Selling the family silver? RBKC, Savills and the carve up of our communities.

The Grenfell Action Group wrote recently to Robin Yu, who is responsible for the administration of Freedom of Information requests for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, following concerns in our community that the TMO/Council are cooking up a plan to literally sell our homes from under our feet.

We are particularly keen to get our hands on two documents that have recently been commissioned by the Royal Borough from Savills, the Estate Agents to the nobs, that we believe may reveal how the Council intends to manage the future of their housing stock. The documents that we have requested are entitled the “Asset Performance Evaluation Report” and the “Options Appraisal for Investment in the Council’s Housing Stock” and were both compiled by Savills.

As soon as the Council complies with their Freedom of Information Act responsibilities we will appraise and share the contents with our readership. In the meantime we would question why the same company that has been given responsibility for creating a blueprint for the future of the Council’s social housing stock (Savills) has recently been spotted selling their wares at Cannes at the recent MIPIM property developers conference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbELTeUaezs

MIPIM is the world’s biggest property fair, where our cities and our land are up for sale. It normally takes place in Cannes, bringing together about 20,000 investors, developers, local authorities, and banks to figure out how to carve up our cities and sell off our land.
The companies which attend MIPIM, and our government “representatives” who share their champagne, are responsible for the eviction of communities, the gentrification of our neighbourhoods, and the housing crisis itself.

This year, on March 12th, people in cities across Europe took action to denounce the sale of our cities. The action was called by the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City, and was supported in the UK by the Radical Housing Network, with which the Grenfell Action Group is now affiliated.

It is at MIPIM that the rich and powerful get together to carve up the land that will be stolen from existing social housing tenants. It is at MIPIM that our cities, lives and communities are bought and sold without any regard for existing residents well-being. It is at MIPIM that we fear our futures will be traded and our land sold to the highest bidder.

MIPIM will be meeting next at OLYMPIA in October, which will give our residents the opportunity to voice our protest against the immoral and inhuman treatment of RBKC social housing tenants. We strongly urge our readers to be there so that our voices and our resistance can be heard.

In the meantime, we want to know why our Council has given the power to decide the future of the Borough’s precious social housing stock, and the living communities within, to an Estate Agent company that the Grenfell Action Group believes is so involved in the world of MIPIM with its high profits, low morals and dodgy deals.