Council meeting to be webcast live

The council meeting on Wednesday 19 July, the first since the disastrous Grenfell Tower fire, is expected to draw a record audience. Because of the big public interest, it will be held in the Great Hall instead of the Council Chamber, as the Great Hall has a much larger capacity. The meeting will begin at 6:30pm, but admittance will be on a first-come first-served basis. The council therefore urges those wanting a seat to come early, at least one hour before.

For those who can’t attend, or prefer to avoid sitting in an audience which may become very boisterous, the council will be dusting off its webcast service, which after four years of inactivity will broadcast this meeting live via the internet.

This is a link to the RBKC web TV page for the meeting, where there is also possible to submit an email address to get an automatic alert before the broadcast begins.

The agenda for the meeting, which is published on the web TV page – and also can be found here, together with various meeting documents – contains, among other things:

@ Formal election of the new council leader, Elizabeth Campbell, following the resignation of Nick Paget-Brown;

@ Formal appointment of the interim chief executive, Barry Quirk, following the resignation of Nicolas Holgate;

@ Presentation of a public petition which asks that the residents of the Silchester Estate will be allowed full participation and a veto regarding the future of their estate;

@ Presentation of a public petition which demands that the RBKC cabinet immediately resigns, following its failures around the Grenfell Tower fire, and that all council managed building and regeneration projects stop until new, community co-designed masterplans for key Kensington areas have been created;

@ A motion from Councillor Linda Wade (Lib Dem) asking for more inclusion and consultation with minority parties in the future;

@ A motion from Councillor Robert Thompson (Labour) to call on the government to reverse the decision to impose normal immigration rules on undocumented victims of the Grenfell fire after 12 months, and instead grant them permanent right to remain in the country;

@ A motion from Councillor Bevan Powell (Labour) to establish a special Grenfell education fund “to address the additional educational challenges and barriers that the young survivors and witnesses of the Grenfell Tower disaster will face over the remaining years of their education”;

@ A motion from Councillor Judith Blakeman (Labour) to to use some of the council’s £250 million plus reserves to buy back the lease to the Grainger development of 32 homes for use as social rented housing, to purchase homes on the open market in North Kensington for social rented housing, to terminate the Silchester “Red Line” regeneration project and put the money spent on this project back into the the council’s housing revenue account, and to designate many more homes for social rented housing in various ongoing and planned developments across the borough.