Grenfell: Housing managers repeatedly rejected calls to improve safety of disabled residents

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report has revealed how opportunities to produce evacuation plans for disabled residents of Grenfell – and other high-rise buildings in the same London borough – were repeatedly rejected by those responsible for their safety.

The report was published yesterday (Wednesday), with the inquiry’s chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, describing “a persistent failure to give sufficient importance to the demands of fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people”.

The fire, in the early hours of 14 June 2017, led to the deaths of 72 people, and analysis of the final report suggests about 20 of those who died were disabled.

The report – which reaches nearly 1,700 pages, across seven volumes – raises repeated concerns in volumes one and three about the failure to protect disabled people and others who were particularly vulnerable in such emergencies.

Evidence in volume three of the report provides repeated evidence of how Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) – which took over management of Kensington and Chelsea council’s housing in 1995 – repeatedly failed to ensure the safety of its disabled tenants.

It also details how Kensington and Chelsea council failed to ensure those duties were carried out.

It describes how Robert Black, KCTMO’s chief executive, misled the council’s executive director of housing in 2010 about plans to produce personal emergency evacuation plans (PEEPs) for disabled tenants.

He told her that KCTMO intended to produce PEEPs for its disabled residents, but only two were ever prepared between 2010 and 2017, and neither of those residents lived in Grenfell Tower.

The following year, in 2011, Janice Wray, KCTMO’s head of health and safety, “gave similar assurances that the TMO* intended to identify vulnerable and disabled residents who required PEEPs”.

But the council failed to check on whether those PEEPs were completed. It later admitted to the inquiry that this had been “a failure of oversight on its part”, says the report.

London Fire Brigade (LFB) also asked KCTMO to prepare a list of vulnerable residents that could be easily accessed in an emergency.

But, the report says, KCTMO “did not create a system to collect information about residents with additional needs that could be made available to the LFB in the event of a fire”.

At one point in 2012, Carl Stokes, a former firefighter turned fire safety consultant who had been appointed as KCTMO’s fire risk assessor, advised Wray to lie to LFB and tell them she was not aware of any vulnerable people who might be suitable for a fire brigade initiative to install sprinklers.

The report says: “He did so in order to avoid any questions being asked about why anyone who might qualify had not been identified in the fire risk assessments or received a PEEP.”

It adds: “The truth is that he knew that PEEPs were required for vulnerable residents, that the TMO had produced only two, and that his fire risk assessments had not recommended any additional fire safety measures for vulnerable people.

“His advice amounted to a suggestion that she should lie to the LFB.”

The report says that neither Stokes nor Wray were “able to provide a clear explanation for their failure to ascertain the number of vulnerable people” living in KCTMO properties.

And it concludes that “the fire risk assessments carried out by Mr Stokes that we examined, including those relating to Grenfell Tower, were inaccurate and out of date in relation to the presence of vulnerable persons”.

The report also reveals that KCTMO’s fire safety strategy made provision for PEEPs for its own disabled staff members but “contained no reference to PEEPs for vulnerable residents”.

And it says that no disabled residents were ever told that they could ask to be assessed for a PEEP “and the possibility was not drawn to their attention in any of the literature they were given”.

The report concludes that the Grenfell Tower fire “revealed the importance of ensuring that the responsible person collects sufficient information about any vulnerable occupants to enable PEEPs to be prepared, when appropriate, and, in the event of a fire, appropriate measures to be taken to assist their escape (see separate story).

“The TMO’s failure to collect such information illustrates a basic neglect of its obligations in relation to fire safety.”

*Tenant management organisation

Picture: (From left to right) Robert Black, Janice Wray and Carl Stokes giving evidence to the inquiry

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