The continuing saga of Barton House

As much as Bristol City Council would like the reporting about their botched evacuation of Barton House (a council housing block in the east of Bristol) to die down, it's showing no sign of doing so. The block was evacuated on the evening of Tuesday 14^th November because of concerns about its structural integrity. The more that gets revealed about the way the council are dealing with the situation, the worse they look. This is a useful update of the situation as things currently stand: Barton House evacuation: Was the chaos and confusion completely unnecessary? - Sean Morrison & Priyanka Ravel | The Bristol Cable | 24.11.23.

What's interesting to note is the contrast between the way Bristol City Council are handling the situation with Barton House compared to the way Southwark Council (a borough in south London) handled the evacuation of a high rise block on the Ledbury estate in 2017. That evacuation took place in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire when concerns about the structural integrity of many housing blocks in the event of a fire came to the fore. This is what Danielle Gregory who was a resident on the Ledbury estate had to say about the evacuation:

“Immediately [Southwark Council] put up a satellite office that was open 24/7 so people had someone to speak to, face to face.”

“They published a daily newsletter, employed extra staff, every block had a named person residents could call, and the Red Cross was involved.”

“Southwark did put a lot in place, and it seems like Bristol really haven’t organised themselves.”

“It’s really unbelievable, I don’t think I’ve seen a worse case of decanting an LPS [Large Panel System] block.”

“I don’t know where [Bristol] was getting their advice from. Where was their crisis response?”

“As far as I’m aware, Bristol is the first local authority to undertake an immediate full evacuation of an LPS block following discovery that it doesn’t meet safety standards… we need to know why that is.”

It's only when you start to look at how some other local authorities (but not all by a long way) successfully deal with crisis situations, that you realise how utterly dysfunctional Bristol City Council are.

There are two particular aspects of the ongoing crisis that we want to look at in the rest of this post. Firstly, there are many evacuated residents who are still expected to pay rent on flats they currently can't live in. Secondly, the gaps in knowledge that led to the structural issues with Barton House not being looked into for some years.

Paying rent for a flat you can't live in

The residents evacuated at short notice from Barton House who are now being accommodated at the Holiday Inn in the city centre are still being asked to pay the rent on their flats: Barton House tower block residents will still have to pay rent despite evacuation - Tristan Cork | Bristol Post | 23.11.23. Currently, 67 households are staying at the hotel. There have been complaints about the accommodation at the Holiday Inn and the way a number of the residents have been treated by some of the staff there. The complaints concern the poor quality of the food they're being served, bed bugs, and damp, unclean rooms. Issues that Bristol City Council would love to sweep under the carpet but which ACORN Bristol are working tirelessly to bring to the fore. A situation not helped by the ongoing piss poor level of communication about the situation from the council to the evacuated residents.

ACORN Bristol are rightly demanding that the rents paid for November are reimbursed and that there's a rent pause until the residents can either return safely to Barton House, or are permanently and properly rehoused. Why should residents be expected to pay rent to a council that is continuing to screw up the way they're managing the situation? This post we put up a few days ago deals in part with how the crisis is being mismanaged: Contingency planning? Anyone? 18.11.23.

Communication breakdown

In this post, we wrote about the lack of action on checking the structural integrity of Barton House after a warning letter was sent in 2017 to housing chiefs across the country drawing attention to issues with blocks of flats built using the Large Panel System (LPS) method: A council getting their priorities totally wrong... 17.11.23. It now turns out that the politician who was in charge of housing at Bristol City Council in 2017 claims he never saw a copy of that letter and that if he had, he would have acted upon it. This is how this latest debacle is being covered: Man in charge of Bristol's housing 'wasn't told' of 2017 tower block warning letter - Tristan Cork | Bristol Post | 24.11.23.

When the letter was sent in 2017, on the same day, the chief executive of Bristol City Council wasn't there to receive it. The executive in question, one Anna Klonowski announced her resignation on that day. This left the mayor, Marvin Rees, looking to hire the council's fourth chief executive in the first sixteen months of his first term in office after being elected in 2016. As you can imagine, this led to what can best be described as a bit of a vacuum in the top echelons of the council. One where a letter from the government warning about the urgent action needing to be taken over blocks built using the LPS system ended up being overlooked in the ensuing chaos and confusion.

Conclusion

You seriously couldn't make this up could you? From the abysmal treatment of the evacuated residents through to the confusion over who, if anyone, saw the warning letter from the government back in 2017, the situation can only be described as one massive clusterf**k. Issues that should be a matter of routine to deal with by mature processes and protocols are all too frequently turning into major dramas. In light of this, we make no apology for reproducing the quote below from a previous post. In that post, we addressed the gnawing feeling that we're heading towards some kind of collapse, both literal and metaphorical: Collapse, metaphorical and literal 4.9.23. This is what we had to say:

Here in the UK, it feels like we're living in a country where nothing really works properly any more and things are, literally falling apart. It feels like society has become so complex that no one has any real idea of how it all fits together, with the consequence being that we're increasingly being caught on the hop by physical and digital infrastructure failures. This is despite, as previously mentioned, there being relevant professionals who have anticipated problems and issued warnings, only to find they're being ignored.