UPDATED WITH COUNCIL RESPONSE: Brent Council must exercise its duty of care and fix the non-operating self-closing fire doors at South Kilburn block. Have they not learnt lessons from Grenfell?

 This 3rd floor self-closing fire door has not been working since 2017 despite notification to Brent Council

A week ago Wembley Matters published a letter from John Healy who lives at William Dunbar House on the South Kilburn Estate. LINK

He had resorted to writing the letter to ask Wembley Matters for helf after his attempts to get Brent Council to repair what are supposed to be self-closing fire doors that have remained open. One since 2017!

John Healy wrote:

At the Grenfell Inquiry, self closing fire doors that did not self close were identified as the second highest issue after unsafe cladding and as a result I have been emailing the council to fix 2 self closing doors that do not self close and which are part of my only fire escape in my high-rise, one on the 3rd floor & one on the 5th floor but after 3 years, they still have not been fixed and everyone's safety is under threat because of this.

I had a response to one of my emails from a housing officer who said "Fire Safety is not included in my job description" and he failed to pass it on to another officer, who did have Fire Safety in their job description.

After 3 years I decided to ask the London Fire Brigade to solve the issue but I was shocked by their reply, which said they were not responsible for Fire Safety in council blocks and they forwarded my email back to Brent Council who failed to take any action as usual.

I hope that now the evidence of failure to rectify is public that Brent Council will exercise its dury of care to residents and quickly fix the problem on the 3rd floor and the more recent 5th floor problem (below) and check every self-closing door in the block.

 As I  was was completing this article I received another email from John Healy that speaks for itself:

Can you ask Brent Housing to carry out a full inspection of all the fire doors in William Dunbar House, as I have only checked those doors up to the 5th floor and for all I know, there may be many others in the floors above me.

At the Grenfell Inquiry Mr. Stokes the Fire Risk assessor carried out his FRA's without actually going into the tower.  Since I began emailing the council, my block has had 2 FRA's, with the last one in 2019 and neither of them noticed the damaged doors.

II can only assume that the FRA's in my block were carried out using the same method as Mr. Stokes, where the assessor never actually visited my block.  The last one even got the location of our only fire escape wrong. He said it was next to the lift shaft and anyone entering the building could clearly see the stairwell began at the far side of the building.

When I reported this to Brent Housing they said "they had full confidence in the FRA assessor and it did not matter that he got the location wrong".

It is worth recalling that a resident of Grenfell had written a series of blog articles drawing attention to the fire danger in the block. He was ignored.

 RESPONSE ON TWITTER SHORTLY AFTER THE ABOVE ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED