AN OPEN LETTER TO NICK PAGET-BROWN

DEAR LEADER ELECT,

We in the Grenfell Action Group would like to express our congratulations on your appointment as Leader elect of Kensington and Chelsea Council, and for finally ending the Cockell cabal that has been inflicted on residents for the past thirteen years.

The Grenfell Action Group wishes to acknowledge your decency and openness during the election process and particularly your courage in posting your manifesto on the Hornet’s Nest website, thereby letting ordinary residents know what you were standing for.

Members of the Grenfell Action Group, the Lancaster West Residents Association, and the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders Association are meeting with our MP, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, on Friday 10th May to highlight ongoing concerns with regards the loss of our rights-of-way across the Kensington Academy and Leisure Centre (KALC) site, lack of employment opportunities for local people on KALC, the delays to the Grenfell Tower Project and general concerns with regards what we see as the “managed decline” of Lancaster West Estate and the widespread fear that the Council may be intending to “socially cleanse” North Kensington and other vulnerable and poor communities in the Royal Borough.

We understand that you must be busy at this present time but the Grenfell Action Group, Lancaster West Residents Association and the Grenfell Leaseholders Association would welcome the opportunity to invite you to visit our community on Lancaster West Estate, in the near future, to discuss some of the same issues that we will be raising with Sir Malcolm and to hear from you how the Council plans to fund the long term investment needed in our homes.

We in the Grenfell Action Group genuinely hope that we can have an honest and open relationship with you in your role as Leader of the Royal Borough and, with this in mind, we wish you all the best for the future,

Kind regards,

Edward Daffarn

Grenfell Action Group

(Graphic: The Emperor’s New Clothes by Thorarinn Leifson)

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO…..?

On 2nd May 2012 the RBKC Cabinet was presented with a paper by the Cabinet Member for Housing and Property seeking approval to spend receipts from the sale of empty basements at Elm Park Gardens on a number of housing regeneration projects in the borough. This was all part of Cllr Coleridge’s pet project known as the Hidden Homes Initiative. The Elm Park Gardens sale was projected to return around £8 million in net profits which could then be reinvested elsewhere. The jewel in the crown of this particular plan was a proposal to divert £6 million of this windfall for the regeneration of Grenfell Tower on Lancaster West Estate. This would involve installing a new heating system, new double glazed windows, external cladding of the whole structure, the creation of some new social housing units in disused parts of the building (ie Hidden Homes) the relocation of some community resources in improved premises and some improvements to the public areas surrounding the tower.

Cabinet approved the proposals. Plans for the Grenfell Tower project were drawn up, by the same architects and construction companies that were already handling the KALC project, a period of statutory public consultation followed, and a planning application was submitted by the TMO in September 2012 with a decision date scheduled for 24th December.

However, the ink was scarcely dry on the plans before the original application PP/12/03163 was suddenly withdrawn on 18 October 2012. A new application PP/12/04097 was submitted the following day 19 October 2012, but has made no progress since then towards securing planning permission, and is still awaiting decision. Unsurprisingly, the original decision date in December was missed, but subsequent meetings of the Major Planning Development Committee, scheduled for January, February, March and April were all subsequently cancelled. To date, residents have not been informed of these delays, and no explanation has been offered, either for the withdrawal of the original planning application, or for the subsequent delays. The application appears to have been quietly buried, the whole project is stuck in a kind of Limbo, and no-one who lives at Lancaster West has any idea what is going on.

Eventually, some of the local resident groups grew impatient and began querying all of this, notably the Grenfell Leaseholders Association, and of course ourselves, the Grenfell Action Group. After the usual series of false starts we eventually succeeded in eliciting a response of sorts from Councillor Coleridge, whose pet project the Hidden Homes initiative is. On 8th April he wrote to us with the following:

“As you know we have announced that we have total funds available of just over £9M for the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower and the new homes and improvements about the lower floors and base of the Tower.

You will appreciate that to carry this out we need to have a design submitted by an architect and then to agree the price with the contractors. This process takes time as a contract of this nature is complex to price and negotiations do go back and forth, and there are more than one view on what it should cost. These negotiations are still on going. When they are concluded planning will be sought and work will begin. I hope they will be concluded very soon, but it must be within the budget available.

I know you are keen to know when work will start, but clearly work can only start when a contract is sound and financially tested.”

We weren’t satisfied with this reply for a number of reasons, not least because it raised far more questions than it answered, and so we wrote back to Coleridge querying the discrepancy between the £6 million quoted in the Cabinet report and the £9 million quoted in his email. He replied immediately claiming that the actual figure is £9.4 million and is made up of a contribution of £6 million from the Elm Park Gardens sale, with the balance coming from the Housing Revenue Account (ie from the TMO’s annual capital expenditure budget).

This seems fairly plausible at first glance, but becomes far less so once it has been unpicked. Councillor Coleridge claimed, for instance, that the budget had not been revised upwards from £6 million, but had always been £9.4 million. This is simply not true. The Cabinet report from May 2012 clearly states a figure of £6 million, and states that it was based on an estimate produced by the TMO which had included all of the various components of the scheme. There is mention of a HRA contribution to the cost of the replacement heating sytem, but this is contradicted elsewhere.  For instance, the minutes of the TMO board meeting held in July 2012 states that:

“Confirmation was given that the Cabinet had now agreed £6.2m to be invested in Grenfell Tower…Clarification was given that the work being done at Grenfell Tower was funded by money from the sale of Elm Park Gardens basements, and was separate from the work done under the HRA capital programme”. (paragraph 6.2)

The TMO denial of HRA funding is also echoed in an information pack recently circulated by them to applicants for a contract manager post they are currently advertising. This document, dated March 2013, states that:

“The role of asset management has increased to include a programme of hidden homes and a larger £8m regeneration scheme (funded separately from the capital programme) of one of the tower blocks.”

This is clearly a reference to Grenfell Tower, and further undermines Coleridge’s claim to have HRA funds to supplement the Grenfell Tower budget. However, more worrying for residents of the greater part of Lancaster West is the following from the same TMO information pack:

“The current size of the capital programme is £9.2m with a further £7m available each year for the next 4 years. At present this programme is covering basic health and safety, legislative requirements and some decent homes work….there is a gap in terms of funding for investment in the stock over the next 5 and 30 year plan.”

This is bad news for anyone at Lancaster West who might have hopes or expectations that the Grenfell Tower project will be followed by other improvements to this estate, notably the provision of a long awaited and desperately needed new heating system. Indeed, the minutes of the Council’s Housing and Property Scrutiny Committee, which met in September 2012, addressed this specific issue:

“The Committee noted the current Capital Programme (around £7 million per year) would only be able to pay for essential repairs, not new heating systems.” (page 6)

Returning again to our starting thesis, we must also point out that the figure of £9.4 million quoted by Coleridge appears nowhere in the official documents. It does not appear in the Cabinet report from May 2012, nor in any subsequent Cabinet reports or minutes, and nor is there any discussion of the Grenfell Tower budget, nor of any revision of it, in the reports or minutes of the Housing and Property Scrutiny Committee, throughout this entire period from May 2012 onwards.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the Grenfell Tower budget estimate does indeed appear to have been revised upwards by more than 50%, but we can find no evidence that this revision was ever formally approved by Cabinet or any other body. This leads us inevitably back to Coleridge’s email of 8th April 2013 and what he said about negotiating prices with the contractors. Just to remind you, he said that:

“…this process takes time, as a contract of this nature is complex to price and negotiations do go back and forth, and there are more than one view on what it should cost…”

He also stressed that these negotiations are still ongoing, and that planning permission can not, and will not, be sought until they are completed.

The problem with this gobbledegook is that, right from the start, the Council decided to forego the normal process of competitive tendering and best value controls in appointing the team who have been tasked with delivering this project  – Max Fordham’s and Churchman’s architects, Curtins Consulting, Taylor Young and, last but not least, the construction contractors Leadbitters. Instead they simply gifted the whole project to the same team of architects, and other contractors, who were already delivering, the KALC project.

The rationale for this corner cutting was supposedly to save time and money, and guarantee quality, by seamlessly integrating delivery of both projects, in which case they should not now still be haggling over costs and budgets a full seven months after the Grenfell Tower planning application was submitted. Indeed, the fact that the planning application has long since been submitted (in October 2012) strongly implies that all the contractual negotiations had been satisfactorily resolved at that time. This was certainly the impression that was conveyed to the residents of Grenfell Tower and of Lancaster West Estate generally.

SO WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON HERE?

Was the original estimate so flawed and incompetent that it had to be revised upwards by nearly three and a half million pounds?

Did a bidding war break out in which the contractors have been ruthlessly abusing their favoured position to blackmail the Council for more money?

Have rising costs made this whole project unviable from the Council’s perspective, and are they now quietly conspiring to pull the plug?

The next meeting of the Major Planning Development Committee is scheduled for 21st May.

