THE GLOVES COME OFF

11th February

Dear Councillor Foreman,

I am now writing to you, formally, on behalf of the Lancaster West Residents Association, the Grenfell Action Group and the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders Association to request that our local Ward Councillors facilitate a Community Meeting (as referred to in my emails to Councillor Blakeman on the 8th and 5th Feb 2013) to address resident’s legitimate concerns about the ill treatment of our community?

We request this meeting takes place without any undue delay and that Councillor Coleridge ( in his capacity as the Council’s KALC representative and Council’s Housing Cabinet Member) along with a representative from the Planning Dept. (Mr Bore?), also, attend.
Needless to say, the residents that elected you to represent our community expect your earnest co-operation with the above request.

Kind regards,
Edward Daffarn
Grenfell Action Group.

13th February

Dear Eddie

I have seen your e-mail of 11th February 2013 to Cllr Todd Foreman, inviting him to attend a public meeting called by yourself. In the same e-mail you suggest that I might wish to attend such a meeting.

Since the beginning of this project you have made it clear that you do not want either the new Academy to be built, nor the new Leisure centre. The decision to go ahead was democraticaly made by the Royal Borough Council, the British Government who are providing a grant of £17M, the local Planning Authority and the Mayor of London. Since these democratic decision have been made they have been accepted by the vast majority of local residents (many of whom are looking forward to a new academy for their children and a new leisure centre), but apparently not by you. You continue to do all you can to disrupt and delay the project, causing considerable extra work for officers, contractors and Councillors. If you have a legitimate complaint to make it will be dealt with properly, but your long trail of e-mails over months and months leads me to believe that you have your own agenda, which is not a positive one for either the future school or local residents interests. Local residents want the work finished on time, and to be able to enjoy what will be a much improved environment.

Eddie, so long as you continue to hound our officers and local councillors to satisfy your own agenda I am unwilling to attend a meeting called by yourself. I believe it was you that sprayed some offensive messages on the hoardings (you have not denied it) and this apart from being criminal damage was upsetting to local residents, and has for me called into question your motives.

Sincerely

Councillor Coleridge

20th February

Dear Judith,

I take great exception to the tone and content of your email, in which you appear to accuse me, and other members of the Grenfell Action Group, of making complaints “couched in tendentious, abusive, offensive and bullying terms”.

You also accuse us of making “vexatious complaints that are intended solely to delay the completion of the construction works”.

If you have evidence to support either of these accusations kindly produce it without further delay. Otherwise I must ask that you desist from making such false and scurrilous accusations, which I note that you have copied widely in an apparent attempt to damage our reputation and undermine the legitimacy of the concerns and complaints we have quite properly raised, and will continue to raise.

The position taken by the Labour Group, and by Notting Barns ward councillors in particular, in supporting the RBKC decision to impose the hated KALC development on this totally unsuitable site was disgraceful and completely indefensible. The situation that now prevails is that the residents of Grenfell Tower have been deprived, and will remain deprived for the duration of the works, of all residential amenity space, including the small playground for pre-teens that used to stand next to Grenfell Tower, and which is now completely destroyed.

Where will the children of the Grenfell area play? Where will the toddlers of the area play? How can the elderly and infirm venture outside to take the air or to sit in quiet contemplation? There was a time when Labour Party councillors could be counted on to defend the rights of the poor and powerless. This is clearly no longer the case, at least not in Notting Barns, hence the formation of uncompromising action groups such as ours.

I presume that your accusation of “vexatious complaints intended solely to delay completion of the construction works” refers to our recent efforts to resist the Council’s illegal closure of the rights-of-way through the area now occupied by the KALC site. According to feedback I received from yesterday’s Community Forum, Leadbitters and the Council have now acknowledged the hardship these closures cause to local residents, particularly the most vulnerable, and have agreed to re-open a north/south right of way through the centre of the KALC site.

The complaints against the closures, championed by our Mr Daffarn, and to which you appear to have taken particular and very personal exception, have clearly been entirely vindicated, although the apology Mr Daffarn was seeking, on behalf of the community, has yet to materialise. If you had an ounce of integrity you too would be demanding that apology.

Your use of the terms “abusive, offensive and bullying” was also extended to an accusation that our members had behaved in such a manner at ward councillor’s surgeries. This accusation appears also to be directed specifically against Mr Daffarn, who assures me that he hasn’t actually attended one of your surgeries for several months, and certainly did not behave in an abusive or bullying manner when he did.

One has to wonder why, if Mr Daffarn’s behaviour was so troubling, you waited five whole months before complaining to me about it. One has to wonder also why you would direct this complaint to me at all. I am not Mr Daffarn’s keeper. If you have a problem with him I suggest you sort it out with him. I know that I have never found his behaviour abusive, offensive or bullying, and I do not recognise your characterisation of him – or perhaps I might more correctly call it your character assassination of him, because I am quite sure that this is your true intention – both yours and that of Cllr Coleridge who has already insulted, falsely accused, and tried to provoke Mr Daffarn in an earlier email (to which you also refer)

Incidentally, your reaction to Cllr Coleridge’s attack on Mr Daffarn:
“TIM, FANTASTIC, THANK YOU SOOO MUCH, JUDITH”
strikes me as a particularly disgusting, odious and completely inappropriate attempt to humiliate and provoke Mr Daffarn beyond endurance.

Cllr Coleridge and yourself both occupy positions of considerable power within the Hornton Street establishment, yet you abuse your power to intimidate and threaten him, and then have to effrontery, like Goliath confronting David, to call him the bully. There is someting especially odious about the way that you have conspired together to attack the character and reputation of this local man who has done no more than dare to challenge your abuse of power and unprincipled betrayal of the Lancaster West community, and to fight to defend local residents against the juggernaut of this rotten and unprincipled Tory Council.

Yours most sincerely,

Francis O’Connor

OOPS

Lancaster West Manager Siobhan Rumble clearly took great exception to yesterday’s post. She called our webmaster up on the phone, muttered something about going too far this time, said we were getting too personal, and threatened us with a lawsuit.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that we are actually very careful about what we print, particularly when we’re dealing with controversial issues (which we usually are) and we don’t make accusations which we can’t support with evidence.

Ms Rumble is not the first to accuse us, and to try to bully and intimidate us into silence.

STAY TOONED – MORE WILL BE REVEALED VERY SHORTLY

Another Fire Safety Scandal

When we published our two recent items on Fire Safety in the Grenfell Tower area we expected to see some serious repercussions. Our earlier complaints to Siobhan Rumble had, of course, been copied to senior figures at RBKC, including the Director of Housing and the Cabinet Member for Housing, so we fully expected to see evidence of some kind of seismic upheavel following our revelations. Nothing of the sort happened. There wasn’t so much as a peep out of Coleridge or his deputy Laura Johnson.

We did get a reaction from Rumble herself. Following her earlier failure to provide us with contact details for Steve Cunningham, the Station Manager at North Kensington Fire Station, she did so immediately, once she had been publicly embarrassed by our first blog.

Unfortunately, and for reasons that we don’t fully understand, we got a very poor response from Mr Cunningham, who seemed inclined to cut Ms Rumble and her cronies rather a lot of slack.  He even suggested that we call the police next time we saw vehicles parked illegally in the Grenfell Tower area. Perhaps someone forgot to tell him that the enforcement authority for fire safety issues is not the Metropolitan Police, but the London Fire Brigade, which has the power to issue an enforcement notice requiring the Lancaster West authorities to comply with their own fire safety rules.

Imagine our consternation, therefore, when we then saw the recent report in the K&C Chronicle of a special fire safety exercise organised by the London Fire Brigade, not at Grenfell Tower, which we had been desperately trying to flag up to anyone who cared, but at Trellick Tower, a mile up the road from us.

kensington.londoninformer.co.uk/2013/02/fire-safety-exercise-at-trelli.html

Ironic don’t you think?

BUT WE’RE NOT FINISHED YET!

Below is an extract from the most recent Fire risk Assessment of Grenfell Tower, conducted in November 2012,  which TMO Health and Safety Officer Janice Wray was kind enough (?) to provide us with.

On Page 28 the following is recorded:

“From the asset records provided to me by the TMO the emergency lighting and fire alarm systems along with the dry riser, fire fighter lifts and the hose reels installed in this building are all subject to a maintenance contracts. Testing, servicing and maintenance is being carried out by professional third party contractors on a planned preventive maintenance programme with records kept centrally by TMO at the “Hub” and by the contractor for all these systems, no test certificates have been seen to confirm this.

