Tomorrow, Thursday May the 5th, might be Election Day for our local Council, but for some also thinking about RBKC, it will also be when Nicholas “Naughty Nick” Holgate appears at the Grenfell Inquiry:
People in and around the Grenfell community might remember Nicholas Holgate. He was the Town Clerk of RBKC (Barry Quirk’s predecessor) until shortly after the Grenfell Tower fire when 72 innocent members of our community lost their lives. He resigned from the Council around a week after the disaster, saying he would be a “distraction”.
But when asked by journalists if the then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Sajid Javid authorised this. MHCLG did not deny this and just issued a statement saying that “The appointment of chief executives is entirely the responsibility of the local authority,” sometime afterwards.
For anyone who happens to think Holgate was just some innocent “fall guy” director simply doing his job and simply just took the rap from the decisions of Nick Paget-Brown, “Jailhouse” Rock Feilding-Mellen and co, we’ll just post a link to his statements and evidence so far:
https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/evidence/nicholas-holgate-evidence-read-26-july-2021
Holgate might be highly intelligent and like to think he can cover his terms with official speak and an air of detachment but reading what he says and contrasting that with the goings on at the time tells quite another story – and that story is that he was a collaborator. We recommend interested readers to have a look look through the Grenfell Action Group archive to decide for themselves :
https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/
Questions of “where are they now? as to the whereabouts of the former “old guard” at RBKC have long been asked by residents. Shockingly, THINK can report thst Nicholas Holgate, since leaving the murky depths of the Rotten Borough of K & C, has been working as a teacher and he is locally based too. . Here is his LinkedIn profile:
Of course, there is no mention of Grenfell on his profile, and while RBKC is basically under questioning at the Grenfell Inquiry , and the affected local North Kensington community, survivors and the families of those who died in the fire are struggling to get on with their lives and hoping that one day some of those responsible will be brought to justice, Holgate is going about getting on with his life without an apparent second thought for people here affected. Perhaps if he cared, he wouldn’t have picked a school so closely located to here to teach in. Sacred Heart High School iis less than 2 miles from Grenfell, and we do know some locals , whose children attend the school and will have perhaps been unaware of Holgate there
Not so long ago, friends of a Grenfell survivor were horrified to find our that their daughters maths teacher at Godolphin and Latymer School, was Holgate This school is also fairly nearby and is only 2 miles from Grenfell. We’ll remind Holgate that 18 of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire were children.
An affected local resident, on hearing about this commented ” “Wonder how he got the job at these schools and how the parents and pupils feel being taught by someone whose organisation’s concerns with numbers resulted in cheap flammable cladding being substituted on the exterior of Grenfell Tower.Is it ethically acceptable that the disgraced ex Chief Exec of RBKC has access and responsibility to youngsters in the local Hammersmith/Kensington area?”
Just as an example of Holgate’s murky business with his fellow collaborators at the Rotten Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, people can see this old Grenfell Action Group blog about Wornington College and see how little he cared about the education of our community:
“The Town Clerk, Nicholas Holgate, did not disappoint us after we predicted that he would respond to our concerns by claiming that there was no conflict of interest and that the Council, and the officer in question, had both behaved properly. We have decided to publish Mr Holgate’s response to us below”
From: Nicholas.Holgate@rbkc.gov.uk
Sent: 16 January 2017 10:34
To: ********
Subject: RE: Complaint regarding RBKC and K and C College.
Dear *******,
Tony Redpath joined the Board at the College’s request. They sought his membership because they valued his knowledge and experience. It is not unusual for officers to take on such roles. But conscious of the possibility of conflicts of interest arising, before joining the Board, Tony met the then Principal and the College’s Clerk on 25 February 2014 at which they reached a clear understanding that he would not act on the College’s behalf on any matter concerning the Council. Accordingly, he played no part in discussions about the Council’s purchase of the Wornington Green site.
As further evidence of the care with which he has managed any possible conflicts of interest, he suspended his membership of the Board in February 2015 because he was involved, as a Council officer, in the London Area Review of Further Education. The Review has now concluded and, after taking advice from the Head of Legal Services, he has agreed to re-join the Board from the start of this year. Coincidentally, he was therefore not a member of the Board during the period when the College and the Council agreed the sale of the Wornington Green site. Nor did he play any role in advising the Council on the purchase: that was a matter for the Corporate Property department.
In short, we have taken care to ensure that there has been no conflict of interest.
Nicholas Holgate
Town Clerk
Piglet-Pies? Well, he’ll avoid be questioned about Wornington College tomorrow, but we thought we’d just put this up as a brief history lesson. . We’ll be waiting to see how the Inquiry goes tomorrow, to see how Holgate’s “evidence” holds up – or not, and we hope that Richard Millett QC gives “Naughty Nick” six of the best….
THis Is North Kensington 
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