London Emergencies Trust has special role

Your editorial (16 August) about the Grenfell Tower tragedy unfairly points the finger at the London Emergencies Trust (LET) for supposedly being slow off the mark in getting charitable donations to survivors.

Our role is a special one: to get money to the bereaved next of kin who lost loved ones and to those who were hospitalised as a result of the fire. Other organisations are helping those who were made homeless and penniless and this is a confusion – maybe an understandable one – that LET has had to contend with in explaining its role.

So far we have made payments totalling £1.7m to 82 bereaved and injured people. We had to plan how to distribute fairly, which was challenging when the numbers of dead and missing were uncertain. Clearly a “first come first served” approach was inappropriate.

We planned for up to 100 dead. With the funds we were given by the Red Cross and others, we calculated we could pay out £40,000 per deceased person to next of kin – that’s £4m.

And we planned for payments of £20,000 each for up to 24 seriously injured. So far we’ve paid out to 12, but expect another 10-12 claims. We’ve also paid out £3,500 each to another 34 short-stay hospital cases – £119,000 – and will pay to another 10 people soon, taking that distribution to £154,000.

So almost all the £4.6m funding is either already paid out or earmarked for future claims, leaving about £166,000 for any hospital or bereaved cases over and above what we expect.
Rob Bell
Director, London Emergencies Trust

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