RGE Services are under contract to TMO to provide portable fire fighting equipment, testing, servicing and maintenance, the fire extinguisher in this building, the basement boiler room, the lift motor room, the ground floor electrical room plus other areas were out of test date according to the contractors label on the extinguishers.  The last test date was on the 8th August 2011. Some located in the roof level areas had “condemned” written on them in large black writing with a last test date of 2009 or 2010. This seems to indicate that monthly occupier inspections are not being carried out.

It is not known if the caretaker is undertaking the monthly occupier’s tests of the installed emergency lighting system, fire extinguishers and structural items as per the caretakers check list this would include the external stairs and lift checks with the results being kept as a record of testing having been undertaken.”

On the face of it this is alarming evidence of serious negligence over several years, and it is rendered all the more alarming when seen in its true context, as part of a history of negligence that in all likelihood stretches back to 2004 and beyond.

It just so happens that one of our members chaired the EMB Property Management Committee in 2004 when that committee received information that the Grenfell Tower emergency lighting system was in very poor condition. Two thirds of the battery packs were completely dead, and the entire system would have failed in an emergency. The committee then fought a protracted battle with the TMO for more than a year, during which time the TMO repeatedly denied that there was a problem, or any negligence with regard to inspection and testing of the system. Eventually the EMB committee succeeded in badgering the TMO into ordering an independent investigation. This was conducted by Peter West of Capita Symonds. His report, when it was published in May 2005, was a shocking indictement of TMO mal-administration and failure of oversight, and of the electrical contractors whose duty it had been to inspect and test the Lancaster West emergency lighting system.

The report recommended that all batteries be replaced urgently, and this was done immediately. However, other recommendations appear to have been largely ignored, one of which was that the TMO urgently consider options for replacing the whole system, which was virtually obsolete and unfit for purpose. Another crucial recommendation that appears to have been ignored was that the TMO initiate and enforce in future a far more rigorous testing and inspection regime for fire safety equipment at Lancaster West.

The implications of the Capita Symonds report went far beyond Lancaster West and led to a wide ranging review of TMO fire safety procedures throughout the borough, but unfortunately, the lessons of 2004/2005 appear to have soon been forgotten – if indeed they were ever learned at all –  and the culture of negligence at the TMO appears to have reverted to type and to have continued unabated to the present

Anyway, the one bit of good news is that when we queried the perverse LFB decision to run their fire exercise at Trellick Tower, despite our complaints about the obstructed access to Grenfell Tower, a similar exercise was hurriedly arranged for Grenfell Tower.

At that time we copied the Grenfell Tower Fire Risk Assessment to Councillor Blakeman (and various others including the LFB) and she replied on 18th February informing us that she had asked for;

“…a full and comprehensive report once the emergency fire test at Grenfell Tower has been conducted and also for this to be an item on the Lancaster West EMB meeting agenda… (and) also asked for the likely timeframe within which we can expect a response.”

As expected we got no reply from anyone else in authority, so we’ll just have to wait and see what develops out of this. Needless to say we won’t be holding our breaths while we wait.

In the light of this official report, which is strongly suggestive of years of ongoing neglect and criminal negligence of the fire safety systems at Grenfell Tower, we would suggest that the managing authorities need to tak a long hard look at themselves, and how they manage this estate. We would also strongly suggest that they seriously reconsider their earlier facile dismissal of the concerns we raised regarding their lax attitude to the emergency access arrangements also.

We note from the account of the Trellick Tower exercise that four fire appliances attended on that occasion. We would be very interested to see whether LFB can fit four appliances into the Grenfell Tower emergency access zone, particularly if it is obstructed with multiple parked service vehicles, as it so often is during working hours.

Given that Lancaster West management and LFB have both dismissed our concerns about such obstructions, we would even dare to suggest that arrangements are made to ensure that a minumum of six service vehicles are deliberately parked in this area, for the duration of the Grenfell Tower exercise, including three in the gallows-gated area, to test access and manoeuverability of fire appliances under emergency circumstances.

