By Sophie Barnes

These alarm bells have rung loud and clear, both through the evidence of key tower block fires and in warnings from experts across the years.

At each turn, the story is of missed opportunities.

To understand this picture properly, the first thing to understand is the devotion of successive governments to an ideology which has at times come ahead of calls to improve safety: deregulation.

Deregulation

Since the 1980s, governments of all colours have enthusiastically pursued a deregulation agenda. Margaret Thatcher famously led the way, replacing 306 pages of building regulations with 24, in a big bang to rival that in the financial sector.

Labour enthusiatically picked up the baton when it came to power in 1997. Tony Blair began a programme of “better regulation” and announced that no new regulation would be considered without a regulatory impact assessment being carried out. The ‘Better Regulation Task Force’ was set up to ‘reduce unnecessary regulatory and administrative burdens’ on businesses. This asked all government departments to simplify or abolish regulation in the areas for which they were responsible.

Then in 2010, the Conservative and Liberal Democrats coalition took power and the Cabinet Office's Cutting Red Tape initiative was born. Vince Cable, now Liberal Democrats leader, then business secretary, became chair of the committee.

“This coalition has a clear new year's resolution: to kill off the health and safety culture for good.”

The government introduced a ‘one in, one out’ rule - which ordered that whenever a regulation was introduced another had to be removed. In 2013, it became ‘one in, two out’ as the government adopted a mission statement of being “the first government ever to reduce regulation”.

In January 2012, David Cameron gave a speech where he made it his “new year's resolution” to “kill off the health and safety culture for good”.

In March 2016, as the final touches were being put on the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, the government – now a Conservative majority – upped its target to ‘one in, three out’ and promised to save businesses £10bn by reducing regulation.

As Paul Everall, the civil servant who was head of building control between 1991 and 2005, says: “You shouldn't just attack advisors on this. It really was the culture we were in with the government.

“For the past 10 or 15 years we've had ministers who've been pressing for deregulation rather than regulation. We need a change in the culture in the government [to see] that regulation is not per se a bad thing.”

This philosophy has had a direct impact on fire safety.

Falling fire deaths

Numerous experts have told Inside Housing that when they approached government urging changes to fire safety guidance over the years, advisors were reluctant to back their call for change, pointing to the drop in fire deaths as evidence that all was fine.

There is, to be fair, no arguing with the numbers on this point. In the 12 months to March 1982, 755 people died in fires in England. With a few bumps, it decreased every year through to 2016/17 (the financial year which finished two months before Grenfell) when it hit a low of 262.

“It is sadly our view that fire safety is not a prime driver of design and tends to be neglected when it comes to procurement and construction.”

But under the government's own analysis, changes such as increasingly fire-resistant furniture (thanks at least in part to EU regulations), falling levels of smoking and reduced domestic chip pan use over the years have driven the fall in fatalities.

In August 2010, David Sugden, then chair of the Passive Fire Protection Forum (PFPF), wrote to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) with the following warning: “It is sadly our view that fire safety is not a prime driver of design and tends to be neglected when it comes to procurement and construction.”

It followed a three-year government-backed research project carried out by the PFPF that concluded in 2003 that fire protections were being installed poorly because the work was carried out by workers who had no fire safety training.

The forum also found that building jobs were being completed without any checks being made on the fire protection materials or quality of workmanship because there was no legal requirement to certify the work.

Mr Sugden says: “We found that in completing a job a contractor that was doing fire safety work was being asked for a certificate by the main contractor. Now, there is no such thing so they were producing spurious fire certificates and handing those to their client, and these were being accepted as proof that the work had been done. We also found that local authority building control officers were accepting these spurious certificates as proof.”

The forum recommended that the use of third party certificates for fire protection products and installers should be made mandatory.



But in response a DCLG civil servant said any major change in regulation had to go through the Cabinet Office, who would carry out a cost-benefit analysis.

“So at every stage when the industry has said you need to have tighter control of the products and the installation of those products we have failed to get it,” says Mr Sugden.

“The number of deaths in fires has been coming down very nicely. The [Cabinet Office] could not be convinced that there was sufficient danger to the public for major changes in regulation.”

Despite the lack of government action on making changes to the building regulations, exactly one year after the Lakanal House fire the then Department for Communities and Local Government did seek views on what changes needed to be made.

But the focus seemed to be on how to cut costs, rather than strengthen the regulations. Its letter seeking views from the fire sector stated: “Ministers have indicated that they would be particularly interested in views and suggestions about compliance with the building regulations. This is in response to concerns that lack of compliance undermines what the regulations seek to achieve. We are keen to ensure that savings are really delivered and that our achievements are real and not theoretical.

“Our work needs to be underpinned by robust evidence so that we can make the right choices and understand clearly the costs and benefits.”

MHCLG (formerly the DCLG) says this "letter... made clear that building regulations need to be managed and maintained carefully".



Hannah Mansell, who is the current chair of the PFPF as well as technical manager for the British Woodworking Federation (BWF), says in recent years the 'one in two out rule' has hampered progress. She adds: “They simply didn’t see that the number of people who were dying in fires was of significant enough numbers to pay attention to.”

For Ronnie King, an ex-firefighter with 20 years' experience as a chief fire officer under his belt and honorary secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety, this has been a source of frustration.



“It's a real frustration for someone who spent 41 years in the fire and rescue service in Yorkshire, London, Scotland and Wales, 20 of which were as a chief fire officer, who has brought out lifeless bodies of children from burning buildings, and who doesn't receive payment for his current role. But who does not appear to be listened to when guidance from government department officials seems to carry more sway.”

So what were the warning signs?

Overseas fires

On New Year's Eve 2015, the Address Downtown Hotel in Dubai burst into flames. A fire had broken out on the 20th floor of the 63-storey building and ripped up the side. Jonathan Gilliam, a CNN law-enforcement analyst in Dubai, said: “This is looking absolutely horrific. This is spreading very rapidly.” At one stage more than 40 storeys burned simultaneously.

There have been other, similar fires at high rises in Dubai. A report by architectural consultancy Probyn Miers in 2016 said: “It is widely suspected that the presence of combustible aluminium composite panels was responsible for the fire spreading alarmingly rapidly up the exterior of the Address... the Dubai fires involved polyethylene (LDPE) cores.”

The same material that was on Grenfell also caused a terrifying tower block fire at the Lacrosse Tower in Melbourne in 2014 and the Mermoz Tower in France in 2012.

All of these should have been evidence enough to government and contractors to think carefully about using this product so widely in the UK. But other warnings were closer to home.

Garnock Court

The blaze at Garnock Court in North Ayrshire in 1999, has been discussed in both of the sections above. It was one of the earliest warnings about the danger posed by cladding systems. This fire destroyed flats on nine floors of the 14-storey block, killing a disabled 55-year-old man and injuring five others including a 15-month old baby. It spread up the building via composite window panels, and reached the top in around 10 minutes.



We have seen above how this fire in fact opened the door to large-scale testing and eventually the widespread use of combustible insulation. But the warnings could instead have triggered the changes necessary to ensure it was the last time a disaster like this occurred.

In 1999, the House of Commons Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee launched an inquiry into the Garnock Court fire and an earlier fire in 1991 that had broken out in Knowsley Heights in Liverpool.

“We do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks.”

Witnesses to the inquiry, including the Fire Brigades Union and cladding manufacturers, said the guidance in Approved Document B “may not be adequate for the purposes of ensuring the safety of external cladding systems in a fire”.

The chief concern raised by witnesses to the committee was the “risk of unexpectedly rapid fire spread involving these systems” which could create “disproportionate difficulties in firefighting” and “disproportionate damage to the building”.

Most importantly, the committee noted that concerns about the fire safety of external cladding systems “are not new”.

“Local authorities and [housing associations] should also be instructed to monitor existing cladding systems carefully.”

“We do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks,” it concluded.

The House of Commons committee stated that all cladding systems should be required to either be “entirely non-combustible” or proven through full-scale testing not to pose an “unacceptable level of risk” in terms of fire spread.



As we have seen, this is not the way building regulations panned out.

But north of the border the story was different. Since 2005 Scottish building regulations have stated that cladding and insulation on high rise domestic buildings should either be made of non-combustible materials or the whole cladding system subject to a full scale fire test. These regulations applied not only to new high rise domestic buildings but also if an existing high rise domestic building was being re-clad.

Prior to 2005 cladding on high rise domestic buildings built or altered had to meet a Class 0 classification.



This appears to have been decisive. After Grenfell, 300 social housing towers in England were found to have potentially dangerous cladding. In Scotland there were none.



And this was not the only missed opportunity. The committee also had something to say about fire risk assessments.

“Competent fire safety assessors should then be called in to evaluate what work may be necessary to ensure that no undue risk is posed by any of these systems, with particular reference to the lessons learned from the fires at Knowsley Heights and Garnock Court,” the report said.

But before Grenfell, virtually all risk assessments carried out by housing associations and councils only considered common areas of the building area and paid no attention to the outside.

Indeed, Grenfell was cleared by risk assessor Carl Stokes before the blaze, who has since admitted to Inside Housing that he did not take the cladding into account in his assessment.

The committee called on the government to instruct social landlords to review their existing building stock “with a view to ascertaining how many multi-storey buildings are currently using external cladding systems”.

“Local authorities and [housing associations] should also be instructed to monitor existing cladding systems carefully to ensure that the materials from which they are constructed do not degrade over time and become less resistant to flame spread than they were at the time of construction,” the report says.



It appears these warnings about the danger of cladding simply fell by the wayside over the years. After Grenfell, no one in government had a list of the buildings which contained cladding. In the weeks after the fire, building owners scrambled to identify the materials on the outside. The advice, in 1999, to “monitor... carefully” was lost to the years.

Lakanal House, 2009

The fire that experts agree should have been the gamechanger for fire safety legislation broke out in Lakanal House in south London on the afternoon of 3 July 2009.



An electrical fault with a TV caused it to burst into flames and as the fire spread it burnt through a cladding panel on the outside of the wall, tearing up the outside of the building.

Less than two hours later six people were dead, including three children – one just three weeks old. The subsequent investigation revealed the window panels didn't even meet the Class 0 standard and there were suspended ceilings in the block that were a “significant fuel load”.

The coroner tasked with investigating the Lakanal House fire recommended the government review Approved Document B, describing it as “a most difficult document to use” in her report in 2013. This, then, was the opportunity to uncover the dangers with Class 0 material in cladding systems and the potential problems with large-scale tests and desktop studies.

But this review never took place. The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Fire Safety sent countless letters to various housing ministers calling for it. This included correspondence with successive governments since the building regulation guidance was last revised in 2006.

Since the Lakanal House inquest the APPG has specifically referred to the cladding on tower blocks and asked for a return to regulations which required one hour fire resistance for the external walls of buildings.



The group also urged various ministers to act on the Lakanal House coroner's recommendations. However, as Mr King points out: “The promised building regulations review, which was set to be completed in 2016/17, has not even commenced, with correspondence from ministers to this effect confirming such.”

As late as October 2016 then housing minister Gavin Barwell made clear in parliament the promised review of guidance still had not got underway.



“We have not set out any formal plans to review the building regulations as a whole, but we have publicly committed ourselves to reviewing Part B following the Lakanal House fire.”

Last year the BBC reported on leaked letters from the APPG. In one, sent in March 2014, the group wrote: “Surely… when you already have credible evidence to justify updating… the guidance… which will lead to saving of lives, you don't need to wait another three years in addition to the two already spent since the research findings were updated, in order to take action?

“As there are estimated to be another 4,000 older tower blocks in the UK, without automatic sprinkler protection, can we really afford to wait for another tragedy to occur before we amend this weakness?”

After further correspondence, Liberal Democrat MP Stephen Williams – who was then a junior minister in the Communities and Local Government department – replied: “I have neither seen nor heard anything that would suggest that consideration of these specific potential changes is urgent and I am not willing to disrupt the work of this department by asking that these matters are brought forward.”

In November 2016, Mr Barwell replied to a letter from the group to say his department had been looking at the regulations, and would make a statement “in due course”.

Five months later, Mr Barwell wrote to say he did “acknowledge that producing a statement on building regulations has taken longer than I had envisaged”.

