Justice for Grenfell

Justice for Grenfell: 6.30pm, Monday 14th June

Outside the Haringey Civic Centre, High Road, Wood Green, N22 8LE

Bring a candle… Wear Green…  All are welcome…

“Remember the dead, fight for the living”

Four years after the Grenfell fire tragedy the survivors and the victims still do not have justice. The Grenfell Inquiry has uncovered many malpractices, but the building safety crisis has still not been addressed.

We stand in support of the leaseholders in new private blocks who are being faced with tens of thousands of pounds in costs relating to fire safety faults. The developers must pay.  More direct action will be needed to win.

Fire safety must be addressed in Haringey too.

Haringey Council has not collected data on means of escape for vulnerable people in tower blocks. The fire risk assessment for the 15-storey block Newbury House in Wood Green says that there is no up to date vulnerable persons list, and that ‘It is an assumed principle that residents can self evacuate in the event of a fire’, with no further action to be taken.

This is a local example of a national problem. The Home Office has just opened a consultation on whether or not to require the owners of high rise housing to provide personal evacuation plans for vulnerable residents… and this is four years after Grenfell.  The back story is that the corporate fire safety industry has lobbied hard to say NO to this requirement.

There are more 11,000 overdue fire safety actions for Haringey Council’s housing stock of 20,000 dwellings, with 7,441 actions overdue in the High Risk category alone.

A lack of compartmentation caused a huge fire to spread through the roof at Firs House in Wood Green in April 2020. THREE Fire Risk Assessments (2015, 2018 and 2019) said that there was ‘no access to roof spaces in the communal area’.  But each time, the assessor could have looked up in the stairwell, seen the highly visible roof hatch into the roof space and water tank; and arranged the necessary safety compartmentation work.

These are some of the issues that we will be working on, alongside Haringey Council, to keep residents safe in future.

Contact Paul Burnham (Secretary, Haringey Defend Council Housing) 07847 714 158, haringey_dch@outlook.com.