ONE THING IS CERTAIN – THEY CAN’T SAY THEY HAVEN’T BEEN WARNED.

Sleeping On The Job

Our regular readers will no doubt have noticed that we have begun expanding our sphere of operations lately and have begun to confront the negligence and incompetence of Lancaster West and TMO management. This new focus might have something to do with the fact that local residents got no support from these august bodies, and no protection from them, when faced with even the worst excesses of the KALC planners

In keeping with the spirit of our expanded agenda we reproduce below, with the consent of the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders Association, an email they sent to Ms Rumble at Lancaster West, and various others at the TMO, during this last weekend. Anyone with previous experience of contacting the TMO out–of-hours emergency service will be familiar with the response(?) that Grenfell Tower residents received on this occasion:

” Sun, 3 Feb 2013 23:19:20

To The Estate Manager and Officers of Lancaster West Estate,

We the residents of Grenfell Tower hope you all had a very good weekend.  Unfortunately, we all did not. The residents of Grenfell Tower suffered from a lack of running water for three days.

To describe our situation in some detail now. We could not flush the Toilet, we could not cook, and we could not wash. But worse of all, when individuals from the block called, we are bluntly told a lie. We are told that no one has called to complain apart from one individual.

The TMO have failed to realise that these scripted words mean very little when there are 120 homes each suffering from the same plight. We know how many people actually called to report the incident; we do not appreciate a lack of honesty in such a difficult situation. To add to this debacle, one of the lifts is not working properly.

Some of the residents were told to call Thames Water instead of TMO, and that it has nothing to do with the TMO. We would thus like to know when there is no running water, who is responsible for providing us with this essential and vital service…on a weekend.

Furthermore, Grenfell Tower has become very difficult to access now, especially carrying shopping. These circumstances thus made it a very frustrating weekend for all, most of all the elderly.

The weekend was very chaotic and stressful. Please let the residents know how you are planning  to compensate us for this serious inconvience.

On behalf of
Grenfell Tower Leaseholders Association and the residents of Grenfell Tower”

Wake Up You Lazy Deceitful Incompetent Shower!

Our Community Deserves Better Than This!

More On Fire Safety

The picture above, taken in October 2012, is the one that kicked-off our row with Lancaster West management on the issue of public safety and emergency access in the Grenfell Tower area. It shows several vehicles belonging to the cleaning contractors which had been parked for a full weekend in an emergency access area adjacent to Grenfell Tower, which should have  been protected by a locked gallows gate.

When we renewed  our complaints in December we were assured, by Ms Rumble, that her response to the October complaint had been to issue strict instructions to the offending contractor that they must not park in this area. We understood this to mean that no vehicles would be allowed to park in this area, that all contractors would be given the same instructions, and that the caretaking staff were under orders to enforce strict parking controls in the area.

Clearly this is not what she meant, as she later informed us that she had actually authorised other vehicles (but apparently not the cleaning contractors?) to park next to Grenfell Tower, and on double-yellow lines elsewhere in the emergency access zone. When we queried this later, with the local highways authority at RBKC, we were told that Ms Rumble has no power to dispense with, or re-interpret, the Highway Code which forbids parking on double-yellow lines.

Anyway, this second picture was taken by us on Monday 28th January at exactly the same location, and shows several commercial vehicles parked, on double-yellow lines in the same restricted emergency access area. What exactly, we wonder, is the difference, and why would this be considered acceptable by Ms Rumble, while the parking of the cleaning contractors vehicles apparently was not?

We think Ms Rumble is guilty of duplicity, and is still risking public safety for the sake of convenience. She doesn’t appear to be running a very tight ship at Lancaster West. This is not surprising if you consider that she spends much of her time these days at the TMO, doubling as their Income Manager. This, incidentally, is a breach of the LWMA management agreement which requires the manager post (aka lead officer) at Lancaster West to be full-time. But then, neither the Council nor the TMO have ever shown the slightest regard or respect for that agreement, except when it suited their own interests to invoke it.

Either way this reeks of criminal negligence to us, and as usual there’s very little the disempowered and uninformed residents of Lancaster West can do about it.

