Just 14 of 158 families evacuated from Grenfell Tower have accepted offers of temporary accommodation three weeks after the fire, officials have revealed.
Wednesday’s deadline for offering all affected families a temporary home in the area, which was set by Theresa May, has been missed, as 19 families are yet to receive any housing offer.
But the Grenfell Response Team [GRT] defended the rehousing programme, saying traumatised families could not be rushed into accepting offers to meet artificial targets and that most families were holding out for permanent homes.
Eleanor Kelly, the chief executive of Southwark council and a spokeswoman for GRT, said: “It is about going at the pace of each individual family as to what it is that they want for themselves. That’s why you can’t put a timescale on it, because it is not about numbers and its not about rushing people to meet targets.”
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Kelly pointed out that some families had received up to four offers of temporary homes in the area but many were turning them down because they want a permanent home after being left “homeless and destitute”.
She said: “It isn’t just about having moved out of one home to look for another and that’s why the levels of acceptances of the temporary accommodation offered are so low. It is now at 14. It is very low because people don’t want to make two moves. They are looking for their permanent home.”
She added: “Very many of the families are now on their second or third or even fourth offer.”
The housing minister Alok Sharma was heckled by survivors last week when he repeated May’s pledge to offer temporary accommodation by Wednesday but refused to commit to providing permanent accommodation.
Kelly said: “The original undertaking given by the prime minister was that all of the people who had lost their homes in Grenfell Tower and Grenfell Walk would be offered suitable temporary accommodation matched to their housing needs. That is the process that we’ve gone through: 139 of the 158 households have been offered that accommodation.”
She suggested that most of the 19 families yet to be offered homes were not in a position to accept offers because family members were still in hospital recovering from the fire.
Kelly also said the prime minister’s three-week deadline was not realistic. “Three weeks is not a long time to recover even your equilibrium in relation to what’s happened to you … We have to be emotionally responsive to the fact that it is going to take people a long time to really work through where they want to go.
“That’s why very very many of the families are choosing to stay in emergency hotel accommodation for the moment and [then] make [a] permanent move. We have to deal with each individual family’s circumstances as appropriately and sensitively as we can.”
Asked when permanent homes could be found, Kelly said: “When you are dealing with 158 families, of which only 14 have currently accepted the temporary accommodation, you have to factor in that it goes at the pace of individual family.
“It isn’t just about identification of appropriate properties either in Kensington and Chelsea, in Westminster, or Hammersmith and Fulham. It is about understanding the devastating impact on these families and that each family has to have wrap-around support in order to be able to make the right decisions and get to the right position in order to help them move forward.”
Kelly told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that 68 permanent homes will be offered to Grenfell families by the end of July in Kensington Row, in the affluent south of the borough. The homes will be a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom flats across two blocks and have been acquired by the Corporation of London, which will add them to its social housing stock.
Shadow housing secretary, John Healey, said May’s promise to rehouse Grenfell families within three weeks had not been met.
He said: “At every stage ministers have been off the pace - too slow to grasp the scale of the problems people are facing and too slow to act.
“For the Grenfell Tower survivors and for the local community in North Kensington, underlying everything is the question of trust. Ministers must now show that they mean what they say, do what they promise and act urgently to give those affected by this tragic fire the support they need.”