that before the refurbishment they had always been contained within the room or flat: the building was designed like that. Never mind that survivors have suggested there may have been a power surge in the building, as happened before, shorting numerous electrical items. Never mind the Council’s responsibility for ensuring the work was carried out correctly, which they failed to do. And never mind that the Cabinet Member responsible for the refurb had specifically asked to cut costs on the cladding, ending up with a cheaper type, as flammable as solid petrol.
Our ‘cash-strapped’ Council is spending a fortune on damage limitation in the form of PR and legal defence. At the last count this was said to be £5m a year. The media-coms department, once slimmed down, is now back ‘up to strength’. It now incorporates community engagement, which is pretty revealing: they see engagement as PR. Some of the ‘engagement’ officers do a fine job, while many are out of their depth, simply spouting the Council’s non-stop menu of platitudes.
The Council regularly claims to have achieved a ‘culture change’. They can claim that when we see them acting with honesty and transparency. They have a long way to go.
One test will be the response to questions being asked in the community about what some have identified as ‘the missing Grenfell £50m’. We must all sincerely hope this allegation of missing money is incorrect, and that it will be answered in detail with 100% honesty and transparency very soon.
The Grenfell Public Inquiry reopens on 8th February, and will be all virtual, to the relief of witnesses not wishing to walk past desperate, angry and frustrated protestors on their way in. The first part of Phase II included jaw-dropping evidence, from cladding salespeople to construction managers, of their total contempt for the safety of their fellow human beings.
I watched as much of it as I could bear. My heart went out to the RBKC Building Control officer, clearly distraught, who had left the job due to overwork months before the fire, but who clearly felt he should take some of the blame – if only all senior officers and former Councillors felt the same!
I spent a couple of hours ploughing through Council budget records, to find that while they had halved the budget and cut Building Control officer numbers as an ‘efficiency measure’, the truth is that Building Control income was very stable in the five years leading up to the fire. RBKC made ideological cuts in the name of austerity. Their wholly unnecessary ‘cost-cutting and efficiency drive’ cost 72 lives.
The stalled last session exposed potential corporate fraud on a massive scale in the pursuit of profit, without a thought for the end users of products that some of them knew were flammable and unsuitable for use on tall buildings. Some of the email exchanges read out were genuinely shocking.
Once they have finished grilling these witnesses, after Easter the focus will turn to RBKC ‘complaints and communication management of Grenfell Tower’, and compliance with fire safety regulations. Brace yourselves for another round of revelations. There may be some awkward questions coming via the legal team of the ‘rebel residents’ as they were named by RBKC. These are the residents who we now know had justifiable concerns about the way the building was being refurbished – the exposed gas pipes, the dodgy fire-stopping, doors and windows that didn’t fit, potential issues of access for emergency services, and so on. It will all come out soon, and it will be riveting – but also nightmarish.
It’s worth remembering, as you see the senior Councillors and officers take the stand later this year, that they will have been briefed and trained and rehearsed over every single potential question. They will in all likelihood respond to perfection, while saying they are ‘very very very very very sorry’ – the record from one senior Councillor was five sorrys – for the ‘tragedy’ of the fire. The final question from the QC is always ‘If you were in the same situation again, would you do anything different?’ Watch – they will be word perfect.
Shame on them for abandoning officers lower down the pecking order, who have to live with their nightmares. Shame on them for spending a small fortune on legal procedures to protect them from prosecution. And shame on them all for their performative grief.
Image: Grenfell Tower. Author: Carcharoth, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.