‘Left to Rot: How Governments Have Betrayed Us and How We Fix It’ – an extract from Daniel Hewitt’s new book

What had we learned? Everything I had found in tower blocks, council homes and housing association properties across Britain had happened in the wake of the Grenfell fire – the echoes were obvious. Seventy-two men, women and children died in a 24-storey high-rise owned by Kensington and Chelsea Royal Borough Council. Flammable cladding had been wrapped around the building – plastered on to please passers-by while the people inside were repeatedly ignored when they raised complaints about the safety of their homes. ‘Often problems can be resolved between landlords and tenants themselves,’ the government had said six years earlier.

Why did 72 people die? A public inquiry lasting six years produced two reports containing thousands of pages, and ultimately told the victims and the survivors of Grenfell what they already knew – that no one cared about them. Seventy-two people died because people with power and those with money did not do enough to stop it from happening. The tenants were the last people the government was thinking of as they stripped back regulation on building safety and tenants’ rights. The building industry was not thinking of them as it cut corners to maximise its profits. The council was not thinking of them as they dismissed their legitimate concerns about life inside the tower. And then people died. And they should have lived.

And what of that mirror we held up to ourselves? In the aftermath of such pointless death, was the Regulator reformed to give social housing tenants more of a chance? Were proactive inspections and genuine investigations reinstated? Was the ‘serious detriment’ test scrapped, rendered redundant in the wake of 72 deaths? Was ‘systematic failure’ reformed to ensure a fair hearing for those making the complaints, as well as those being complained about? Was the ‘designated person’ criterion abolished, returning to residents the dignity of submitting a direct grievance?

I got my answer as I walked into Fransoy’s flat four years later. In 2021, not a single law had been changed to improve tenants’ rights in the wake of the fire. The shame subsided, the soul-searching was called off, the mirror was put to one side. This book is not about Grenfell, and yet it is all about Grenfell. It echoes on every page, in every property, with every person –  it haunts every story and yet the echoes were ignored. The lessons were not learned. What happens when you reach a turning point, but you just keep driving?

I thought I had seen everything, and then I met Medhi. I was six months into the investigation. The inbox was unrelenting. The anger over the Eastfields verdict, which we reported on ITV News, attracted yet more stories. Thousands of people, hoping to get a hearing, had now contacted us. Who else was going to listen? Housing was now my full-time beat, the stories coming in dominated my every thought.

“This book is not about Grenfell, and yet it is all about Grenfell. It echoes on every page, in every property, with every person –  it haunts every story and yet the echoes were ignored”

I took the rickety tin-box lift to the first floor of a nine-storey high-rise in Lewisham, the door screeching open to reveal an electric mobility scooter on the outside walkway before the door of number 5. A man in his sixties answered the door, his body leaning slightly right as his left hand clung to a walking frame. ‘Hello, Dan. Be careful, not to slip,’ Medhi said, breathless, shuffling aside for me to enter the dark hallway of his flat. He had been right to warn me, my feet uneasy on the tiles. The entire floor in Medhi’s hallway was flooded. He had placed towels along the narrow corridor, but they too were soaked, like it had been raining inside. The sound of our squelching feet bounced between the walls as Medhi led me into his home, navigating the treacherous conditions, making sure to carefully place the legs of his walking frame down on towel rather than tile.

As we turned left out of the entrance hall and down a short narrow corridor, too narrow for an electric wheelchair, I involuntarily blurted: ‘Oh my God’. The smell was horrific, like raw sewage, sharp in my nostrils. To my shame I almost gagged. The walls were stained a mosaic of browns, blacks and yellows. They were as wet as the floor, sweating a dark liquid, droplets of murky water weaving their weary paths and gathering in pools at our feet. Medhi had said in his email that he was desperate, that he felt he was dying, the home he lived in slowly killing him. He was not exaggerating. He coughed, violently, behind his mask. His breathing was laboured, hunched over his Zimmer frame.

Along the corridor were doors to his bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen and the lounge. The kitchen too was flooded. Above the door frame, the wall was crumbling. Mehdi delicately peeled off wet plaster –  layer upon layer falling away like paper mâché. When I asked how long the flat had been like this, Medhi ran his hand across the wall outside the bathroom and showed me his palm – it was completely covered black, and dripping, like kids’ fingerpaint about to be pressed onto a piece of white cardboard.

‘A good six or seven years now,’ he replied. ‘The bathroom has been like that for seven years. I don’t feel like even going in there because it stinks. I’m making myself more dirty rather than cleaning myself.’

Inside the bathroom, white walls were stained with dark mould spores, the air thick with damp, the stench unbearable, somehow worse than the hallway. The small extractor fan was fighting a losing battle. Medhi was a tenant of Lewisham Homes – an independent housing management organisation that in 2005 took control of Lewisham Council’s entire housing stock.

Medhi became a tenant the same year. The flat had always suffered from leaks, but in November 2020 it got considerably worse. Water came gushing into his flat, and the fire service was called after reports of electrical sparks. It would be the first of numerous visits over the coming months.

“Thousands of people, hoping to get a hearing, had now contacted us. Who else was going to listen? Housing was now my full-time beat, the stories coming in dominated my every thought”

‘I have told them about 25 times. People have been upstairs and they reckon the work is completed, but it is still leaking. Every time they come and go and every time I ring them back, and they just say the work has been completed. We’ve found the leak.’

Sound familiar? Reporting the same problems over and over again? Being told it is fixed: ‘There is no leak in your flat’? Medhi wasn’t just being ignored, he was being gaslit by his landlord. And not for a matter of months, but for years.

‘It doesn’t feel like I’m living in London, in the United Kingdom. It is totally madness. It’s making me crazy. And I just simply don’t know what to do.’

Medhi injured his spine in an accident in his forties – falling down 17 stairs, damaging discs in his back and causing a trapped nerve in his leg. In older age, his mobility has declined. He has carers visit the flat to help him wash in the weeks where the pain is particularly bad. Even before the leaks began, the flat was unsuitable for Medhi – he lives in a high-rise block where the lifts regularly break and his flat is not wheelchair-accessible. He worries every day his electric scooter will be stolen.

At the start of 2021 both social services and Citizens Advice made representations to Lewisham Homes to move Mehdi out. A report by an occupational therapist stated the flat was a fire risk due to the electrics under the leaks. Looking around his home, you didn’t need a report to tell you any of this. I could see Mehdi deteriorating in front of my eyes. The laboured breathing had nothing to do with his medical history – his home had done that to him.

“Medhi wasn’t just being ignored, he was being gaslit by his landlord. And not for a matter of months, but for years”

Mehdi sat down on a single sofa chair in his living room and switched on his mobile ventilation machine. For the next ten minutes I watched as the machine helped Mehdi gather his breath, humming away in the background as our documentary director, Tim, set up his own equipment for the interview. I had said to Tim when we started filming the programme that we were unlikely to find anything more shocking than what I had discovered in Croydon six months earlier, and yet this was worse. Watching Medhi hunched over a walking frame, coughing up his lungs, water falling on his back as he dragged himself onto the sofa to hook himself up to breathing equipment his local hospital had given to him, I had found a new low. Mehdi looked broken. The fight in him was fading before me. Physically or mentally, he couldn’t survive there.

‘I’m waking up at night breathless. I’m feeling suffocated in here, my chest is feeling congested. It could be any day I’m dead. I am literally on the verge of nervous breakdown. I just don’t know what to do. I just simply don’t know what to do.’

We called Jeff Charlton, the environmental hygienist who carried out a survey on Fransoy’s flat in Croydon. Medhi’s home had again shocked the unshockable – Jeff was mesmerised by the horrors of this home. We waited outside on the street while Jeff took his readings inside, which largely told us what we already knew – that the flat was unsanitary and unsafe. In parts of the flat there was a ‘100 per cent chance of electrocution’, according to Jeff. As he carried out his work, Jeff spotted something in the bathroom that we hadn’t, something that defied belief, in what would be our most shocking discovery yet.

‘Left to Rot: How Governments Have Betrayed Us and How We Fix It’ is published by Bristol University Press and is out now. You can purchase a copy here.