Introduction
Since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, the Council and local community have worked together to keep our most vulnerable residents safe. It has put immense pressure on all of us and our services but has shown us that our community is made up of kindness, bravery and unity, and it has brought our local residents closer than ever.
As life starts to return to normal, the local vaccination programme continues to help reduce the number of cases occurring in the borough. We’re still contacting residents who we think may need extra support and we will continue to call you if you have asked us to. We have re-opened community centres, with social contact restrictions in place. As shielding has officially ended, we are now carrying out outstanding essential gas and electric checks and all routine repairs. We also set up a hardship fund to help residents who faced financial hardship due to the pandemic.
Work on our £374 million Capital Works Programme to make all our homes modern, safe and warm is able to gain pace again. Adair and Hazlewood Towers are some of the first buildings to have had contractors on site for major works. This work has included external fabric work and large empty property reconfiguration schemes. Since the work began this year, residents have also benefitted from new lifts and a new concierge office with additional, and more modern, CCTV cameras.
There has also been good progress with our New Homes Programme which will see 600 new homes built across the borough, 300 of which will be for social rent. We have already started work on two of our Phase One schemes at Kensal Road and Hewer Street, and the planning application to build 11 homes for social rent at Silchester Arches has been submitted. Plans for a number of other sites are currently being consulted on with residents. These are the first Council homes this borough has built since 2017 and will go some way to helping tackle the housing shortage we face.
Thank you to the many residents who have got involved with our other consultations in the last year. We have had a number of Task and Finish groups on various policies, strategies and decisions, and your voice has really helped shape these for the better. Residents have also been increasingly involved in the quarterly Housing Matters magazine, with an ever-growing number of articles written by them.
As ever, supporting the community to recover from the Grenfell tragedy remains a top priority for the Council and this year marked four years since the tragedy. This is always an extremely difficult time for residents and my heart goes out to the survivors, bereaved and everyone who was impacted by what they witnessed that night. We will continue to assist the ongoing public inquiry with the aim of getting to the truth no matter what. It goes without saying that we will always remember the 72 people who lost their lives, and we are committed to learning from what happened that night and making sure that a tragedy like that does not happen again. We want our homes to be comfortable and safe for all our residents. We will continue to support you as best we can.
Cllr Kim Taylor-Smith
Deputy Leader, Grenfell, Housing and Social Investment