A government review into building regulations in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire has concluded that indifference and ignorance led to a “race to the bottom” in building safety practices, with cost prioritised over safety.



But the answer to the key question of whether the government should ban combustible materials, such as those which spread the flames on Grenfell where 72 people died, was left unclear.

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In a report published on Thursday, Dame Judith Hackitt, the government’s reviewer, said a new standards regulator should be the centrepiece of a reformed system but suggested she did not believe combustible materials should be banned.

“Restricting or prohibiting certain practices, will not address the root causes,” she said.

Grenfell survivors said they were “disappointed and saddened” that the report rejected their calls for a ban on combustible materials. David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, described the report as a “betrayal and a whitewash”. Architects, councils and fire experts also condemned the approach.

But then Hackitt appeared to contradict her own report and admitted she would in fact support a ban on combustible materials as long as it was alongside the wider reforms she proposed.

The housing secretary, James Brokenshire, is due to make a statement on the future of building regulations at around 12.30pm.

Flammable insulation and cladding products are currently being stripped from hundreds of high-rise homes in England and Wales. The prime minister said on Wednesday the government would spend £400m to help councils and registered social landlords strip it off, suggesting ministers consider it unacceptable.

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Lammy said it was “unthinkable” so many people could die in Grenfell Tower and one year on flammable cladding had not been banned.

“I will continue to stand with the Grenfell families and will continue to call for an outright ban on any combustible materials,” he said.

Shahin Sadafi, chair of Grenfell United, whose family lived at Grenfell, said: “Worrying that a fire like Grenfell could happen again is something that keeps many of us awake at night. When we met Dame Judith Hackitt we asked her for an outright ban on combustible cladding. We are disappointed and saddened that she didn’t listen to us and she didn’t listen to other experts.”

Lord Porter, chairman of the Local Government Association, said that despite Hackitt’s report the government should nevertheless act without delay to introduce a temporary ban on the use of combustible materials on complex and high-rise buildings ”until we have a regulatory and testing system which is fit for the 21st century”.

Hackitt said a new building regulations system should at first focus on buildings of 10 storeys or more. A new regulator called the Joint Competent Authority should be made up of local authority building standards, fire and rescue authorities and Health and Safety Executive officials. It will be independent of the building owner and it will approve designs before construction begins.

“What I want to see happen here is we do not want to have to wait for a tragedy like Grenfell before we apply the full criminal sanctions of the law,” she said.

“We have to get to a position where people putting lives at risk by what they’re doing gets picked up at the time and there’s sanctions applied there and then, not in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy like Grenfell.”

She continued: “If this had been in place prior to Grenfell, I do not believe the cladding that was put on Grenfell would have got through the system in the first place.”

At Grenfell Tower, which was owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the building regulations were checked by RBKC’s own building officers while works were already under way. The same thing happened on dozens of other buildings clad in combustible material nationwide.

There should also be tougher penalties for failures; Hackitt found rates of enforcement action against breaches of building regulations had fallen 75% in the last decade.

But she argued there shouldn’t be prescription about what materials could and could not be used; instead the onus should be on the “construction industry to take responsibility for the delivery of safe buildings rather than looking to others to tell them what is or is not acceptable”. She said “it will be important now for industry to show leadership in driving this forward”.

Hackitt said people did not bother to read regulations and when they did, they did not understand them. She said concerns were ignored during the building process because “the primary motivation is to do things as quickly and cheaply as possible rather than to deliver quality homes” and that some builders use the ambiguity of the regulations to “game the system”.

She also said people in the industry did not know who was in charge, that enforcement was patchy and penalties were so small as to be ineffective.

However, she stopped short of banning controversial desktop studies, which can be used to justify using certain materials without a fire test. She said she wanted desktop studies to be carried out only by qualified people, which she said would effectively stop unregulated fire engineers paid by builders of building owners from declaring systems safe.

However, the detailed results of those tests should remain commercially confidential, she said.

She said the new regulatory framework must also address the fact that “residents often go unheard, even when safety issues are identified”.