Cabinet member Meric Apak

THIS week’s full council meeting opened with a discussion of the vital issue of fire safety.

We heard a passionate contribution from three DMC, district management committee. chairs, tenant representatives, who spoke about the importance of having proper government funding to pay for safe, warm and affordable council homes.

We also heard from members of the public who have sat on the fire safety and compliance panel about their experiences of the council’s fire safety work.

Finally we heard from the borough commander of the London Fire Brigade explaining the collaborative work between the LFB and the council.

I would like to reflect on this discussion and set out Camden’s plans and actions on this to bring our standards up to the highest possible for our residents.

As mentioned by contributors on Monday, Camden, like all councils, lacks sufficient funding to deliver this most important and urgent work.

We have stepped in to invest over £200million of our own funding from the HRA, housing revenue account, into this work, that’s the equivalent of a full year’s annual budget in housing.

Yet, despite the financial challenges highlighted in the deputation and references, we need to go further and faster to reassure our residents that they are safe. We must ensure that we are confident that Camden homes are safe, warm and high quality.

As cabinet member I closely monitor our progress in addressing key issues and resolving outstanding fire safety actions.

This will continue until both I and the fire safety and compliance panel are satisfied and confident of the council’s ongoing work.

We are now down to 85 “priority actions” – those which the social housing regulator has identified as of core concern.

Many involve difficult issues that are often very personal to people, such as door security grilles, items in communal areas, and access issue. We are working closely with tenants and leaseholders to complete these actions.

We are also working to agreed timescales, in active discussion with the regulator, to complete the installation programme of hard-wired smoke alarms.

But in the interim we have visited all our homes to offer battery-operated smoke alarms while we wait for the hard-wired systems to be installed.

This builds on critical fire safety improvements such as installing new fire doors, fire-stopping, and individual block issues such as cladding.

We are deep into implementing our plan to meet the requisite standards and I will be working non-stop to ensure this.

We recognise we have more to do but are confident we are making progress.

To this end, we have invited the communities secretary Michael Gove to come to Camden and meet our tenants first-hand.

When he comes, he may like to take the opportunity to explain why he handed back £1.9billion in funding to the Treasury, money that was earmarked for social housing repairs and which could have helped councils go even further and faster on improving fire safety.

• Councillor Meric Apak is Camden’s Cabinet Member for Better Homes.