Industry News


Tenants win big reduction in temporary accommodation rents


Hundreds of council tenants in temporary accommodation in east London have had their rents reduced by about 60 per cent following a four-year campaign against their landlord. The tenants live in 250 properties at Custom


House and Canning Town, in Newham, which were leased out by the council to the property management company Mears. The properties have now been transferred back into council management. Tenants claimed their homes are unsafe and


unhealthy, with issues such as crumbling asbestos floors, brown water running from taps, and leaky roofs. Those who had struggled to pay their rent, which they described as “sky high”, had fallen into arrears. Some of these issues were compounded during lockdown.Newham council says it will charge tenants a social rent and will respond to repair works needed in the homes, which have been used as temporary accommodation to house local homeless households. The exact rent reduction would depend on each property. Rokhsana Fiaz, Newham’s mayor, said: “This


marks a real victory for the residents who have had historical issues with the management of the property by Mears, which I have been committed to address from the time I was a councillor in Custom House. “Since becoming the mayor of Newham in May


2018, officers have worked tremendously hard with residents to address these issues, by challenging Mears to meet their responsibilities and now we’ve come up with an acceptable solution which causes minimum disruption for tenants.”


Mears said it had spent £400,000 annually on repairs to the properties, which were condemned for demolition by Newham council. The company said the rent levels in the blocks were set by the council.


The properties will be demolished and


replaced as part of a regeneration scheme. The council announced plans that will allow current Mears tenants who have lived in the area for five years and were placed into their homes by the council to receive a secure social rent home.


Grenfell Tower inquiry news – in brief cont.


• Ministers have backed away from a Phase One Inquiry recommendation to make it a legal requirement to carry out three-monthly checks of all fire doors in blocks of flats. Instead the Government is proposing making three-monthly checks compulsory only for fire doors in communal areas of high rises, with six-monthly checks required for entrance doors to individual flats in high rises. These timeframes double for buildings between 11m and 18m tall, while the Government said it is also seeking views on whether prescribing a frequency of checks for shorter buildings is “reasonable and practicable”. A Home Office consultation paper also waters down a call by inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick for mandatory personal evacuation plans (PEEPS) for all high-rise residents who would struggle to leave their building in a fire. Instead, it is proposing that PEEPs will only be required in buildings with a waking watch in place, mainly those with unsafe cladding. For other high rises, responsible persons would be required to pass details of people who self-identify as needing evacuation assistance to the fire service and keep them in a premises information box on site.


A Government statement said “the lack of personnel available to assist during an evacuation; the complexity of any particular building and the roles of those responsible; high turnover of residents; and data protection concerns” present practical challenges to implementing this measure.”


Sir Martin’s phase one report found that missing or broken self-closers on fire doors at Grenfell helped smoke and toxic gases to spread through the tower. While Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick previously promised to implement the inquiry’s recommendations “in full”, there is growing evidence of the Government rowing back from that commitment. Experts have suggested this


16 | HMM October/November 2020 | www.housingmmonline.co.uk


could well be because of the growing costs associated with full implementation of the inquiry report’s recommendations, particularly on the private sector and complex issues over responsibility for payment and delivery.


• Ben Bailey, the project manager on Grenfell Tower’s refurbishment for cladding firm Harley Facades, told the inquiry he had received no training or qualifications in fire safety in construction of buildings, in building regulations or industry codes of practice for design and installation of cladding and windows. Bailey said the only assessment of the performance of the Celotex insulation boards that he saw was of its thermal insulation, not its fire performance. He claimed he was unaware of various documents showing Harley’s contractual responsibilities for ensuring that cladding met official guidance on the fire performance of external walls, nor requirements for the firm to comply with all all building regulations and a national standard for walls with vertical rainscreens. He was also unaware that product literature for RS 5000 stated that its classification for safe use on buildings over 18m only applied to the system as tested and detailed in the classification report, which did not test it with combustible, plastic-filled aluminium panels.


• Police helicopters circling Grenfell Tower did not fan the flames or cost lives by misleading trapped residents into thinking they would rescue them, an investigation managed by the national police watchdog has concluded. The surveillance helicopters were not close enough for their rotors to fuel the fire and residents who believed they were there to rescue them had not been misled by 999 call operators, according to a report by the Metropolitan Police’s directorate of professional standards under the management of the Independent Office of Police Conduct. However, the report concluded that 999 operators taking calls from trapped residents asking about the possibility of helicopter rescues had on occasion been “unclear” and recommended all emergency services call handlers be trained to be explicit that national police air service helicopters do not have rescue capabilities. The findings came three years after an initial complaint by Nabil Choucair, who lost six members of his family in the fire in west London on 14 June 2017. He had said the six helicopters deployed to fly around the tower almost continuously from 1.44am to 4.05am had offered a “cruel and tortuous hope”. In fact, their job was to send live video footage to incident commanders.


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