One of the most startling findings to emerge from the Grenfell report is that the blaze killed almost half (41%) the building’s Disabled occupants.
As well as the 15 residents with conditions or impairments who lost their lives after a Hot Point fridge freezer ignited on the fourth floor of the 23 storey North Kensington building that night,17 of the Tower’s 67 children also perished. These 32 deaths account for nearly half the total number of fatalities.
Whichever way you cut the figures, it’s clear that residents with higher needs, and especially Disabled people, fared particularly badly in the disaster.
Nearly half Grenfell’s Disabled occupants were killed in the blaze – source Disability Rights UK.
The Disabled residents of Grenfell may well not have died in such disproportionately high numbers if they’d had Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (PEEP) and if these plans had been available in the foyers of the Tower so that the emergency services could have established where those residents were.
Multi-floor buildings like Grenfell should also have evacuchairs to make it easier to move Disabled people in the event of an emergency.
In 2019, the Grenfell Inquiry recommended that all Disabled people with impaired mobility living in high rise buildings should have a PEEP, but the previous Government ignored this, saying PEEPs were not ‘practical, safe or appropriate’.
But it’s not only the former Government that has poor track record on fire safety. We know from the press that Camden Council’s actions on fire safety have been woefully lacking. After a fire in a block of flats in Daleham Gardens caused the death of Magdalena Fink in 2017, the Town Hall was slammed with a £500,000 fine for failing to implement fire safety recommendations issued in 2013.
The Social Housing regulator has since released a damning report on Camden’s fire safety record. When the report came out in July last year, the regulator said the Council still had over 9,000 overdue fire safety actions to take.
Furthermore, our council contracted the firm Rydon, heavily criticised in the Grenfell Report for bearing “considerable responsibility for the 2017 fatal blaze,” to carry out the refurbishments of Camden’s Chalcots estate. The disgraced firm encrusted the Chalcots buildings in flammable cladding, turning the towers into a tinderbox and compelling the council to evacuate the premises on a Friday evening.
As in Kensington then, it would seem that Camden Council officers are paying little attention to the needs of Disabled people in the event of fires.
I hope I am wrong, that Camden has bucked its ideas up and that all residential blocks in Camden now have PEEPs in place, but I have been unable to find any information on the Council’s actions on issuing PEEPS so I have made a Freedom of Information Act request.
Camden Disability Action and the Council’s Disability Oversight Panel should as a matter of urgency persuade the Council to review its policy towards the evacuation of its Disabled tenants in the event of a fire. Secondly, the council should re-examine all projects involving the firm Rydon.
The evacuation of people, whether Disabled or not, is quite separate from the state of fire precautions and Rydon has a track record of failing on fire safey precautions.
The wider issue for both CDA and DOP is the importance of their roles as pressure groups on matters such as these which affect large numbers of people.
Measures you could take include deputations to Council meetings, publicity in the media and demands for meetings with the responsible Cabinet members and senior officers. An immediate action would be to press for the Council to start on an independent investigation into the refurbishment of Chalcots.
There is a strong message to CDA and its trustees, please act strongly and urgently for those people it represents to ensure that we are not victims of fires.
Those who live in Chalcots were lucky that the Fire Brigade, just after Grenfell, told the Council that it could not guarantee the evacuation of Chalcots residents, Disabled or able, in the event of a fire. The question is why was the Council unaware of this and why it signed off on an unsafe refurbishment of the tower blocks.
