Six months on from the Grenfell Tower fire, the vast majority of survivors are still struggling in temporary accommodation, unable to begin the process of rebuilding their lives.

This is an inexcusable failure by the state. At a local level it reflects the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s unwillingness to take the kind of drastic and urgent actions available to them to assist survivors: Conservative councillors rejected out of hand the possibility of using compulsory purchase powers to reclaim local empty homes for example, and it took months for RBKC to listen to the demands from the local community to draw from their substantial reserves to support rehousing costs.

A survey circulated by the local Conservative Association last month, asking residents in one of the wealthier wards to rank the importance of support for Grenfell survivors against issues such as parking and rubbish collection, demonstrates the callous attitude towards victims of the fire that still prevails within the governing party. Survivors do not feel that the local authority is supporting them; rather the opposite. At Tuesday’s Grenfell scrutiny committee meeting, one survivor described the stress of attempting to access local government assistance for her elderly parent as a type of torture: “We feel we are being penalised for being alive.”

A total of 17 local Conservative councillors have either been deselected or are resigning their posts before next May’s local elections, suggesting that at least some have the humility to acknowledge the absolute failure of RBKC to deal with housing issues post-Grenfell. Hopefully new councillors will be genuinely dedicated to assisting survivors. But they will have to get up to speed quickly. As residents have pointed out, at the current rate of rehousing there will still be Grenfell families without permanent homes not just by May, but for another two years. This cannot be tolerated.

That so many are facing a Christmas without cooking facilities or space for their children to play is shocking

RBKC’s continual failure to keep its promises to survivors (the most recent promise had been to rehouse most survivors by Christmas) suggests it may soon be time to call in commissioners to deal with these deep inadequacies. And national government also continues to do much more to harm than to help. Despite its promises to act on the massive shortage of affordable secure housing in many parts of the UK, the government still pushes policy that supports only provision of private homes, for sale or at rent levels far higher than the vast majority of working people in London can afford.

Meanwhile the policies that have so diminished the supply of genuinely affordable homes continue to inflict their damage. The extension of right-to-buy, private developer-led “regeneration” of social housing estates, increased commercialisation of housing associations, and massive cuts to welfare, are all evidence of national government’s lack of care for families made homeless at Grenfell, and others like them.

Grenfell survivors have made it clear to ministers that housing is their utmost priority. Not just urgent rehousing for those made homeless by the fire, but also the wider issues that concern the rest of the population: the lack of genuinely affordable secure homes available to people on lower or average wages. It should be obvious that safe, secure housing is a primary need, necessary for any person to function adequately in wider society. Homeless children experience negative impacts on all aspects of their emotional, social and educational development that will continue to affect them in later life.

The people who lived through the trauma and loss at Grenfell are now experiencing a collective mental health crisis more severe than we can possibly imagine. This ongoing failure to meet their housing needs amounts to an act of further unnecessary cruelty.

That so many of them, six months on from that terrible night, are facing a Christmas without cooking facilities to make a family meal, space for their children to play, or a future with the security of a safe permanent home, is a terrible indictment of both the local authority and national government – and also of us as a society if we do not continue to apply pressure on government to resolve these families’ needs.

We must never forget about Grenfell. Each signature on a petition, every supportive tweet, every argument voiced against those who wish to turn us from the sense of human empathy we all felt in those days after the fire all contribute in some way to Grenfell survivors’ eventual recovery.

On the 14th of every month, the community and their friends march silently to show that those who died have not been forgotten. For the living, we must continue to fight for safe, well-maintained, affordable homes.

• Pilgrim Tucker is a community organiser and campaigner who supported the Grenfell Tower residents’ campaign, the Grenfell Action Group