14 1GM Tuesday October 20 2020 | the times
News
Two witnesses at the public inquiry into
the Grenfell Tower fire have been criti-
cised for failing to hand over notes re-
lating to their roles in refurbishing the
building.
Both worked at Kensington and
Chelsea council’s tenant management
organisation (TMO) which owned the
building and was in charge of works
from 2014-16 in which flammable clad-
ding was put around the tower.
Peter Maddison, who was a director,
told the inquiry only last week that he
kept five diaries and eight notebooks in
which he had made detailed notes.
They total about 300 pages of often
“dense manuscript notes”, Richard
Millett, QC, the lead counsel, told in-
quiry, and “contain material of the ut-
most relevance”. Mr Maddison is due to
start giving evidence today and will be
asked about the notes. Proceedings will
then be halted for a day and a half to al-
low all parties to read them.
Lawyers who are representing Mr
Maddison said that they found out
about their existence only when he
offered to check his notes of a meeting
with the main contractor when this was
referred to by another witness.Grenfell officials failed to
give inquiry key documents
Claire Williams, the TMO’s project
manager for the Grenfell Tower works,
told the inquiry that she had “binned”
two or three of her own notebooks in
which she kept records relating to her
work. She threw them away when she
left the organisation and cleared her
desk in 2018, she said.
This was a year after the disaster in
June 2017, in which 72 residents died as
a fire in a fridge-freezer spread across
the building’s exterior via the cladding.
Ms Williams said she had kept one of
her notebooks that she considered rele-
vant but had not thought to keep the
others because the information in them
had been replicated elsewhere.
The issue raises questions for the law
firm representing both witnesses, Ken-
nedys, over whether the pair were
asked about documents they held.
Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the inquiry
chairman, called it “very unsatisfacto-
ry” that Mr Maddison’s diaries and
notebooks had been “disclosed to us
only very much at the last minute”. He
also intervened to ask Ms Williams why
she destroyed her notebooks when she
knew there would be a public inquiry.
Grenfell United, which represents
victims and their families, said it was
shocked at the officials’ “indifference”.Greg Hurst Social Affairs Editor
More than a thousand residents of a
housing development a few miles from
Grenfell Tower have been told to leave
because of fire risks.
Inspections at six blocks of flats and
student housing at the Paragon com-
plex in Brentford, west London, found
structural defects so serious that all res-
idents are being sent to nearby hotels.
Berkeley First, part of the luxury dev-
eloper Berkeley Homes, completed the
award-winning £100 million scheme
from modules built in a factory in 2007.
It includes a 17-storey tower.
The scheme is the latest to be hit by a
building safety scandal exposed after
the Grenfell disaster, where flammable
cladding and other defects allowed fire
to spread and kill 72 people in 2017.
Grenfell-type cladding has been
found on 30,000 high-rise flats and
other types of flammable materials
have been found on another 175,
flats in almost 2,800 schemes. Up to
1.5 million flats in modern blocks of all
heights could be left unmortgageable
for years.
Notting Hill Genesis (NHG), the
housing association that owns and
manages the 1,059-home Paragon site,
told residents yesterday that they must
move by Sunday. It uncovered prob-
lems such as missing cavity barriers to
stop fire spreading inside walls and a
lack of fire protection to steelwork.
“I’ve nearly had a heart attack,” said
Robert Nkansah, 40, a banker who had
just heard the news. “People telling you
to move out of your home just like that,
it’s not right. We can’t cook anything. I
can’t afford to eat out every night.”
After the fire NHG undertook an
£8 million programme to fix fire stops
and strip out unsafe cladding that was
different from the aluminium compos-
ite material on Grenfell Tower. Lease-Families told to
flee 1,000 flats
over fire danger
Martina Lees Senior Property Writer holders said that their buildings had
been covered in plywood and scaffold-
ing for two years.
Some residents were being evacuat-
ed for the second time, having been
moved between blocks on site earlier
this year. David McCormack, 35, has
rented a flat in the building with his
partner and their baby for 18 months
and said: “I’ve never seen anyone doing
the work. Not once. Why is it suddenly
unsafe now?”
Many residents to whom The Times
spoke yesterday were still unaware that
they had to leave. Varsha Sharma, 40,
said she and her daughter, six, had
already been told that they had a vita-
min D deficiency after two years in a
flat where scaffolding blocks out day-
light. “Now I have to move all my things
into a hotel for four weeks in the middle
of Covid, and then what?” she asked.
Katie Bond, group director of sales
and building safety at NHG, said: “This
is not solely a cladding issue.” The re-
sults of surveys, the most recent in the
past two weeks, were “like peeling an
onion” of layer upon layer of fire de-
fects. She would not say which issue
had prompted the evacuation. “We
hold Berkeley responsible,” she said.
Almost 700 students, mostly of the
University of West London and Imperi-
al College, will be moved today to
blocks in Wembley, northwest London.
Leaseholders in a further 107 flats and
75 key workers who rent studio flats can
move to a hotel paid for by NHG with a
£30 daily food allowance, or get £100 a
day to make their own arrangements.
Berkeley refused to comment and
was not involved in the decision to
evacuate the homes. NHG has previ-
ously taken legal action against four
contractors but not against Berkeley.
Kate Davies, NHG’s chief executive,
said that it was “genuinely sorry for the
huge amount of disruption”.Rib tickler Nigel Larkin dismantles the skeleton of a 40ft North Atlantic right whale as Hull Maritime Museum is refurbished
DANNY LAWSON/PA