On the surface, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), the wealthy central London local council that is home to the luxury department store Harrods and the affluent neighbourhood of Notting Hill, appears the ideal place to live, with the highest median income (£1,40,000 a year) and highest life expectancy in Britain. However, dig a little deeper and things look different. In one part of the borough, child poverty levels are among the worst in Britain, with 58% of children living in poverty. While in one neighbourhood life expectancy is around 94 years for a man, in another part of the borough, it has declined by six years since 2010 to 72 years. These are some of the statistics that feature in a detailed and highly critical report published this week, looking into conditions in Kensington and Chelsea, five months after a devastating fire tore through Grenfell Tower, the 24-storey public housing high-rise within the borough, killing 71 people. The tragedy occurred despite warnings from residents of their concerns about the maintenance of the building and the risks posed should a fire take hold, including the lack of an alarm system.
“Kensington and Chelsea is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong in our country in the past few years,” writes Labour MP Emma Dent Coad in her report, which contrasts the council’s willingness to spend on what she describes as a host of vanity projects while penny-pinching when it came to social welfare and housing spend. “The proximity of huge wealth attracted by an overheated international property market unencumbered by taxes, alongside poverty so extreme that children and older people are suffering malnutrition, is a scandal that brings shame on our society in the 21st century London.”
Broad-based inquiry
The Grenfell tragedy and the questions it raised continue to haunt British politics. In September, a government-commissioned inquiry opened into the tragedy, led by a former judge, Marti Moore Bick, which is examining everything from the construction and maintenance and management of the building to the response of the emergency services. However, some critics have argued that its reach does not go far enough — and that a far more broad-based inquiry looking at the wider issue of social housing in Britain and issues such as racial prejudice need to be included. A separate review of building regulations and fire safety is also under way, with the Labour Party pushing for the government to set aside funds to install sprinklers in high-rises across the country in the coming budget.
Meanwhile, the government (and local authorities) has continued to face criticism over the speed of the response — a substantial number of families who lost their homes in the fire remain in temporary housing, while campaign group Justice4Grenfell has expressed concerns about the direction of the immigration amnesty offered to undocumented survivors of the fire, arguing it offered no “certainty, safety or security for traumatised survivors”. Questions have also arisen about the limited distribution of charitable funds — to various organisations — by members of the public in the wake of the tragedy.
This week, another controversy surfaced as the Labour Party accused the Conservatives of insensitivity as a written survey in a wealthy ward in Kensington and Chelsea asked residents to rate the importance they accorded the Grenfell tragedy on a scale of 1 to 10. “Grenfell inquiry has barely got under way and the same group of politicians who have been in charge of the RBKC appear to be already brushing what happened under the carpet,” tweeted Labour MP David Lammy.
(Vidya Ram works for The Hindu and is based in London)