In the meantime Councillor Coleridge needs to reassure the Lancaster West Community that the Grenfell Tower application will be decided on that date.

He also needs to provide a full clear and unambiguous explanation of what has gone on thus far, along with an absolute guarantee of an immediate end to all delay and procrastination.

AT THIS STAGE NOTHING LESS WILL DO.

DEAD MAN WALKING

We are very pleased to be able to report at last the imminent departure of Pooter Cockell as Leader of the Council. His departure is long overdue.

We couldn’t help but notice the glowing tributes paid to the little dictator by Councillor Coleridge, the Cabinet Member for Housing and Property, with whom we have often crossed swords over the hated KALC development at Lancaster Green.

Slightly more puzzling, although not entirely surprising, is the similar tribute paid by our own Councillor Blakeman, leader of the so-called Labour opposition group at RBKC.

You can read both of these eulogies here in the K&C Chronicle.

In the interests of balance we would also highly recommmend that you read the various recent items posted by our friends on the Hornet’s Nest blog who have long campaigned for a change of leadership at Hornton Street.

http://fromthehornetsnest.blogspot.co.uk/

Our own feelings on Pooters departure can be simply expressed with the words:

GOOD RIDDANCE!

More Broken Promises – The Wall

In July 2012 the RBKC Cabinet delegated authority to the Cabinet Member for Housing and Property to order the enabling works for the KALC development, subject to a condition that the right–of-way along the western edge of the site (ie Station Walk) should be preserved. There is good reason to believe that this condition was imposed in order to fully comply with the provisions of the Town and Country Act, which stipulates that, when extinguishing traditional rights-of-way for planning purposes, local authorities are required to make suitable alternative provision.

The promise to keep Station Walk open lasted only until the new year when, without warning or explanation, the Council’s contractors blocked off all the footpaths that had previously traversed the KALC site, leaving a large part of the Lancaster West community marooned in an isolated ghetto to the south of the site. At that time the Grenfell Action Group fought them, and won, on legal technicalities, but the reprieve was only temporary, and in early February all the footpaths were again blocked and would remain so thereafter.

The contractors, Leadbitters, finally offered an explanation for their actions at the Community Forum that met on 19th February. They also made a new promise. Instead of Station Walk they offerred instead an alternative footpath right through the heart of the site on the north/south axis, the logistics of which they said would take about three weeks to arrange (ie it was due to open on or about 12th March). According to the minutes of that meeting:

 “An old gas main, an old water main and old power cables have been found under Station Walk which have hindered plans to keep Station Walk open during the construction period.  Due to the issues found, a temporary and alternative North/South link will be introduced by Verity Close to the emergency access to Grenfell Road with the intention for it to be closed if necessary when it is unsafe to keep it open. This will be opened promptly after the works have been done.”

Now here we are in the middle of April, Station Walk is long gone, and there is still no sign of the promised alternative on this north/south axis. Instead we have now been told that this also is undeliverable.

YET ANOTHER BROKEN PROMISE

We received this latest devastating news at the April Residents Forum, where we were also informed that the latest cancellation has more to do with the Council’s reluctance to spend the money required than with any health and safety issues, as they had falsely claimed in recent correspondence. Leadbitters, it seems have costed the provision of a right-of-way along the north/south footpath at £186,000 and Councillor Coleridge has absolutely refused to contemplate footing this bill.

One has to wonder why it would cost so much for a temporary footpath that would be no more than a couple of hundred yards long, and we can’t help wondering if the costing might have been deliberately over-estimated to give Coleridge an excuse to refuse it. We already know that Leadbitters don’t want a footpath at this location because it would be a logistical nightmare for them, blocking crucial access to the Leisure Centre site. We also have reason to suspect that both Leadbitters and the Council may already be struggling to keep within the budgets set for them by Cabinet.

In any case Coleridge’s obstinate refusal to even consider paying for the alternative footpath was fiercely resisted by all the community representatives who were present at the meeting, including Cllr Blakeman, who admonished Coleridge that the loss of pedestrian access was causing real hardship, and that the entire local community was united in opposition to it. She insisted that the funds could, if necessary, be drawn from the Parking Reserve Fund. Indeed, it is no secret that the Council has enjoyed rich pickings from parking charges on this site for many years – a fact that Coleridge appears now to have conveniently forgotten.

We find it totally unacceptable that the Council would willingly spend £30 million for paving stones in Exhibition Road, and £100 million on the hugely expensive Holland Park School, but can’t find the much more modest amount required to return some dignity to a community that has been mistreated, lied to and abused by them for far too long.

