Grenfell Tower landlord ‘blocked staff access to residents’ blog’
Grenfell Tower’s landlord blocked staff computers from accessing a residents’ blog which raised concerns about the building’s refurbishment and warned of a potentially disastrous fire, the inquiry into the 14 June 2017 blaze has heard.
The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) considered the Grenfell Action Group blog “scaremongering and potentially frightening to the residents”. It blocked access to it on its servers so staff working on the project could not view posts from around 2013 onwards.
The censored blog was co-written by Edward Daffarn, a 16th-floor resident, and in November 2016, eight months before the fire that killed 72 people, the blog warned: “Only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation.”
Claire Williams, the TMO’s refurbishment project manager, told the inquiry she read some of the critical blogs before they were blocked and considered them “negative and vitriolic”. She decided: “I would not look at them again.” She also complained the blog did not sufficiently praise the work of the TMO. “There was never any comment about the good work we were doing in terms of employment initiatives, all the things we did for residents – they were just overlooked,” she said.
The inquiry also heard confirmation that the TMO did not tell residents that non-combustible zinc cladding had been swapped for plastic-filled aluminium cladding which would later prove to be combustible and the main source of fire spread. Williams said: “It wasn’t mentioned and that was an omission.”
She said it was because construction had already begun when the decision was made. The combustible panels were hundreds of thousands of pounds cheaper and were introduced in a costcutting exercise, the inquiry has previously heard.
KCTMO’s decision to block the blog emerged as the inquiry investigated how the landlord handled residents’ concern about quality of workmanship and fire safety.
Daffarn was part of the Grenfell Compact, a representative residents’ group which in January 2016 called on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to launch an independent inquiry into the TMO’s regeneration works and complained of “ill-treatment, incompetence and abuse”.
The counsel to the inquiry, Richard Millett QC, asked Williams: “Did you consider that the blogs might be a way in which some of the residents sought to bring issues that affected them personally and their homes to the TMO’s attention?”
She replied: “As a means of communication with the TMO, it was not an
appropriate media … There was concern over how representative the blogs were and a lot of the time they were libellous, unsubstantiated and clearly slanted.” She added: “This was not the way people were thinking … people would disassociate from the Grenfell Action Group. They would tell me specifically, ‘I am not part of that, we do not think like that, we think what you are doing for this building is positive, thank you.’”
Daffarn gave evidence to the inquiry last week and said RBKC and the TMO had treated residents with “hostility”, “neglect” and “contempt”.
Leaseholders in the tower also voiced serious concerns about the works and three months before the blaze said they were “seriously concerned” that people might die in a fire, but their fears were not properly addressed and they were treated as “subcitizens”.
David Collins, another resident who chaired the Grenfell Compact, told the inquiry: “Residents were experiencing threats, lies, bullying and harassment from TMO and Rydon [the main contractor].” In April 2015, with the works well under way, Williams warned a senior colleague against attending a meeting of a residents’ group called Grenfell Community Unite because it could become “a showcase for Mr Daffarn”.
“The agenda would be disrupted by Mr Daffarn raising issues in a loud voice and generally making an organised meeting quite difficult to hold,” Williams told the inquiry. She said he just wanted to “spoil” meetings between residents and the TMO, and “would shift the goalposts”.
The inquiry also heard the TMO failed to tell residents that during 2014 and 2015 the smoke ventilation system was not working. Instead it hoped “our luck holds and there are no fires”.
The system was beyond repair but, according to meeting minutes, the landlord told the London fire brigade it was partially working. Internally, the landlord’s contractor was “urgently” trying to fix the system “to get Grenfell some protection ASAP”.
“It is something we could have told people about, but we didn’t,” Williams told the inquiry.
Millett put it to her that keeping their “fingers crossed” that there would be no fire was a “wholly inappropriate and potentially very dangerous” approach.
“There were other safety measures in the building,” she said.
When Daffarn and the Grenfell Tower leaseholders’ association asked about the problems with the smoke vents, Williams described it as “bad news” to colleagues. Millett said: “It was bad news because they were on to you and you didn’t like it.” She denied that.