fire safety

LBWF’s Goddarts sheltered housing block in Walthamstow: fire safety assessors find serious issues for five years running, but, astonishingly, they remain unaddressed, leaving vulnerable residents in danger

July 15, 2025 fire hazards, fire safety 0

Goddarts House, Walthamstow, is a purpose built two-storey block, owned and administered by LBWF, containing 27 flats providing sheltered living accommodation. Its residents include the elderly, and those who have hearing, sight, or mental health impairment.  Some are wheelchair users. In 2019-21, Goddarts came to the attention of this blog because one of its residents, Roy Sutton, discovered... »

LBWF’s fire safety remediation programme lags as asbestos found in some of the high-rise housing blocks being upgraded

January 15, 2025 asbestos, fire safety

As previous posts have noted (see links below), LBWF’s remediation programme (RP) to make its 42 low-rise and 21 high-rise housing blocks fully fire safe still has much work to do. The RP was launched in 2020, with £40m. earmarked as support, but at the beginning of 2025, there remain nearly 2,000 high and medium risk issues in the blocks which need addressing, and many of these concern fundamenta... »

Private Eye reports LBWF’s latest fire safety scandal, the fact that, seven years after Grenfell, only one of its 63 low-rise and high-rise blocks of flats is fire safe

December 5, 2024 fire safety

From Private Eye 1638 6-19 December 2024 »

More on LBWF’s failure to keep tenants in its low-rise and high-rise housing blocks safe from fire

November 25, 2024 fire safety

A few weeks ago, and in response to a Freedom of Information Act question, LBWF released further data about the remediation programme it is running to address the fire safety defects which exist in all but one of its 63 low-rise and high-rise housing blocks. Unsurprisingly, given that this programme started in 2020, the data shows that in the years that have elapsed there has been some tangible pr... »

New official data shows that seven years after Grenfell nearly all LBWF housing blocks have ‘life-critical fire-safety defects’, leaving tenants to live with the risks

November 1, 2024 fire safety

In 2020, after LBWF was involved in several notable fire safety scandals, including the purchase of hundreds of misleadingly labelled fire doors, the subject of a fraud inquiry, it began a programme of remedial work to bring its housing stock ‘up to the most modern…safety standard’, this being forecast to cost about £40m., with the final sum dependent on what was discovered as the work proceeded. ... »

Local journalist Michelle Edwards reveals pressing fire safety issues at a newly built LBWF housing block, but from the Town Hall there is only silence

January 19, 2023 fire hazards, fire safety

The respected Waltham Forest journalist Michelle Edwards has recently moved to a flat in a low-rise block at Pinder Road, Wood Street, completed by Countryside Partnerships in early 2022 and now owned and run by LBWF. It is true to say that this has not been a happy experience, and she tweets about the issues she has encountered at https://twitter.com/NewBuildHell.  Some of these issues are partic... »

New LBWF fire safety scandal: Northwood and St Georges Court towers have had high risk failings for years, and nothing has been done about them

May 10, 2022 fire hazards, fire safety

LBWF is currently embarked on a £40m. programme of ‘building safety works’.  Much of this sum will be spent on its 14 tower blocks, all of which require substantial modifications, to the extent that for many months Waking Watch arrangements (where ‘suitably trained persons continually patrol all floors and the exterior perimeter of the building in order to detect a fire, raise the alarm, and ... »

LBWF fraud team’s investigation of the FEDs fire safety scandal dodges key questions, as officers focus on their ding dong battle with Osborne at the High Court

December 23, 2021 fire hazards, fire safety, Goddarts House, Northwood Tower

In response to a Freedom of Information request, LBWF has just released a redacted version of the June 2021 investigation report, authored by the internal Corporate Anti-Fraud Team (CAFT), concerning the flat entrance door (FED) scandal, much discussed previously on this blog. The ‘executive summary’ of the findings reads as follows: ‘Osborne Property Services Ltd (OPSL) were contracted by LBWF to... »

LBWF launches a £40m. programme to upgrade the fire safety of its social housing provision, but questions remain as to why this wasn’t done years ago

September 15, 2021 fire hazards, fire safety, Northwood Tower

It has long been suspected, by this blog not least, that LBWF is facing a major problem about fire safety in its social housing provision, and now some new evidence shows that not only is this true, but something is finally being done about it.  The pandemic has slowed down council reporting across the board, and so for the latest developments it is necessary to go back to a report presented ... »

Another LBWF fire safety cock up: now its housing management agent, Morgan Sindall, replaces flat entrance doors ‘in error’

August 23, 2021 fire hazards, fire safety

Over the years, LBWF has gained a reputation for blunders, whether big, like recklessly exposing its own employees in the Town Hall to dangerous asbestos dust, or relatively small, like planning to spend £40,000’s worth of public money on an inappropriate and unwanted ‘artistic’ mural in Cann Hall. What follows is a further example of this disreputable tradition. As this blog has extensively repor... »

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