Inquiry told that defect was reported but proposal to fix system for £1,800 was ignored

The smoke ventilation system at Grenfell Tower was reported to have failed eight days before the fatal blaze claimed 71 lives, but a proposal to fix it for £1,800 was ignored, the public inquiry has heard.

The failure of the ventilation system, designed to extract smoke from lobbies outside flats in the event of a fire, has been identified by experts as a factor in the escape routes from the building filling with thick black smoke that may have prevented evacuation and rescue. However, the system was not designed to clear smoke from multiple floors at once.



Martin Booth, the managing director of PSB, which made the system, told the inquiry it received a request for help with the failure on 6 June 2017 after Rydon, the main contractor on the refurbishment of the building, was alerted to automatic opening vents not working.



The email was sent by an aftercare administrator at JS Wright, the company that installed the system.



“It was stated that JS Wright would like to arrange an appointment for a PSB engineer and an engineer from Direct Control Solutions to attend to investigate and resolve any issues,” said Booth in a written statement published on Tuesday. “On 12 June 2017 at 15.52 a response was sent. The proposed cost was £1,800 + VAT. No response was received and no instructions were received by PSB or Witt & Son UK to attend the Grenfell Tower site to investigate the potential fault report.”



Dr Barbara Lane, a fire engineer appointed by the inquiry, said in a report that the system installed failed to meet building regulations.

Booth said it had been designed to meet regulations and could only operate on one floor at a time, and “could not have prevented smoke from fires on multiple floors impacting lobbies and the common stair on multiple levels”.

However, Lane said: “Had the smoke control system operated correctly and the fire service been able to take control, they might have used the system to sequentially vent smoke from the lobbies on each floor of Grenfell Tower.”

Play Video 2:33 Video timeline shows how the Grenfell Tower fire unfolded

Booth also revealed that an earlier proposal for a 12-month maintenance contract involving six-month maintenance visits for the system, costing £3,600, was ignored.

The proposal was sent to JS Wright on 5 May 2016 by Witt & Son UK, the contract servicing and maintenance arm of the Witt UK Group of which PSB is a member.

“The proposed cost was £3,600 plus VAT,” Booth said. “The proposal for a maintenance contract was not taken up.

JS Wright declined to comment. Rydon have been contacted for comment.

Meanwhile, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) said it put the residents of Grenfell Tower first when making choices balancing their safety with that of firefighters and has questioned whether it was feasible to order an evacuation of the tower.



In its opening submission to the inquiry, it described how incident commanders and other decision makers had to make instantaneous choices and that it “has thus far found no evidence of any occasions when that balance was not struck in favour of the residents of Grenfell Tower despite the appalling challenges which LFB personnel were required to face”.

The brigade has faced criticism that it allowed the stay-put policy to remain too long on the night of the fire, meaning that people perished in flats that were supposed to be safe.

The stay-put policy failed at 1.23am, according to Dr Barbara Lane. But it was only changed to evacuation at 2.37am by which time 107 people were still inside, only 36 of whom got out.

But the LFB has said the inquiry should consider whether immediate evacuation of the block was feasible, given the way it was designed with only one staircase, had no fire alarm and had no system for communicating an evacuation alert. It also said its 999 call handlers faced an “appalling dilemma” when advising people whether to stay or flee and that it received more calls about fire survival guidance from residents within the tower on the night of the fire than the total number of such calls in the previous 10 years from the whole of London.

It also questioned whether it was in the public interest for it to plan to fight fires in buildings such as Grenfell Tower based on the assumption that their design is unsafe.

In a statement to the inquiry, the LFB asked whether it should “develop new high-rise fire and rescue policy and capabilities, and receive the appropriate associated funding, on the express assumption that buildings [are] … constructed so as to render them inherently unsafe in the event of a fire”.