This interview is part of a series, which asks if newspapers have become Above the Law.

Read & watch further expert views & testimony from the campaign’s homepage.

By Alice Watkins

The high rise fire in Grenfell Tower, Kensington, North London, on 14th June 2017, took the lives of 72 people and left over 300 more displaced.

We now know that the fire, which began due to an electrical fault in a refrigerator, was able to spread quickly through the building due to combustible plastic cladding on the exterior of the building – confirmed by the inquiry. We also know that residents previously raised concerns about fire safety in the building, years before the disaster. 

Yvette Williams MBE is a lead campaigner in the Justice 4 Grenfell campaign. Yvette has lived in North Kensington for over 30 years and is also a founding member of operation Black Vote – a national campaign encouraging BME communities to engage in the democratic process to get their voices heard. 

Hacked Off sat down with Yvette to talk about the impact of the coverage.

Yvette was on the ground in the aftermath of the fire. She believes that residents were failed by the press. 

She said, “The press was constantly there trying to find out who are easy targets to keep the story going, as opposed to focusing on the key issues. We said on the day that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea were responsible, but actually they just let that pass. Nobody went for the local government. Nobody went for the central government.”

On the night of the fire, as the blaze broke out, the press arrived before some of the emergency services.

Once the sun had come up, the press set up a cordoned area and began questioning people, looking to speak to people who lived in the tower or who knew someone who did. Yvette felt that the focus of the press’ interest was the ‘types’ of people who lived in the tower.  In her view, reporting focused on people subletting in the tower, or who were immigrants.

At first it was reported that one person had been killed, and this official figure rose only very slowly. The community who had been there on the night felt confident that there had been at least 400 people in the building, and were suspicious of the implausibly low number of reported fatalities.

Yvette says that the media became a hindrance. She described reports that the press even used a community helpline, which was set up to help residents and people whose loved ones were missing, to find people that would speak to them. 

They just seemed to be everywhere. They seemed to know about things before the community knew about them and we definitely know that they were picking people off to give them information.

Months after the tragedy, one of the Sunday papers ran a negative story about a resident who had lived in an apartment in the walkways below Grenfell.  His flat had been evacuated, but he had returned to collect his belongings. The resident was living in hotel accommodation as his flat had been drenched in water. He – it was alleged – was somehow undeserving of the public funds needed to keep him and other residents in hotels.

Yvette and other members of the community were labelled in the press as ‘left wing agitators’.

Prior to the tragedy, local blogs had written about Grenfell residents’ safety concerns. Refurbishments to the Tower began in 2015, following an inquest which concluded that the 2009 Lakanal House tower block fire, which killed six people in Camberwell, had been the result of unsafe renovation work and poor safety planning. And when safety concerns were raised by residents during the refurbishments at Grenfell Tower (including complaints that the gas and electricity would sporadically cease to work as well as water shortages, broken lifts and ill-fitting windows), the local authority threatened to evict complainants if they refused to allow entry to their properties for the work to be completed.

Just months before the fire, the Grenfell Action Group blog warned: “The Grenfell Action Group have reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of [Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation] residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation.”

But these concerns, which were raised during several meetings between residents and local councillors, were not well-covered in the national media, despite being in the public interest in the aftermath of the Lakanal House tragedy.

Yvette said, “The press’ behaviour did hinder the pursuit of justice because if they’d have focused on those key things around safety and how that refurbishment had gone from day one, they would have had a better story and we would be in a better place now so that the fires that have happened after Grenfell, possibly could have been preventable if they had focused on those in the first place.

Tell your MP that newspapers shouldn’t be above the law.