Magdelena Fink died in a fire in Hampstead in 2017

LABOUR chiefs were faced with calls for a public apology in the wake of the housing regulator’s discovery that thousands of council homes are unsafe.

The Town Hall held an emergency debate on the state of fire safety works on Monday evening with the leadership insisting it was doing all it could.

The council was fined £500,000 earlier this year after pleading guilty to failing to make a block in Daleham Gardens, Hampstead, safe before 35-year-old Magdalena Fink died in a fire in 2017.

The case led to an investigation by the Regulator of Social Housing which issued a notice in July that said there had been a long-standing failure and a slowness to complete remedial work.

Conservative councillor Andrew Parkinson

Their findings were scathing, revealing that around 9,000 homes have not been fitted with a smoke alarm and that a queue of overdue work has built up. Conservative councillor Andrew Parkinson said these figures only came to light because they had been included in the “red notice”.

He looked at the Labour leadership at Monday’s meeting and said: “Can we have a public apology tonight for the failings – a clear apology to residents for the failings which the regulator has said are long standing. They’re not new, they are long standing.”

Green councillor Sian Berry added that the issue of fire safety had been in “plain sight” for years. “It’s not just about lack of money,” she said. “It’s also about not having necessarily good management… The words of the regulator are really clear: the council doesn’t have a system in place to actually deal with this – and things like the serious high risk actions were overdue.”

Lib Dem leader Councillor Tom Simon

And Lib Dem councillor Tom Simon, the leader of the opposition, said there was still no plan of action for members to scrutinise.

“Why wasn’t a plan made following the prosecution for the death of Magdalena Fink? Instead, the message to members at that time was that the council was on top of things,” he said. “Then we had the notice that showed we most certainly were not on top of things.”

The fatal fire in Daleham Gardens

Labour councillor Pat Callaghan, the acting leader of the council while Georgia Gould is on maternity leave, listed a series of measures that had been taken.

She said the council had “rapidly completed enhanced fire risk assessments” and had invested more than £200million from Camden’s housing revenue account. This is largely made up with council tenants’ rent.

Cllr Callaghan said there was a commitment to safety and there had already been more than 40,000 “individual improvements and repairs” and added the Town Hall had worked with tenants residents associations to get the work done.

Former mayor Labour councillor Richard Cotton said that Cllr Gould’s decision to order the unprecedented evacuation of the Chalcots estate after the Grenfell fire tragedy showed how seriously the council took the risks.

Housing chief Cllr Meric Apak outlines his response in today’s (Thursday’s) paper.

When governments invested in council housing…

A FORMER councillor from the 1970s lamented that it’s not like the old days as he returned to the council chamber for the fire safety debate.

Derek Jarman, now chair of the Kentish Town District Management Committee, said when he was an elected member councils would identify a problem and national government would provide funding for the fix.

Derek Jarman at the meeting on Monday night

”The money would come within a few months,” he said in a deputation to Monday’s meeting.

“Not like today where you have to jump through so many hoops to be told: Sorry, the money’s gone somewhere else. Governments of any political colour realised that council housing needed to be properly funded.”