Grenfell Tower five years on: how can we do better?

Ed Daffarn is a former resident of Grenfell Tower, who lived on the 16th floor. He is a member of Grenfell United and has been attending the Grenfell Tower public inquiry, which continues to examine the circumstances of that tragic night.

He spoke to Modus to explain how the fire exposed major shortcomings in the social housing sector, why he believes social housing tenants continue to be mistreated and what must change to prevent similar disasters occurring in the future.

On the night it happened, we were left standing in the street and if it hadn’t been for the local community and local faith groups and youth centres opening up, we would have been standing there a long time. Being abandoned in the fifth richest country in the world in the 21st century, when we purport to be very different to that, was very painful and still hurts.

About five minutes later I heard some shouting in the communal area and that got me out of bed. I put on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, went to my front door, opened it, and instead of seeing my neighbour out there like I expected, this black, acrid smoke was swirling around.

I closed the door straight away and my heart sank. I thought ‘this isn’t just my neighbour, we’ve got a proper fire going on here’. We’d been told by the TMO (tenant management organisation) that we should stay put if something like this happened. And that’s probably what I would have done if it hadn’t been for the fact my phone rang and it was a neighbour of mine from downstairs who just shouted at me ‘GET OUT, GET THE F*** OUT!’

It was something in the power of his voice and the way he told me that I didn’t say, ‘look, I’ve opened the door, seen a lot of smoke and I think I’ll stay here’, I just thought, I need to go. So I wrapped a wet towel around my mouth, went out into the hallway and closed the door behind me.

Then I had to walk between my front door and the emergency stairwell which was probably about 15-20 feet, not a great distance, but I couldn’t see anything because the smoke was so thick. Instead of finding the door to the stairwell, I found a wall. And I started panicking and pawing at the wall, so I dropped the towel and started inhaling the smoke. I was thinking ‘I’m going to die now’. At that moment, a firefighter had come through the door and was crawling along the ground where the smoke was thinner. He grabbed hold of my legs, stood up and pulled me out of there into the stairwell.

Once I got my breath back, I experienced what is called ‘fight or flight’ and just ran for my life down the building and got outside at about 1.30am, by which time the fire had been going for 40 minutes. It was the most horrific scene, the whole side of the building was ablaze, people were at the windows and it was really distressing.

The firefighters said it was a million to one shot they found me because they’d actually come to get my neighbour whose smoke alarm had gone off. Unfortunately, he died in the fire – we lost two people on my landing.

I’m not saying that I wasn’t a challenging individual for these people, but they needed challenging. They didn’t like being questioned. The KCTMO (Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation) spent a lot of time during this inquiry trying to drag my name through the mud. The truth of it is, that we stood up to people who wanted to have it all their own way.

Unfortunately, five years on, I think many social housing tenants would say that the system hasn’t changed significantly enough. The white paper on social housing is supposed to be the vehicle to bring meaningful change.

When you’re a social housing manager and you’ve got 200 properties under your control, the fact that you have no qualifications is bit worrying. We were the victims of that and want to make sure it doesn’t happen to other people.

A member of our committee works in the city in banking and he was quite keen to see if we could get a senior management regime introduced, where you’re responsible for the people under you. That was introduced to banking after the 2008 financial crash. We tried to get that included but failed.

We were trying to get the regulator to split with the commercial arm, which looks at the finances of the housing associations and TMOs, and we failed with that as well. We were dealing with Robert Jenrick (then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government). We had a good relationship with James Brokenshire, a less productive relationship with Jenrick and we’re just in the process now of seeing what Michael Gove will or will not do.

By profession, I’m a social worker and that’s because I believe people need to be treated with respect. Injustice to individuals needs to be challenged. Here we have a great injustice being done against a whole cohort of residents. It was a really awful experience to be a victim of the KCTMO.

I readily acknowledge there is a small percentage of very good housing providers and a larger percentage of housing providers that do a so-so job. But unfortunately there is large percentage of housing providers down the bottom… I’ve said it many times about the KCTMO – it was a racket, they were a mini-mafia, a non-functioning organisation who didn’t care about their residents. They weren’t in it for their residents, they were in it for what they could get out of it.

If ever a housing association needed evidence that they needed to improve, Grenfell was it but the fact that we are having this conversation now means it hasn’t worked. We need a regulator that is capable of carrying out proactive, unannounced or very short notice visits to really get under the bonnet of what these organisations are doing. Looking at how they treat complaints, handle evictions, how they facilitate tenant voice.

I hesitate to say the Ofsted model but schools really fear their visits and they talk to the parents and it’s short notice. It’s got to be meaningful; we can’t allow the rogue landlords to game the system. What the KCTMO was good at was gaming the system and knowing how to deal with a weak regulator.

Grenfell Action Group wrote a blog that some people said prophesied the fire. But it wasn’t a prophecy because if your landlord is unable to meet even the most basic of their health and safety obligations, then you’re not a prophet to see there could be catastrophic consequences.

All these different contributors did not have safety as their focus. The architects wanted to make the building look nice and the local council focused on the colour of the cladding but no one was asking how we keep people safe. As Grenfell or Lakanal House show, if you don’t build a safe building it’s going to come and get you later.

There was a fire-resistant cladding that was available but they went for the cheaper, non-fire resistant option. It's the commodification of the housing industry – if you get involved with housing you can make a lot of money out of it.

In a few generations’ time they’ll look back and the judgement on what we’ve done with housing will be withering – our lack of care about how we build, what our priorities are when we build and the long-term outcome of that.

For me it’s about returning some dignity and respect to people living in social housing, ensuring they are listened to when they raise concerns and are treated as proper human beings. There’s a feeling that we were treated as second-class citizens because we lived in social housing. That really needs to change.

The Beveridge Report and the vision for the UK of delivering free healthcare, education and housing was what we demanded as a country after the Second World War. Social housing pays for itself, people who live there pay their rent, it’s self-sustaining. It’s a brilliant concept, on a level with the NHS or free education. But it’s come to be seen as something very different.

After the fire, some of the press ran stories that spoke of illegal immigrants, ‘spongers’ and sub-letting. The truth is we were articulate, hard-working, intelligent and community-minded people from broad ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. We had a banker living in the tower, we had social workers, teachers, all kinds of different people. And we had some vulnerable people who weren’t able to work, with severe and enduring mental health issues.

It was painful that after the fire we were portrayed in that way – maybe that’s a hint as to why people who live in social housing are treated the way they are; people view them through the negative stereotypes seen in the media.

We came together because we were being treated very badly. I’m proud of the community we had beforehand and one of the great shames of the Grenfell fire is that we don’t have that community anymore.

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