Taplow Tower in Swiss Cottage

• CONCERNING Camden’s attempt to use the courts to force a family to return to a “safe” Taplow, Chalcots estate (Family who won’t go back are fined, October 5), Taplow, as it stands, is a death trap.

By Camden’s own admission the present front doors are not fit for purpose. Replacement work has just started and is scheduled to take months. In the meantime – “safe”?

Pat O’Neill, a council official, stood in my living room on July 6 asserting that the hole in the ceiling above the window, which leads directly to the interior of the flat above, and the hole in the floor, which ends in the ceiling of the flat below, had been properly “compartmented” and were not a fire risk.

Four months later Camden admits at a public meeting, leader Cllr Georgia Gould in attendance, that this is not true. “Safe”?

Their proposal is to stuff the cavity with rockwool insulation! From outside. After “consultation” with the manufacturers. No starting date.

No mention of the fact that each of those cavities contains two three-inch wide strips of cladding which must, of necessity, be left unprotected within the interior of the flat.

In the case of a typical studio that means two strips of highly flammable cladding three inches wide by 10 feet long (approximately) at ceiling level in a room 10ft by 15ft. The same is true of every flat on every floor in Taplow. Safe?

Camden, you need to stop trying to cover up the transgressions of 2006, perhaps trying to protect those still in place who presided over it, and start behaving a little less like one of those rogue landlords you are so keen to prosecute.

The one thing you have succeeded in doing is uniting everyone in mistrust of and contempt for our landlords, London Borough of Camden. Quite an achievement for a Labour borough – the same Labour borough I spent my adult life praising.

IVOR GREALY
Taplow Tower, NW3