Membership of the Residents Association (RA) is open to all residents and includes members with shared ownership (26) or who rent fully (15), from Moat Housing, freeholders (6), full leaseholder/Owners (53) and others renting through agencies like Houseen or privately (10) and a few associate members (2).

The Residents Association (RA) was set up, firstly, to address unregulated escalating estate management company, FirstPort, service-charge costs. Then, to our shock, it emerged that cladding does not meet the new post-Grenfell (EWS1) standards.

We successfully addressed the hugely worrying issue of us potentially having to pay the costs of cladding remediation, and that being enforced by the estate management company. This was done as part of a national campaign involving protests, picketing construction companies’ new sites, involving MPS and the media. 

Thanks to those efforts, Barratt Homes have now agreed to pay for the replacement of the old cladding and, voluntarily, to carry out other necessary work. There are still concerns about when the remediation work will start and what the quality will be like but Barratt Homes have met with us to reassure, and appear to be being transparent about these matters

Rather than the stress of confronting complicated bureaucratic systems, and dealing with the past seeming indifference of entities such as FirstPort and Moat (the housing association which is a key stakeholder in the area, owning many properties), individually, we have worked to get them to listen.

Other possible approaches to resolving our problems include investigating ‘right-to-manage’.  There are many lesser benefits to having an RA in that we can share information on preferred electricians, plumbers and trades-people, and discuss matters such as noise, pollution, leaks and minor problems, as well as making plans to green our area and plant more trees for example.

We attempt to hold General Meetings (open to all members) every two months and at our Annual General Meeting we elected a committee (currently that is Anna Belabbes, Beverley Cook, Jamie Gunn, Artur Kozlowski, Clara Molin, Micheál O’Connell, John Packer, Dan Smith, Anna Spearpoint, Maurice Spearpoint, Helen Taylor, Maddy Williams and Millie Windsor) who meet separately as necessary. Lastly we have negotiated – and at first the various entities refused to meet us – quarterly, Working Meetings where two to three representatives from the RA try to problem-solve with similar numbers attending from both FirstPort and Moat.