Fire Safety Scandal At Lancaster West

One of the concerns raised by the Grenfell Action Group when we were opposing the KALC development was the impact the loss of the Lancaster Road car-park would have on the community in the Grenfell Tower area. Because vehicular access to Grenfell Tower, and the several low-rise blocks adjacent to it, is severely restricted, the Lancaster Road car-park has served a vital function over the years for residents parking, service and delivery vehicles etc. It has even been used as a backup parking area by the London Fire Brigade because emergency access to the Grenfell Tower area is so restricted.  We argued that the loss of the Lancaster Road car-park would inevitably increase the pressure on Grenfell Road, which is now the only vehicular access to a large part of the southern half of Lancaster West Estate. Everything that moves in or out of this area, including all goods and services, comes through a single narrow and congested corridor – Grenfell Road.

Grenfell Tower stands at the end of this narrow corridor. Parking along Grenfell Road is restricted to resident permit holders only, hence there is no casual parking allowed in the whole area. As it approaches Grenfell Tower the road takes a sharp left turn into the final approach to the tower. From this corner onwards emergency access restrictions apply and are supposed to be strictly enforced and carefully monitored. There should be no parking at any time in this area except for emergency vehicles only. Indeed, there is barely adequate room to manoeuvre for fire engines responding to emergency calls, and any obstruction of this emergency access zone could have lethal consequences in the event of a serious fire or similar emergency in Grenfell Tower or the adjacent blocks.

In recent months we have observed frequent breaches of the emergency access restrictions in this area, by both service and private vehicles. We began complaining to the estate manager in October 2012, and had to renew our complaints in December. At the same time we began accumulating photographic evidence of multiple breaches of the emergency access zone, which were occurring on a daily basis, as well as at weekends, with the apparent consent and complicity of estate staff. Attempts to engage with Siobhan Rumble, the TMO Neighbourhood Manager at Lancaster West, were less than fruitful. She fobbed us off with misleading and ambiguous answers refusing to accept that there was an ongoing problem.

Eventually, with support from Cllr Judith Blakeman, who had witnessed some of the parking infractions in question, we succeeded in badgering Ms Rumble into inviting the local Station Manager from the London Fire Service to visit on 20th December. We later received an account of this visit from Janice Wray, the TMO’s Health and Safety Officer, via an email response she had sent to Cllr Blakeman at the time.

Strangely, on the day of the inspection all appeared to be hunky–dory, and the Fire Officer witnessed no vehicles parked illegally or obstructing the emergency access route in any way.

One has to wonder how it could be that every time we visited the area during that week, and on subsequent occasions, we were able to take photographs (some of which are reproduced here) showing multiple and continuous obstructions of the emergency access zone, but on the single occasion of the Station Manager’s visit (pre-arrangerd and by invitation) he found no evidence of any obstruction.

We are not in a position to accuse TMO officers of conniving to mislead the London Fire Service, and of playing russian roulette with the safety of local residents, and nor would we presume to make such accusations. We do, however, invite our readers to study a selection of the many photographs we took, and to form their own conclusions. We would be more than happy to make our evidence available to fire officers, and have already offered to do so. However Ms Rumble ignored our requests to be provided with the contact details of the Station Officer in question, who appears to have been badly misled and misinformed.

We are aware of the difficulties faced by Lancaster West staff who struggle to somehow provide access for TMO and other service contractors, but have nowhere to legally park them. Pressure on staff to bend the rules has certainly increased since the Lancaster Road car-park was swallowed up by the KALC construction site. However their primary and most fundamental duty must be to secure and protect the single narrow emergency access corridor on the only remaining approach to Grenfell Tower and adjacent residential blocks. Knowingly compromising this essential emergency access for the convenience of staff and service vehicles would be highly dangerous, criminally negligent, and could prove lethal in the event of a serious fire emergency – which could occur at any time.

On top of this, major works are expected to start soon on Grenfell Tower, which will require the movement of large quantities of materials, plant and equipment through this same narrow access corridor. The logistics of this will be very challenging, and the safety of residents must not be compromised, but how can we trust estate staff to safeguard emergency access in the face of these new challenges when they are already playing fast and loose with the safety of residents before the works have even begun?

MS RUMBLE AND HER BOSSES AT THE TMO NEED TO GET A GRIP – AND SOONER RATHER THAN LATER.