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Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 74: ‘Do you agree that RBKC was ill-prepared and incapable to meet its duties’

Insight06.05.224.30 PM by Peter Apps

This week, Nicholas Holgate, former chief executive of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), was grilled on his failure to hand over control of the aftermath of the fire, despite the borough’s lack of capacity. Peter Apps reports

‘Do you agree that RBKC was ill-prepared and incapable to meet its duties’

The default arrangement for a disaster is that the local authority in which it happens becomes the ‘category one’ responder, with its chief executive taking the senior position of ‘gold commander’.

With Grenfell, this meant RBKC and Mr Holgate (pictured above) taking charge of the response.

But, as he accepted, the council was “ill-prepared” to take on this critical role and his own training and experience left him “unequipped” to lead the response.

Mr Holgate had limited training in disaster management, which he explained by saying he had reached “the wrong conclusion... that one had to put up with being a generalist”.

For the borough itself, it has already been established that the council had far too few staff in key positions to deal with a disaster, including no one in the pivotal role of humanitarian assistance lead officer (HALO).

This was partly because the borough relied on council officers who held other roles volunteering to be part of the team ready to tackle a crisis, and too few did.

Mr Holgate was warned of this from as early as October 2014, when a report told him there was a “significant shortfall in the numbers of trained volunteer emergency management staff” and called for “support from executive directors” to improve the position.

A further email in January 2016 from David Kerry, emergency planning manager at RBKC, warned Mr Holgate that there were only 11 volunteers for the council’s command centre, when he would like at least 20. By the time of the fire, only three managers were trained despite Mr Kerry recommending 10.

Emails from a few months before the fire also warned there were “very few” staff trained to work in emergency rest centres.

A big difficulty was that pressures of the “day job” prevented staff from carrying out the necessary training as volunteers, with no new volunteers coming forward following a recruitment drive that occurred in 2014.

Why did the council not pay staff for these roles, or make it part of their official job, as happened in other boroughs?

“I think we were probably stuck with a practice that we should have changed,” said Mr Holgate.

RBKC was also required to “exercise” its plan for a major emergency annually by its own internal documents – something it did not do.

The inquiry also heard that the borough’s readiness for a disaster was assessed against the minimum standards required for London in February 2016 and was found to be behind in several key areas.

“Do you agree… that RBKC, at least in those respects, was ill-prepared and incapable to meet its duties as a category one responder at the time of the fire?” asked Richard Millett QC, lead counsel to the inquiry.

“I think ill-prepared,” Mr Holgate replied. “I don’t know how incapable we should have been even with those deficiencies.”

‘Do you accept that at least an aspect of your reluctance to invoke London Gold was that it would have been politically damaging to the council?’

Given this background, a pertinent question in this phase of the inquiry is why RBKC did not seek outside help, or immediately hand over control to London Local Authority Gold – a collective mechanism that would have mobilised support from all 33 local authorities in the capital.

As the inquiry has heard, Mr Holgate was promptly advised to do so by Mr Kerry.

The evidence varies, but at a meeting at either 6.30am or 10am on the morning of the fire, Mr Kerry is said to have advised the chief executive that the disaster was “ bigger than any one local authority in London can manage” and that “consideration should be given to asking for mutual aid”.

But Mr Holgate did not, with one log of the events recording that he said: “That looks like we can’t cope.”

“The conversation on mutual aid at that point ceased,” the log records.

Asked if he made this comment, Mr Holgate said it was “not a happy choice of words”, but “if that’s what [the officer who wrote the log] recalls, I’m very happy to accept them”.

He added: “What I mean by that is that, however erroneously, I thought that the borough could achieve the tasks immediately in front of it, and, yes, we would need reinforcement, but the reinforcement could be specific and as necessary. It did not need to be put into a different process entirely.”

“Just to be clear, are you quite sure that… you weren’t at the time feeling a need to protect the council’s reputation from inevitable criticism about being understaffed or having the lack of preparedness or capability?” asked Mr Millett (pictured above).

“Absolutely not, and indeed if I had had that uppermost in my mind, it would have been a completely self-defeating proposition and I would not have entertained it,” Mr Holgate replied.

The inquiry then saw a string of emails from figures in neighbouring boroughs and central government offering varying levels of support to RBKC over the course of the day.

But Mr Holgate knocked them back, writing in one email that “we should be able to manage” and in another that “we think we are coping”.

“Would you agree… that the consistent message from you to those who offered help from early on on the 14th of June, was that RBKC was managing and didn’t need help?” asked Mr Millett.

“I thought we were managing, yes,” replied Mr Holgate.

The inquiry then saw a stream of emails from his own councillors warning him of various problems with the response.

