#KCBC: ‘if you accept temporary flats, you’re off rehoming list’ #Grenfell

It would be an understatement to say that Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council is not covering itself in glory in the opinion of its residents. Anger among local people is running high after the terrible fire and what they say is a lack of useful intervention by the council and its staff, fuelled still further by insensitive letters hand-delivered to neighbours of Grenfell Tower about matters as trivial as ‘antisocial behaviour’ letters about ball games.

But things are getting worse. Residents have told the SKWAWKBOX of a local builder who recently completed twenty new apartments in the area and who has taken them off the market for three months to make them available – for free – to families made homeless by the blaze.

It’s a generous act of kindness typical of the way in which the community has pulled together in the days after the tragedy – but the council has treated it as yet another opportunity to behave crassly toward people whose lives are in tatters at the moment.

Residents say that those who have been offered the free temporary accommodation have been told by the council that if they accept the offer, they will be removed from the council’s rehoming list – even though it’s clear that it’s only temporary.

At a time when you’d expect the council to be trying to retrieve a situation many feel it has handled terribly so far, it seems they are intent on making things worse.

The council’s press office was unavailable for comment.

https://skwawkbox.org/2017/06/18/kcbc-if-you-accept-temporary-flats-youre-off-rehoming-list-grenfell/

In the immediate aftermath of almost every major tragedy, conspiracy theories take root to fill the void left by the absence of hard facts. The Grenfell Tower disaster was no exception, as claims of a cover-up about the real death toll went viral on social media on Friday. Tension among residents was ramped up by suggestions that the Government had gagged the media in an attempt to manage public anger about the inferno.

The claims - all of them completely false - were spread by far-left supporters of Jeremy Corbyn including pop stars and socialist blogs. They could now be examined by MPs as part of an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into “fake news”. A Corbyn-backing blog called Skwawkbox claimed that the Government had banned the media from reporting the true death toll in the tragedy for reasons of “national security”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/16/corbyn-supporters-spread-fake-news-grenfell-house-death-toll/