“Some, perhaps many, occupants of Grenfell Tower regarded the TMO as an uncaring and bullying overlord, which belittled and marginalised them, regarded them as a nuisance or worse, and simply failed to take their concerns seriously.”
This is the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report’s summary of what it felt like to be a resident of the tower before the fire. The sad thing, which it does not go on to say, is that this same feeling is true of many social housing tenants across the country—and indeed, many private leaseholders as well.
The inquiry report savaged Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (the council-owned body responsible for day-to-day management of their homes) for “chronic” and “sustained” fire safety failures in the years before the fire, slamming what it called a “carelessness” towards fire safety and declaring its behaviour a “betrayal of its statutory obligations to its tenants”.
These findings should have prepared the ground for firm recommendations which would look to reframe the power imbalance between tenants and landlords at a local level—and give tenants more voice on policy at a national level. Sadly, this was not what the report delivered.
The failures at Grenfell included appointing an ill-qualified “one man band” to fire risk assess its stock, and then omitting to implement his recommendations and deliberately hiding its failures from its own board. This had a direct consequence in the huge number of missing or broken fire door self-closers in the tower, which was a key reason for the rapid, early smoke spread into communal areas, and as a result, a major contributing factor to many of the deaths.
But sitting behind these specific fire safety failings was the culture described above: one where there was a toxic and adversarial relationship with the residents—for which the report placed the blame squarely with the TMO and its management. “The TMO lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home and the privacy and dignity that a home should provide,” it said.
All of this is worth stating, because you would imagine that they would lead to firm recommendations for change. What is the point in uncovering these failings, if not to call for them to be rectified in the future? In my view the biggest miss in what is otherwise a powerful and fearless piece of truth telling from the inquiry is that it did not.
Instead, noting that there have been statutory reforms introduced covering the regulation of social housing providers, it said that it was not necessary to make any further calls for change.
This is a problem. Because the changes it refers to do not go far enough to correct the failures it has discovered.
Legal changes have handed the Regulator of Social Housing new powers, as of April this year, to grade social landlords (both councils and private housing associations) for the service they provide to tenants.
This process appears thorough and important: the regulator’s work is at an early stage, but it is already showing a strong willingness to dig through the books of social landlords and censure them where they are falling short of their statutory responsibilities. It is quite likely that the TMO—with its huge backlog of fire risk assessment actions—would have fallen foul of this process if it was in force before the fire.
At the same, a beefed-up Housing Ombudsman Service, led by Richard Blakeway, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and David Cameron, has become a proud consumer champion in the sector—singling out instances of major failure by many councils and housing associations and asking them to account for them.
All of these changes are positive, but they do not get to the heart of what was going wrong at Grenfell Tower. Ultimately there was a problem of power.
Grenfell was blessed with diligent, highly intelligent and highly engaged residents, who were brave enough to stand up on behalf of their neighbours and canny and well organised enough to attract major political support to their cause.
The issues they raised were extremely pertinent. The person who spoke out against the appointment of inexperienced architects Studio E for the tower’s refurbishment was tenant Eddie Daffarn, not any of the expensively assembled project consultants.
The person who raised the issue of evacuation from the tower, given the narrow staircase and malfunctioning smoke system? Not the internationally respected fire engineering consultancy appointed to produce a fire safety strategy, but chair of the leaseholder’s association Shah Ahmed.
Those who raised serious concern about fire door self-closers and the new plastic windows? Tenants such as Betty Kasote, Natasha Elcock and Marcio Gomes—not the official fire risk assessor or the clerk of works.
The trouble was that the system did not give these people power. It did not give them status in the scrutiny process. It did not give them legal aid or representation—even when they were experiencing chronic disrepair.
At a national level too, the inquiry report tells a story of a missing tenant voice. When the government commissioned guidance on managing fire safety in blocks of flats, it consulted landlords and landlords’ representatives, but not tenants and particularly not disabled tenants.
The guidance concluded that planning for the evacuation of disabled residents in a fire was too much bother. Would a tenants’ group have ever agreed with this?
The answer is clear: give tenants and tenants groups more power, both on their estates and on the national stage. That would be a more important contribution to fixing the problem than regulators and ombudsmen—with their high bar for investigation and slow timelines—can ever be.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry clearly identified the need for this, but then failed to recommend it.
And that—in an otherwise powerful report—represents a major missed opportunity for change.
