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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 0

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 fundamentals, ‘Door Repairs/Renewal’, ‘Fire Alarm System’, ‘Smoke/Fire Detection’, ‘Fire Signage’, and so on. Now it can be revealed that part of the explanation for the RP’s lack of progress stems from the fact that, as work has proceeded, asbestos has been found in 13 of the high-rise blocks being upgraded,... »

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The Whitefield School child abuse scandal: an update

December 20, 2024 child safeguarding 0

On 27 November 2024, the LBWF Leader Cllr. Grace Williams released a statement on Whitefield School which included the following: ‘We have worked closely with the academy trust, Ofsted, Department for Education, and NHS to support the police investigation. Now that the criminal investigation into staff at Whitefield has concluded, safeguarding partners will commission an independent expert to carry out a Local Children Safeguarding Practice Review to ensure the lessons of this distressing case are learned’.  In passing, the timing of this statement is puzzling.  The casual reader might imagine that ‘the criminal investigation into staff at Whitefield’ to which Cllr. Williams refers... »

LBWF’s Violence Reduction Partnership aims to reduce knife crime, but after 5 years, £6.6m. of funding, and only disappointing results, it urgently needs a re-think

December 13, 2024 Policing/crime 0

In the middle years of the 2010s, there was escalating public disquiet in Waltham Forest about violent crime, particularly knife crime involving local youth, with newspaper reports focusing on both the volume of offences and the fact that the only a small number of perpetrators were being prosecuted (see links, below).  Accordingly, in November 2018, and largely as a response, LBWF launched a Violence Reduction Partnership (VRP), comprising its own staff and representatives of the police, schools, the heath service, the voluntary sector, businesses and the wider community, in order ‘to tackle violence and its root causes’, with, it was emphatically stated, ‘the wellbeing of young people at t... »

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 0

From Private Eye 1638 6-19 December 2024 »

The Whitefield School child abuse scandal: the BBC publishes more awful revelations

November 27, 2024 child safeguarding, Cllr. Clare Coghill, Cllr. Grace Williams 0

The BBC has just published more awful revelations about the Whitefield School child abuse scandal, which can be read here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjw0e3zjx2lo.amp For the background to the scandal, and a timeline of events, see links, below. It should not be forgotten that (a) LBWF was involved at every stage of the scandal, but kept its deliberations and interventions for the most part away from public scrutiny. Thus, to give a flavour, in the crucial period 2017 to 2021, the relevant scrutiny committee minutes make no mention of Whitefield School at all, and nor is the scandal referenced in the annual reports of the Waltham Forest Safeguarding Children Board. (b) At the time o... »

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