Council workers called Grenfell area 'little Africa' after deadly fire, MP says

Council officials called the Grenfell Tower area ‘”little Africa” and said it was “full of people from the Tropics”, a Labour MP has claimed.

Emma Dent Coad, MP for Kensington, said the attitude from Kensington and Chelsea Council following the fire was either “racism or snobbery, take your pick”.

Ms Dent Coad made the comments during a backbench debate in parliament on Thursday over the response to the blaze at the west London tower block in 2017, which left 72 people dead.

In response, the council said they had written to Ms Dent Coad and would investigative the claims “urgently” if they could be substantiated. It also said it hoped that “Emma would have reported them at the time as both a local councillor and MP”.

But Ms Dent Coad told The Independent that some of the derogatory comments about the Grenfell Tower area and its residents were made by council officials during full council meetings where “everybody could hear”.

“The council are more concerned about their reputation than they are about rehousing people,” she said. “They are trying to discredit me rather than focussing on the subject of the debate.”

“They want Grenfell to go away and it won’t.”

Speaking as MPs criticised the response to the tragedy, Ms Dent Coad told the Commons: “A senior council officer was told to go down to the site but refused. He said, ‘It’s like Little Africa down there’.

“Another said ‘the area was full of people from the Tropics’.

“A senior officer regularly in front of others referred to my neighbours as ‘mussies’.”

She added: “This attitude is hardly surprising.”

"A senior councillor about two years ago during a debate on refugee children said during his speech, 'If we let these people in, we will have an Islamic caliphate in Kensington and Chelsea'."

The Labour MP told The Independent that she would share the identity of the councillors and council officers who had made the comments with the leader of the council in an upcoming meeting. She said she was not prepared to name them publicly.

Ms Dent Coad has been a councillor for Kensington and Chelsea since 2006 and was elected as MP for Kensington in 2017.

She also told MPs she is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following the deadly fire.

“As someone myself suffering from PTSD, but able to function and I know so many who cannot, I will on their behalf wear the scars of my own mental ill-health with pride,” Ms Dent Coad said.

“We have 11,000 people affected to varying degrees by the Grenfell atrocity in our neighbourhood. Some have been helped (by mental health services) but many have not.

”The type of trauma we have does not go away. There have been several suicides and while it is often difficult to ascertain causes, the people that I know of, five, who have lost their lives in the past seven months were affected to varying degrees by what happened.“

Campaigners from the Grenfell United group sat in the Commons public gallery to listen to the debate and wore the campaign’s green colours.

Ms Dent Coad added that the police investigation into the fire is “struggling for funds”, noting that the police have asked for a further £2m from the government and have been refused.

”The timeline for criminal charges is slipping and along with it the hope for justice,“ she said.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Kensington and Chelsea Council leader Elizabeth Campbell said: ”If these claims can be substantiated we will of course investigate them urgently, but I hope Emma would have reported them at the time as both a local councillor and MP. I will be writing to her directly to find out the details of the cases she outlined in the House of Commons.“

She defended the council’s efforts to rehouse the survivors, adding: ”We are nearly there, but we will not be rushing the last few families to meet artificial deadlines. There is currently one household in a hotel, and 184 families have a permanent home.“

Conservative Sir David Amess, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on fire safety rescue, highlighted changes made by the government following the fire, but said: ”It’s not true to say nothing has been done, but not enough has been done.“

Steve Reed, Labour MP for Croydon North, criticised the failure of ministers to act on recommendations made following the 2009 Lakanal House fire in south London and said they had chosen to ”cover up their earlier inaction with more inaction“ following Grenfell.

He said: ”If the leaders of a private company had acted in the way that ministers did, they would find themselves in the dock for corporate manslaughter – and ministers should reflect on that point.“

Shadow housing secretary John Healey said: ”We rededicate ourselves to seeing the survivors getting the homes and the help they need, to bringing all those culpable to justice, and to putting in place every measure needed to make sure we can with confidence say that Grenfell can never happen again.“

Mr Healey said that while progress has been made over the last two years, the response had not been on a large enough scale.

He added: ”Ministers have been like rabbits in the headlights. For two years the action they have taken has been too slow and too weak on every front.“

Housing minister Kit Malthouse said he was ”happy to be held to account“ for the government’s response.

He added: ”Grenfell does change everything and I have made commitments in private and in public that there needs to be fundamental change as a fitting legacy to those who died.“

A day after the backbench debate over the response to the Grenfell Tower fire, police investigating the blaze said they have carried 13 interviews under caution.

The Metropolitan Police said they would not confirm how many individuals the 13 interviews concern.

It added more than 7,100 statements had been taken from ”witnesses, community and family members, emergency services personnel“ and ”other sources“.

It comes comes a week before the two-year anniversary of the fire on 14 June 2017.

Additional reporting by PA