Grenfell Tower at dawn, June 14th (Source: Reuters)

Already, it’s clear that the heartbreaking fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower, and claimed many lives, is the culmination of an endless litany of outsourcing local housing services, opaque private landlords, decentralised planning decisions and chilling financial austerity.



Dangerous electrical surges, uncleared building waste from renovations and lack of fire exits were the daily norm for those living in Grenfell Tower. Represented by the Grenfell Action Group, they warned KCTMO, the building’s owners, over and over, for the past four years, that it was only a matter of time before a major disaster took place. In this haunting blog post, residents catalogue the myriad safety violations, prophesying that:

“only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation…” “It is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar high density residential property is the most likely reason that those who wield power at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to justice…”

The arms-length non-profit organisation which manages Grenfell Tower, alongside 10,000 other properties, has a long record of putting tenants at risk with lax health and safety done on the cheap. An almost-identical tragedy occurred in 2015, when KCTMO’s 14-storey Adair Tower caught fire - miraculously, nobody lost their lives. Questions are already being asked: how can such an intolerable situation - reminiscent of recent horror stories from Bangladesh or China - be allowed to persist for years?

KCTMO - or the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation - is one of many TMO boards set up by UK local councils to oversee publically owned housing stock. But they have faced huge resistance from resident groups: they are often cited as corrupt, inefficient and undemocratic. The campaign group NoTMO has collated evidence which spans the UK, showing a history of failure and incompetence, ranging from the complete collapse of Southwark Council’s TMO, to the Cedars TMO’s director using council funds to renovate his own property, to the privatisation of Tower Hamlets TMO.



These organisations have an unclear relationship to local government, with councils often much less empowered to oversee and take corrective actions: Kensington and Chelsea Council’s website states that:

“Before the Council can deal with any complaints from KCTMO tenants, the tenants must first contact and log a complaint with the KCTMO. The KCTMO manages the Council housing stock and as such the Council cannot take enforcement action against it.”

Given the state of Grenfell Tower for a period of years before yesterday’s fire, the criminal inaction of the TMO’s management, and the paralysis of Kensington Council, it becomes impossible to differentiate between KCTMO and the thousands of landlords who profit directly from Britain’s one million substandard, unfit and dangerous homes. Those campaigners who see TMOs as the thin-end of the wedge for private companies and housing associations seeking to buy up council housing stock, if anything, understate their case: like some obscene parody of a corrupt lawman in the Old American West, the KCTMO has become a rogue slum baron operating with the county badge on its lapel.

There is no form of justice which can replace those who have lost their lives in the Grenfell Fire, whose only crime was that of being too poor to afford to live in basic safety. The only justice we can pursue is the ceaseless determination to end the housing crisis: a crisis which was seeded by Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ shareholder democracy, which went unchecked during the years of Blair’s asset-based welfare, and which has been exacerbated manyfold by the Financial Crisis and the ConDems’ buy-to-let bonanza. Only by consciously undermining the last 40 years of neoliberal marketised non-policy will we be able to end the one-way street which corrals poor, desperate Brits into the arms of KCTMO and their ilk.