Kensington and Chelsea council made £129 million from selling property in the years leading to the Grenfell fire tragedy - money that could have been spent on the tower’s renovation works which may have been fatally compromised by cost-cutting.



At the same time cuts were being made to the budget for refurbishing Grenfell tower - including saving £300,000 by using cheaper, more combustible cladding - the council had tens of millions of pounds in the bank which it could have spent, an investigation has revealed. The cladding was a key contributor to the speed with which the fire tore through the building on June 14, 2017, killing 72 people and leaving hundreds of families homeless.

The council has previously said legal restrictions meant it could only use rental income from local authority housing to pay for the renovation works. However the council’s own documents show a large part of the work was actually paid for with the proceeds from the sale of council property - basement flats in Elm Park Gardens, Chelsea.

A collaborative investigation by the Bureau, HuffPost UK and the BBC Local Democracy Reporting Service has revealed for the first time that the council had far more proceeds from property sales available. When presented with our findings that it could have used this money to increase the Grenfell Tower budget, the council did not contest this.

We made the discovery as part of a wider Bureau investigation which revealed how councils are turning to the property market to replace funding lost through government cuts. More than 12,000 public spaces have been sold by councils in England since 2014/15, generating £9 billion in revenue, we reported in March.

Not only was Kensington and Chelsea council selling property worth millions of pounds, it was also spending millions buying more, our latest investigation found. In the year leading up to the Grenfell fire, it spent more than £60 million investing in new buildings.

Survivors of the inferno have accused Kensington and Chelsea of “acting more like a property developer than a council” when it should have been focused on fire safety at Grenfell.

The revelations have prompted fury over why spending on the Grenfell works was so tight, when the council had a significant income stream that could have upped the budget, and when it went on to spend millions buying new property.

Survivor Edward Daffarn, who was among the campaigners fighting for the council to act on repeated safety warnings prior to the fire, said: “The question is obviously why weren’t they using this other money to do that? If they could use the money from the sale of the Elm Park Gardens basements at Grenfell, why couldn’t they use money from the other property sales?

