From the Private Eye article.
"The watchdog that didn’t bark
LOOKING exposed following the Grenfell tragedy is the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), the regulator that deals with complaints from tenants against social housing landlords and which is meant to monitor the landlords’ performance, financial control and services.
Within a year of coming into existence in April 2012, the HCA, which replaced the Tenants Services Authority after it was abolished as part of austerity cuts, faced fierce criticism from individual tenants, tenant groups and MPs, all of whom claim it is toothless.
The criticism arose because of the way the HCA decided to interpret its remit, which was only to investigate complaints against social housing landlords when there was “serious detriment”, which the HCA failed to define.
In 2013 the Commons communities and local government committee reviewed the HCA’s work and complained that it had “interpreted its remit as narrowly as possible” and was failing to “discharge its responsibilities as we would expect”. In fact, the HCA managed to avoid doing very much at all, save finding reasons that complaints against landlords should not be pursued. Presumably this wasn’t the intention when it was created, but nothing has changed since.
Clearly, the risk of a fatal fire should have met even the HCA’s “serious detriment” criteria, so the question is whether the HCA was told of the fire safety risk that tenants living in Grenfell Tower had complained about for years. The HCA should certainly have known about those concerns, because one man sits on the boards of both the HCA and the Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO). Step forward ex-property developer Anthony Preiskel, who last July attended a TMO board meeting at which fire safety concerns were discussed.
At that meeting the board agreed that as part of its health and safety action plan it should “extend the fire safety approach adopted at Grenfell Tower to all major works projects”. Heaven help the tenants"