Leader – Hackney Council now must put fire safety first
Hackney’s social housing residents have fortunately not had to endure the anguish of a fire on the scale of Grenfell Tower, or Southwark’s Lakanal House.
Yet reading between the lines of Hackney’s approach to fire safety, one discerns a worryingly lackadaisical management style clad with communicational opacity.
So far, fewer than five per cent of the 1,800 fire risk assessments (FRAs) Hackney Council has pledged to release have been made public, via a user unfriendly map that has been slammed by disability rights activists.
The contents of this initial trickle of information is cause for serious concern. In the first batch of 15 FRAs posted by the council, three high risk issues were identified, and not a single one had been dealt with within the one-month target.
At 52 Amhurst Road, no FRA was carried out for five years, allegedly because assessors were not able to gain access. When the property was eventually inspected, it was discovered that there was no fire alarm in place.
Fire safety is not glamorous or exciting. Yet whether or not people are clamouring for it, whether or not there is spare cash to splash, protecting residents from a catastrophic inferno is the absolute duty of any local authority.
The council needs to pull its socks up on fire risk management. Residents need to know it is looking out for them, rather than wasting resources sniping at those who report on its failings. It is utterly shameful that such diversionary tactics are the only transparent aspect of the Town Hall’s fire strategy.
I’ve had numerous dealing with Hackney Council on a wide range of issues and have found them neither competent nor efficient. They even conveniently forget to log complaints when they are made, nor do they keep to their own complaint procedure.
Hackney Council likes to give the impression that it is there for its customer, tenants leaseholders and council tax payers when they need its services. However, their failings are many, while their attitude in dealing with complaints is always to excuse their failings as “unusual” and “rare”. And as to paying compensation for their errors……..
But woe betide you should you make a mistake, be late paying a bill, parking in the wrong place and they’re down on you like a ton of bricks – often with the full force of the law behind them.
I think that a team of Councillors should examine each and every complaint made to the Council and the Councils final response. They would then get an accurate picture of the frustrations felt by those who have to use the Council’s services and they could then hold the appropriate officers to account for the failings. And those officers would then be required to take action against the Council employees who let down their customers. The Council is a supplier of services to the community, the customers are the users of those services. Too much authority rests with the supplier rather than the users -its a sort of “we’ll decide what you can have when and how its delivered – you the customer have no say at all”. Councillors need to recognise that their main role is to control the Council’s services through the Councils employed officials – and that will mean being critical of Council services when things go wrong.
Since the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the issue of fire safety has taken on a deeper meaning.
It is about making sure similar buildings are as safe as they can be and that a similar tragedy can never happen again, but it is also about showing people who live in social housing who feel they have been ignored for too long, that we are listening and we will act to make their lives better.
The Liberal Democrats immediately called for new risk assessments to be carried out on all Hackney blocks and that they should be made available online for residents to view.
This is so residents can see for themselves whether their buildings are safe and hold those in authority to account if they are not.
It is not just an exercise in dumping fire risk assessments onto a website, it is an exercise in building trust with residents who have lost all faith that those in authority are listening.
The fact that so few of the promised risk assessments have been made available so far, and the unacceptable delays in dealing with serious fire safety issues identified, is making this whole exercise counter-productive.
Instead of showing that the council will be transparent, it is showing just how obstructive with information it can be.
Instead of showing residents that the council will act quickly to deal with any issue, it is showing just how slow housing issues are dealt with, even if it is a serious fire risk.
It is highlighting what many residents I have spoken to in Hackney believe, that once the Grenfell tragedy fades from the news, councils and governments and politicians will just go back to ignoring them.
The council needs to realise that with every delay in releasing risk assessments and with every delay in dealing with fire safety issues identified, they are eroding trust further and ruining what is a chance to change the relationship with residents in Hackney to an open, transparent one where people feel they are listened to and that their opinions are valued.
It’s mostly just one big a pointless distraction. A “moral panic”, a useful political lever, a bit of politically posturing.
The ship’s hit an iceberg and is sinking and folks, are getting all emotional about an ashtray that’s on fire.
Everyone on hands to put a non-exist problem out … if you want to know the truth, it’s just become a new excuse for more old stuff not to get done.
Grenfell was just an unfortunately “lightning strike” (… albeit one landing right back on the Tories’ programme of cut backs and their pandering to their party funding property and constructing industry mates).
Yes, the Tories are murderers, and they must be sniggering over the fact it was mostly leftie leaning immigrants who went up in flames.
But no one wants to stare in the face of what is *really* – and very predictably – goining to be kill far more people in the borough … and finally kill off the spirit of the old borough – of which there are more than a few from cut backs and benefit changes, to economic social and ethnic cleansing.
You think now and Grenfell was bad … how do think things are going to be in 10 or 15 years when *where* are all the poor, now grown up families going to be living becomes the question?
We are headed back to four families in a flat like in Dicken’s time. It is already happening, with, e.g. 16 low paid workers living in a single house.
People are going to envying the residents of Grenfell in at least they went quickly.