It was very obvious from Coleridge’s personal demeanour at the Forum meeting that he does not consider the loss of Lancaster West’s north/south route as a significant inconvenience to residents, and certainly not one that should be resolved by the spending of valuable council resources.

We have heard that Councillor Julie Mills, of the adjacent Norland Ward, wrote recently to the Director of Housing, Laura Johnson, and suggested that a Council representative and Ward Councillors should quite literally “walk in the shoes” of their constituents and try to negotiate the assault course that is now involved in leaving this estate and travelling north towards Portobello Road, either in a wheelchair or accompanied by two or three young children.

To the best of our knowledge this very sensible request was never entertained or followed up by Council Officers or those who are elected to represent and protect us.

THE GRENFELL ACTION GROUP THEREFORE CHALLENGES YOU DIRECTLY, COUNCILLOR COLERIDGE, TO VISIT OUR COMMUNITY AND TRAVEL FROM THE BASE OF GRENFELL TOWER UP TO LANCASTER ROAD AND LADBROKE GROVE BY WHEELCHAIR.

To assist in this venture, we have obtained the use of a modern wheelchair which can be accessed at a time of your convenience and we will be happy to notify the local press and local disability charities so that your attempt can be witnessed and your assertion that the route is easily navigable by wheelchair is duly verified.

If, as you claim, there is no inconvenience getting off the Estate for the disabled then you should easily be able to steer the wheelchair up to Lancaster Road/Ladbroke Grove without a problem. If, on the other hand, you encounter serious problems in negotiating your way off the Estate, along the minefield of Bomore Road and through Verity Close, then you will understand why the local community (both able bodied and disabled) demand that previous Council promises are kept, that Planning Law and Equality Law are respected and that a way is found to re-open a north/south footpath without further delay.

If you refuse this challenge it will show very clearly to our community that you, and your Council quislings, are not willing to empathise with the plight of our disabled, and that poor people without recourse to expensive lawyers can and will continue to be treated with contempt and disdain by this Rotten Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

THE WITCH IS DEAD

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead.
Which old Witch?
TheWicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up you sleepy head,
Rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/12/bbc-thatcher-ding-dong-witch_n_3068550.html?utm_hp_ref=world

PANTS ON FIRE No.1 – Blakeman

The Grenfell Action Group is under attack from both left and right. There have been clear signs recently of a smear campaign of lies and personal attacks against us orchestrated from Hornton Street and involving both Tory and Labour councillors and their lackeys. Recent comments posted anonymously on the Hornet’s Nest blog have smeared all opponents of the KALC project as either “dope smokers and saddos” or as “a small bunch of dope smokers and pit bull breeders”. Of course, this kind of poisonous vitriol reveals more about the bigotry and vindictiveness of our attackers than it does about us, or the courageous band of ordinary local residents who dared to join us in confronting Pooter Cockell and his cohort on Monday.

The smear campaign has kicked off big-time since the anti-Pooter demonstration (see “Pooter’s Folly” below) but the attacks had started earlier, notably in emails from Coleridge and Blakeman revealed in our earlier piece “The Gloves Come Off”.  Contrary to their accusations against us, we have bullied and intimidated no one. On the contrary we have dared – at considerable personal risk – to confront powerful bureaucracies (ie the Council and the TMO) which have the power to bully and intimidate and, when provoked, can and will do so vindictively and with impunity.

Our fight-back begins today with a series of articles which we will be calling;

THE GRENFELL ACTION GROUP PANTS ON FIRE AWARDS

The first award goes to Blakeman herself whose come-uppance is well overdue.

In an email to us on 20th February, which she copied widely to councillors and officers of both the Council and the TMO, Councillor Blakeman made the following claim:

“The ward councillors – and indeed many others – find it very irritating that your Group claims to speak on behalf of ‘the community’. We know that you speak on behalf of a small group of people. You do not speak on behalf of the wider community and you have never been able to demonstrate any legitimacy for this claim.”

Let’s just unpick this statement and see how it stands up to scrutiny. Firstly, we have never claimed to represent the wider community. We do, however claim to represent many, and perhaps the majority, of Lancaster West residents, and our credentials in doing so have been recognised by RBKC for some considerable time. The history of this is a matter of record.