In the end, the last significant change to Approved Document B before Grenfell

was in 2006, as described above.

One of the last calls to change this before Grenfell was in March 2017. Speaking to Inside Housing that month, Sam Webb, a pioneering architect who has long campaigned for fire safety said there was a “conflict” between a drive for better energy efficiency in homes and fire safety.

“We require buildings to be warmer to save energy, but there's a conflict between the materials that you use to do that and fire safety. If they’re using materials that will cut down on heating bills, that’s fine, but if it’s going to reduce your safety in a fire to a matter of minutes, that’s unacceptable.”

Three months later, flames ripped through the cladding system on the outside of Grenfell Tower in less than 15 minutes and 72 people were condemned to their deaths.

Sprinklers

The Lakanal House Inquiry also had something to say about sprinkler systems.

On day 35 of the inquiry, David Walker, a building surveyor with 29 years' experience, was asked to give expert evidence to the jury. Asked whether he believed sprinklers would have been beneficial, he was unequivocal, but also noted that their use around the UK was minimal.

Brian Davey, an internationally renowned fire expert, backed this view up.

Indeed, as the inquest heard, in 2006 regulations changed to require all new residential buildings over 30m to include sprinklers. But this was never applied retrospectively, to require the retrofitting of the life-saving devices at buildings like Lakanal and Grenfell. Over coming days, the inquest would hear that sprinkler systems were increasingly cheaper and more sophisticated – unlikely to cause any problems to the building outside of a fire.

Coroner Frances Kirkham therefore wrote to the Department for Communities and Local Government saying this:

And this was not the only call for the retrofitting of sprinklers.

In 2010 two firefighters were killed fighting a blaze in Shirley Towers, a 16-storey tower block in Southampton.

The coroner looking into the fire – Ken Wiseman – recommended the government should encourage social housing providers to retrofit sprinklers in buildings 30m or taller.

But when the Lakanal House coroner made the same recommendation Eric Pickles, who was communities secretary at the time, said this was a matter for housing providers to consider, not government.

And in a parliamentary debate in 2010 Earl Attlee, the peer responding on behalf of the government, said:

“We recognise the significant role [sprinklers] can play in life and property protection and in public safety.

“[But] we do not consider that it is necessarily for the government to dictate to the business sector how to manage its business risks. If the fire industry or fire and rescue service consider that greater fire protection would be good for UK businesses, they should take the case directly to building owners rather than to government.”

“In other words there was no word of encouragement whatsoever, ‘it's not my problem, it’s theirs’,” says Mr King.

Even urging from a future government minister fell on deaf ears. Heather Wheeler, MP for South Derbyshire and now the minister responsible for homelessness, spoke in parliament in 2014 when she was a backbencher calling for sprinklers to be made mandatory in all new build developments.

She said: “Nobody wants people to die unnecessarily. We all know that in Derbyshire… the number of fires has been reduced by 50% in the past six years or so. That is a fantastic story, but the vulnerable people and vulnerable areas where such problems persist can be identified. The fact that sprinkler systems would deal with that absolutely overnight is overwhelming, and I recommend that the minister gives us some joyous news later in his contemplations about English building regulations.”

Despite all of this evidence, there were no changes to building regulations made.

In the same 2014 debate, then housing minister Brandon Lewis echoed the deregulatory philosophy described above.

He said: “In our commitment to be the first government to reduce regulation, we have introduced the one in, two out rule for regulation.

“The Department for Communities and Local Government [responsible for housing] has gone further and removed an even higher proportion of regulations. In that context, members will understand why we want to exhaust all non-regulatory options before we introduce new regulations.”

A MHCLG spokesman says: “We all want to make sure homes are safe for those who live in them.

“A number of fire protection measures are needed to provide a suitable standard of safety in a building. These can include smoke alarms, fire compartmentation and smoke control.”

However, it still says the decision on fitting sprinklers is one for building owners.

And without this push from government, in a climate of austerity before Grenfell, action was not forthcoming. In 2015, research by Inside Housing showed just 18 of 2,925 council-owned high-rise blocks in England had sprinklers fitted inside flats.

It is hoped in years to come, the current reviews do not go down as another missed warning. But the signs so far are not wholly encouraging.