This included housing lead Rock Feilding-Mellen describing the main respite centre for survivors at the Westway Leisure Centre as “chaos” and asking when a manager would be arriving in the afternoon after the fire.

“We are the frontline and are having to take all the blame for this,” wrote another councillor, citing the bereaved and survivors’ frustration with the lack of communication. “We really need help and support, please.”

Asked if he accepted there had been a “number of areas of concern” about the response raised with him and “many of them focused on the paucity of the communication response”, Mr Holgate replied: “Yes, yes, absolutely.”

He said that the “penny dropped” on Thursday 15 June, the day after the fire, that RBKC was not coping, as media reports on the lack of response began to “percolate” and he began to realise the strength of anger against the council from those who lived in the tower.

At 3.30 in the afternoon, he dialled in to a meeting with ministers to discuss the response. A witness statement from a civil servant, also on the call, recorded that Mr Holgate “was not able to answer detailed questions about the situation on the ground and appeared quite defensive, trying to assure ministers that no additional help was required”.

Another recorded surprise that he was “unable to articulate any plan beyond the immediate for rehousing or supporting those affected” and that she felt RBKC was “overwhelmed” by the scale of the disaster.

In a call with other London leaders at 5pm, where further concern was expressed about RBKC’s handling of the crisis, Mr Holgate finally invoked the ‘London Gold’ arrangements.

“Was it the case that, in fact, by finally agreeing to trigger London Gold at 5pm on the evening of the 15th, you were reluctantly responding to external pressure due to growing concerns about the council’s inability to lead on the response effort?” asked Mr Millett.

“Yes,” replied Mr Holgate.

He handed over control to John Barradell, chief executive of the City of London, over the course of the next day. In one briefing, Mr Barradell was told: “General community feeling is of hurt and anger. This is being stoked by a small number of known local instigators who continue to fabricate stories in order to further their aims.”

Asked to explain these comments, Mr Holgate said that they reflect “a suspicion that in among a great deal of completely genuine and justified criticism, it was within the scope of a handful of people, who were all the time, well before the fire, extremely antagonistic to the council, to make matters even worse”.

Asked if he was seeking to “deflect attention away from the failings of the council”, Mr Holgate said he was not.

“Do you accept, having seen the evidence that we have been going through together, that at least an aspect of your reluctance to invoke [London] Gold until late Thursday the 15th was that it would have been politically damaging to the council?” asked Mr Millett.

“No, I don’t accept that, actually,” replied Mr Holgate. “If I’d thought that RBKC could not cope, then it would have been madness to have carried on just because it was embarrassing to admit as much… That is not part of my make-up.”

On 20 June 20, Mr Holgate resigned as chief executive after then-communities secretary Sajid Javid told council leader Nicholas Paget-Brown to remove him.

In his witness statement, Mr Holgate said this was “entirely unjust and inappropriate” but they had to comply in order to maintain the support of Mr Javid’s department.

“‘Abandoned’ is a word that the inquiry’s heard to describe how those placed in hotels felt”

Before Mr Holgate, the inquiry heard from Laura Johnson (pictured above), then director of housing at RBKC, whose team led the efforts to find emergency accommodation for those displaced by the fire.

For those who fled the building itself, this meant hotels. But this was a tough process – booking hundreds of hotel rooms in central London during the summer season is no mean feat.

Nonetheless, RBKC potentially made this harder for themselves than they might have done by having no pre-existing agreements in place with local hotels to put up residents during an emergency.

This meant hotels were demanding payment up front and RBKC did not always have high enough limits on credit cards to pay. This made booking difficult, and some staff went as far as paying on their own personal bank accounts to secure rooms.

“In terms of a lesson learned, having perhaps an agreement in advance with hotels and a plan in relation to that may perhaps have avoided such a problem?”

“It may well have helped if we had had an agreement in advance with somebody like the Hilton Group,” replied Ms Johnson, adding that the “sheer scale” of the issue meant the problems might have emerged anyway.

These difficulties – and issues where only a short booking could be obtained – meant some families were ordered out of the hotels at short notice, with some having to move several times in just a few days.

Around a third of the people found a hotel had to be moved within a few days.

“Would you accept that this was highly disruptive and negatively impacted those that had been placed in those hotels initially?” asked counsel to the inquiry Dermot Keating.

“Yes,” replied Ms Johnson. She said while the council tried to visit everyone who had been placed in hotels the day after the fire, there were unable to in many cases. This meant many residents were ordered out of the room by management and did not know where to go.

There were also several instances where hotels were unsuitable: families found that they had been placed in single rooms, those with babies were not provided with cots, and those with older relatives with conditions such as dementia were left without support.

“Do you accept that in those first seven days… a significant number of those placed [in hotels] did not have their needs sufficiently or properly catered for?” asked Mr Keating.

