IN THE early days after the Grenfell Tower fire, after I had been interviewed as the very new MP for Kensington numerous times and had written about it for various publications, I was accused by senior Tories in Kensington and Chelsea Council of “politicising” the fire.

The idea that this terrifying and multifatal catastrophe at the end of my road was somehow a politically neutral event, some kind of misfortune or natural disaster, not man-made, was circulated vigorously. 

They said “tragedy” (sad face). The community said “atrocity” (angry face).

We knew it was preventable. We knew the council had been warned. We knew it had ignored warnings, accused residents of “scare-mongering” and sent cease and desist letters to them. That knowledge was a large part of our outrage and despair.

The determination of the council to distance itself from accountability worked only so far. The £149 million spent to date on legal fees, including costs of the public inquiry, all core participants, corporations and of course Kensington and Chelsea Council, is estimated to rise to £250m. 

But despite the approximately £3-4m legal defence fees that residents are paying for annually, the council has not been shielded from being exposed as reckless, incompetent and uncaring.

Meanwhile, three households made homeless by the fire are yet to be housed after five long years. And a further 50-odd households are “not happily settled” and will be offered one more option to move. 

Some of those in the “not happily settled” category tell their friends and neighbours that, far from being picky and ungrateful (the usual discourse) they have been moved to homes that are unsuitable to their physical needs, in dire need of repairs and improvements to make them habitable long-term, and/or are affecting their mental health by being on upper floors or otherwise triggering circumstances. Some are being remediated for building and fire safety defects. Imagine!

The council, while it repeatedly tells us how very, very sorry it is, and insists that Grenfell is “at the heart” of everything it does, is clearly hoping that a majority of residents and the public are moving on. 

The council leader’s self-satisfied address at the council AGM in May was tone-deaf, parroting the usual lines on lovely bin collections and lovely trees and the lovely recovering retail and hospitality businesses, with a bare nod to the thousands of traumatised residents she feels so sorry for, whose lives will never ever be the same, and to add insult to injury are treated as passive recipients of the council’s largesse who should show some humble gratitude.

Let’s be frank about this. The system set up to “care for” Grenfell-affected residents of all kinds was set up as some kind of Hunger Games or Dragon’s Den. 

In the early days a resident who had been entirely self-sufficient with a good job, paying their dues and proud of it, told me the council turned them into a “beggar.” 

While their family had lost everything, just everything, including their balance of mind, they found they were forced to apply for every single tiny item or meal or cash to buy clothes, and the indignity and humiliation of it was personally destroying them.

While some of these early problems were resolved to an extent, an attitude of “look what we’re giving you” prevailed from the council to those it had, due to neglect, incompetence, and lack of care, so singularly failed. 

Somehow through all this the council wanted praise and gratitude for “giving” people what had so brutally been taken from them, rather than a necessary replacement of what had been lost. 

Aside from the endless form-filling, endless meetings with more-or-less empathic council officers, long waits for “help,” and being provided with unsuitable replacements for numerous reasons, was a frankly demoralising competitive “bidding” process for “Grenfell projects.” 

Community projects aimed at supporting the numerous different groups of people still struggling — it could be schoolchildren, teenagers, men, women, elders, people from different cultures and languages — had to bid in a public process, then be voted on. 

I refused to engage with what I saw as a demeaning and disheartening process to gain funding for services the council should be providing anyway, but was told that the public event was humiliating for some, and that those who were quite simply good at presenting themselves achieved funding, while others with excellent proposals and a good record might get nothing.

Why not simply provide good services with long-term funding based on local need? This competitive process set one community group against another, producing a divided community that is of course easier for the council to control. And to be honest it has worked. 

Keeping people poor and needy, and fighting each other for recognition and for funds, benefits them, and wastes time and energy of people of good faith. 

They have us precisely where they want us. They’ve turned the community into beggars, while they congratulate themselves on their charity work. And yes, I think it is deliberate and orchestrated, and some believe with government backing.

There have been countless outside reports on the progress or otherwise of the council to ensure “culture change,” but most in the community see absolutely zero positive progress in this. 

And while this is a huge frustration for those of us at the cliff-face on the council, the demand for justice, and for criminal charges, seems further away than ever. 

The earliest dates for charges is now likely to be after the inquiry final report, currently estimated for October 2023, so we may all be waiting for the perpetrators to have that knock on the door until early 2024. 

As William Gladstone said: “Justice delayed, is justice denied.” And no-one affected by the fire will rest until justice is served.

Emma Dent Coad is Labour Group Leader on RBKC Council. Her book, One Kensington, is to be published by Quercus on August 4.