The Chalcots estate

THANKFULLY the fire alert at the Chalcots over the Easter break did not lead to any injury but you can understand why the tower block residents feel on edge.

Their experience is like few others. Imagine coming home on a warm Friday evening and being ordered to pack a suitcase and told to leave your home immediately.

With the passing of time and the way the national news agenda has moved on from the horrors of Grenfell, it has perhaps become a hazy memory for people who do not live on the estate.

The evacuation of five tower blocks, however, was unprecedented. Whether it had to be done when it was done and in the manner it was carried out is a debate which probably no longer needs to be raked over again and again.

The council leader Georgia Gould and the fire authorities were acting in good faith that evening. Their on-the-spot decisions were taken against a backdrop of fear.

But those who ended up walking out of their flats that night in 2017 to the flashbulbs of photographers and, in some cases, to a night sleeping on the floor of a leisure centre still deserve answers to a million questions about how their estate had been maintained.

The New Journal vowed to keep asking those questions on their behalf in a campaign aimed at uncovering the truth as to what went wrong and when. But if we’re honest we will probably never know.

There were pledges from the Town Hall to get to the bottom of how so many fire safety flaws were found in the Chalcots but – almost six years later – its investigations have only ever really scratched the surface or related to the most recent work.

How, after all, could there have been a catalogue of issues discovered by the fire inspectors when the New Labour government had agreed a full refurbishment of the estate at the start of the 2000s?

Back then, tenants had little choice to accept a stripped-back Private Finance Initiative project after years of complaints about leaking windows and other faults. This, Tony Blair’s ministers insisted, was the only way to pay for the work.

But the PFI arrangement led to a web of contractors and sub-contractors and decisions which 20 years later are buried in forgotten documents and lie only in the memories of people who now have left the council or various building firms. Perhaps, there isn’t a better illustration of how PFIs removed accountability.

The state of council housing remains a challenge for what could be an even newer Labour government. Sir Keir Starmer should learn from this sorry lesson and have in mind a direct and transparent investment model.