“We did our very best to try and place people somewhere in a very difficult situation and we didn’t get it right on every occasion. And for that I can only apologise because it certainly wasn’t the intent,” Ms Johnson replied.

The inquiry also saw an email from a housing officer at Hammersmith & Fulham Council, which raised concerns that survivors who had been placed in a Premier Inn in their borough had not been contacted by RBKC.

“There are 12 families who had not been contacted by Kensington and Chelsea since placement or six days ago. We were the first to visit them at their hotel,” he wrote.

“They have no idea regarding what happens next. They’ve not been provided with contact details for Kensington and Chelsea. They received two meals per day, breakfast and dinner, but not have not received any cash subsistence.”

“Do you acknowledge that this shouldn’t have happened and leaving these families in this position was unacceptable?” asked Mr Keating.

“Yes, I acknowledge it must have been extremely difficult for those families to be left in that state of limbo, not knowing what was going to take place next,” Ms Johnson replied.

“‘Abandoned’ is a word that the inquiry’s heard to describe how those placed in hotels felt,” said Mr Keating. “Do you accept, both at hotels within the borough and outside the borough, that communication and contact with those people in hotels was deficient?”

“I acknowledge that we could have done more to contact those families,” Ms Johnson said. “It was a very pressured environment… and we didn’t give enough attention to the people that had been placed and giving them information and updates about what they could expect.”

‘Do you accept that was in part a consequence of this passive approach by RBKC?’

As well as those who had lived in Grenfell Tower, 845 residents from ‘The Walkways’ – low rises connected to the main block – were also rendered homeless on the day of the fire.

They had been evacuated from their homes by the police and were not allowed to return, with a cordon in place around the tower.

Their homes were also damaged: the police had forced entry to some, others were flooded with water from firefighters’ hoses, and heating, hot water and cooking facilities were unavailable because the communal gas boiler had been damaged.

But RBKC did not think it had the capacity to find all of these people hotel rooms and they were told to stay with friends and family “in the first instance”.

Where they could not, some were provided with hotel accommodation, but this was limited to the vulnerable, older and those with children.

Instead, many others were asked to bed-down on temporary mattresses in a large hall at the Westway Sports Centre near the tower.

There was also confusion on the ground about what these residents were entitled to, with some refused entry to rest centres or told they would not be given support.

This had painful consequences, with evidence emerging that many people from these homes spent the first night simply sleeping rough.

A log for the council’s command centre recorded British Red Cross staff noting that at 11.30pm on the day of the fire, they had “seen people sleeping on the streets who don’t appear to know about Westway being a relief centre overnight”.

Other records noted people sleeping rough on a street near the tower. A local authority staff member on the scene said he had asked police to check on them, but “police said [they] don’t have the capacity to send an officer” as they were “winding down”.

A separate log prepared by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) recorded incidents of residents sleeping in the park near the tower, under a flyover on the estate and a mother with two children who slept in a car.

“Do you accept that was in part a consequence of this passive approach by RBKC and poor communication regarding the eligibility criteria, both internally and externally, regarding temporary accommodation?” asked Mr Keating (pictured above).

Ms Johnson said she did not believe the council’s approach had been “passive”, but did accept that “there were people who unfortunately did not did not receive the level of care that they should have done”.

The next day, the council decided that people from the Walkways should be moved back home “as quickly as possible”, despite the poor condition of their homes.

Ms Johnson said the “sheer volume” of accommodation required meant that “either people can go home and realise that it’s far from perfect or that they can stay in an emergency rest centre”.

“It’s a very difficult decision to take when you’re looking for hundreds and hundreds of units of accommodation in a very busy capital city,” she said.

‘It surprised me that no one else stepped up to do this role’

On Tuesday, the inquiry had heard from Sue Redmond (pictured above), interim executive director of adult social care and public health at RBKC, who took over the ‘HALO’ role on the day of the fire.

A HALO is responsible for bringing together organisations, such as the police and the voluntary sector, to oversee the humanitarian response and was described as “pivotal” in the evidence this week.

However, as discussed above, this is a role RBKC had failed to fill in the years before the fire, with Ms Redmond’s colleagues ruling themselves out because they were “too busy” to take on the commitment.

As a result, Ms Redmond, who had only worked in the borough since April 2017, took on the role at the same time as leading the adult social care team’s work on the day of the fire.

“It surprised me that no one else stepped up to do this role,” she said.

“So you had – is this right? – to be colloquial about it, a ‘Why me?’ moment?” asked Mr Millett.

“Yes,” she replied.

Ms Redmond said staff at the command centre were like “rabbits in the headlights” on the day of the blaze.

The inquiry continues.

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