In January 2011 Penelope Tollitt, Head of Policy and Design in the Planning Department began negotiating directly with the Grenfell Action Group as representatives of the Lancaster West community. We had formed a coalition with Lancaster West EMB, Lancaster West Residents Association and the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders Association, all of which had declared their opposition to the siting of the proposed new academy on the Lancaster Green site. The coalition received funding from RBKC so that we could pay for independent planning advice. It should be noted that the Grenfell Action Group took the leading role in this coalition and that ‘Planning Aid for London’ was subsequently appointed, on our advice, to support and represent the local community.  The Grenfell Action Group has long been the lynchpin of local resistance to KALC, and Blakeman knows this better than anyone.

In September 2010 we asked Blakeman to assist us in organising a public meeting to give a voice to Lancaster West residents to express their concerns about the Council’s plans for the KALC development.  She duly obliged. The meeting, chaired by Blakeman herself, was held at St Clement’s Church on 20th September 2010 and was attended by about 170 local residents. There was a great deal of anger and strong resistance to the KALC plans, all of which was reported in the Kensington and Chelsea Chronicle at the time.

The Council were clearly rattled by the fierce opposition they had encountered – so much so that their KALC working group began discussing plans to counter the opposition by actively supporting a ‘Friends of Kensington Academy’ group and organising a ‘parent’s petition’  in support of the Council’s plans.  A petition was duly delivered by Councillor Blakeman on 10th December 2010.  She later wrote to us (on 5th February 2011) bragging about the petition, in a clear attempt to discourage us and undermine our resistance:

“You may not be aware” she wrote ”but a parents’ petition in support of the school on this site was organised by a local primary school with around 200 signatures from local parents, including many from Lancaster West Estate, a number of whom are resident in Grenfell Tower and a  number resident in Verity Close. Since the Academy is now 95% certain to be built and to be built on this site, it is vital that we build in as many safeguards and elements of community gain for the immediate locality as possible”

We were becoming increasingly suspicious of Blakeman’s politicking, and we soon learned that a survey conducted locally by the Council in March 2011 had found that the majority of respondents (62%) did not support the Council’s plans. So we wrote to the Council, using the Freedom of Information Act, to query the details of the petition. What we discovered, via a formal reply from Peter Bradbury at RBKC, was that Blakeman’s email was largely a work of fiction.

FIRSTLY, the petition had made no reference to the Lancaster Green site. It simply supported the Council’s proposal to build an Academy in North Kensington, and made no reference to any site or location. Readers should note that we do not dispute the need for a new secondary school for North Kensington. We fully support that. Our only issue is with the siting of this school on the Lancaster Green site, which is too small to accommodate this development, and is essential as open space and green space for the Lancaster West community.

SECONDLY, The petition did not have “around 200 signatures” as Blakeman had claimed. In fact it had been signed by just 118 persons. Big difference there also.

THIRDLY, Blakeman claimed that the signatories had included “many from Lancaster West Estate”. In fact only 26% of the signatories were from Lancaster West.

Given that there are nearly 1000 households on Lancaster West Estate – and 26% of 118 amounts to no more than 31 signatures – we would argue that the 26% quoted by Mr Bradbury could not reasonably or legitimately be described by Blakeman as “many from Lancaster West” and that the petition was in fact signed by only a very few Lancaster West residents.

SO WHAT’S THE POINT OF ALL THIS?

Well, Blakeman knew all along, and certainly since the St Clement’s meeting in September 2010, that there was fierce opposition to KALC at Lancaster West, but it suited her contrary agenda to pretend otherwise, and to cynically misrepresent the facts on the ground to us, and to anyone else she was in a position to influence.

Blakeman was elected to represent the residents of Notting Barns, many of whom live on the Silchester and Lancaster West Estates, which together form one of the most deprived ghettos in North Kensington. Blakeman knows this area well. She lives right next door to Lancaster West – on a private middle class estate called Wesley Square. She knew all along that the siting of the KALC development at Lancaster Green would mean the destruction of essential and irreplaceable open space, one of the few assets the Lancaster West community had, and that the consequent over-development of this area would severely impact the local community in a number of ways.

She also knew that the Lancaster West community would never support these plans, but she chose, for political expediency, to betray this community, deliberately and cynically, by voting with the Tories, and colluding with them in under-representing the strength of local opposition to the plans, and falsely claiming a strength of support in the Lancaster West community that simply did not exist.

For this campaign of treachery and deceit, and for the subsequent smear campaign against all opponents of the KALC project – notably ourselves – we award the first of our GRENFELL ACTION GROUP PANTS ON FIRE AWARDS to Judith Blakeman.

We strongly recommend that she share this award with the rest of the Labour group at RBKC, who are all complicit, one way or another, in the betrayal and abandonment of the Lancaster West community.