Goswell Road residents say the ongoing problem has changed their lives

HOUSING association residents say they don’t know whether they can feel safe in their homes after a wait for fire defects to be fixed.

Now a group from 25b Goswell Road in Clerkenwell – a block of flats run by the housing association Notting Hill Genesis (NHG) – are asking to be shown that the building is safe or provided with somewhere else to live.

Carmello Mirabile, a Goswell Road resident, said: “We want to be rehoused, because it feels like it’s never going to be safe. We’ve all got plans in our heads of how we’ll escape if there’s a fire.”

The housing association removed combustible cladding from the front of the building in 2018 in the wake of the Grenfell disaster, but missing cavity barriers were discovered at the same time at the back of the building. These still have not been installed.

NHG has acknowledged that these missing cavity barriers could potentially cause a fire to “spread across the facade because there are no cavities to break the spread”.

Mr Mirabile said: “They keep telling us that we’re on a swap scheme. But who would want to swap with us if they heard about this?”

The front of the building where cladding hasn’t been replaced

Jodie Collins, another resident, said: “The fire safety issue has completely changed mine and my daughter’s lives. The fire alarm goes off on a weekly basis, and my daughter is petrified. Because it goes off so regularly [we don’t think it’s reliable], we’ll just wait when we hear it, and if it doesn’t go off in a couple of minutes then we’ll start looking out for something. But since it started happening, it’s made her a nervous wreck.”

After the cladding was discovered, fire wardens moved into the block as a safety precaution.

Ms Collins said: “We’ve been living with the fire wardens since the cladding was taken off. But that means that every day it’s just in our faces how unsafe the building is.”

Residents said they want fire extinguishers in the communal areas and proper fire doors for their flats, at the very least, as a precautionary measure given the added danger.

The back of the building

A spokesperson for NHG said: “The removal of combustible ACM cladding was carried out immediately after assessment of these materials in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy… We are in the final stages of agreeing the remediation plan with the contractor and are all working towards starting works in spring 2024, with work expected to take 12 months.

“We put in place a 24-hour [fire warden] patrol at our cost … It does not mean we deem the building unsafe.

“The advice of our fire engineers is that the building is low risk. There is no plan to rehouse residents, though tenants in any of our rented homes can follow our usual transfer process.

“We are aware of an ongoing issue which is being caused by smoke alarms in internal flats … We are working with our fire consultants to review the system and how the internal and communal alarms interact.

“We had begun work on fire door repair or replacement, but we were asked by London Fire Brigade to carry out a full audit on all doors within the block, so the project was paused to allow that to take place. It is standard practice not to have communal fire extinguishers.”