Five months after the Grenfell tragedy, the Conservative-run council still seems unable to get a grip on its response. This week its leader, Elizabeth Campbell, who took over after her predecessor was forced to stand down over his handling of the fire, dismissed a report on inequality by the area’s new MP as “opportunistic” and “littered with typos and factual errors”. In an appalling display of insensitivity, it has also emerged that Kensington Tories have sent residents in Courtfield ward – just a stone’s throw from where some Grenfell survivors are being rehoused – campaign literature that asks them to rate, out of 10, how important support for the families affected by Grenfell is to them. It’s on a list with recycling and “keeping council tax low”.

Campbell also said Emma Dent Coad’s report tells us things we “know already”. In this respect, if in no other, she is absolutely right. Levels of shocking inequality have long existed in the borough: men living in Brompton and Hans Town ward, next to Harrods, can expect to live to 94; while in Golborne ward, a short walk from Grenfell, the figure is 72. There are 4,500 children living in poverty in the borough, and councillors representing the poorer north of the borough were laughed at when they talked about cases of rickets. This in a borough in which the average income is £140,000, and which will spend £7m on an art museum this year but won’t extend council tax rebates to vulnerable care leavers.

I can tell you what it’s like to grow up poor in Kensington and Chelsea, because I’ve done it myself. I was born in a council flat in the 1979. My mother had a relationship that ended badly. She gave birth to my sister in a mother-and-baby home where the carpet was so filthy she couldn’t let my sister crawl. Some of my earliest memories are of her crying down the phone to council officers: missed or missing giros meant we would go hungry, or that she would fall behind with the rent. Four of us were crowded into a one-bedroom flat. I was like the child mentioned in Dent Coad’s report, who did homework on the stairs, and went to bed hungry and early because it was cold. We grew up with holes in our shoes, surrounded by immense wealth.

Nearly three in 10 children live in poverty in the UK in 2017, and just under one in 20 homes are affected by damp

After cuts to child benefit in the 80s, we went without food more frequently. On Sundays we were often reduced to flour and water fried in oil. On several occasions, out of sheer desperation, my mother took us to social services and asked them to put us in care. They refused. The holidays we had were day trips organised by charities similar to Solidarity Sports, which more recently worked with the Hashim family – all five of whom were killed in the fire.

I tell you all this because, as my mother has said, “If speaking out can change something, then we didn’t suffer for nothing.” Residents in Grenfell Tower were not all poor: they included teachers and computer programmers, beauticians and retailers. But for families like mine, the hardships now seem to be even greater. Nearly three in 10 children live in poverty in the UK in 2017, and nearly one in 20 homes are affected by damp.

Having spent a decade working in housing, I’ve witnessed the lived reality of these statistics. It is impossible for me to count the properties I have seen that have problems with damp and mould. On one inspection, I heard a surveyor tell a man with mould in his bathroom that he needed to “wipe down his bathroom walls every time he had a shower”. In Frinstead House, one of the tower blocks across the road from Grenfell, problems with lifts meant disabled residents were unable to leave their homes for days or even weeks at a time.

When I asked the lifts team to come to speak to residents at a meeting, they refused outright. When women trying to escape violent relationships came to me asking for help, the council’s policies seemed designed to make it harder for them to access support. The default position seemed be that they needed to prove they were at risk. I would often have to help them construct a case, going through text messages, building a picture of how they were being harassed or stalked.

I saw a hopelessly bureaucratic system that seemed to exist to defend the borough from the consequences of its failure to provide tenants with adequate housing. Again and again, tenants’ rights had to be fought for, against the odds. At KCTMO, the now infamous organisation responsible for managing council housing in Kensington and Chelsea, disrepair claims went unanswered until they got to court.

When the leader of the council says her staff “know these things already”, she should hang her head in shame. If you can say there is nothing new in this report, that means only one thing: you have known about it all along, and done nothing.

• Seraphima Kennedy is a former neighbourhood officer for Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation