Guidance that residents only evacuate if own flat is on fire is likely to be reviewed after inferno at refurbished tower

The “stay put” policy has been a cornerstone of fire safety advice for housing blocks like Grenfell Tower since the 1950s. The official guidance states that residents should only evacuate if their own flat is on fire – everyone else, generally, is thought safe to remain.

But that policy is expected to come under intense scrutiny after what fire industry experts called an “unprecedented” inferno that has so far claimed six lives with the death toll expected to rise.

Darren Baird, a former senior fire safety officer at Greater Manchester service and the managing director of Total Fire Services, said he expected the “stay put” policy to be reviewed for council blocks that have undergone major refurbishment work, like Grenfell Tower.



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“I’ve been to hundreds of tower block fires and every one has been contained in the flat of origin. It very, very rarely spreads beyond even the room of origin,” he said.

“Our general advice would be that unless the fire is in your flat, stay put. Unless you’ve had refurbishment work that you’re unsure of, stay put. It’s been inherent and built into buildings and tower block designs since the 1950s.”

The “stay put” advice was reviewed after the Lakanal House fire in south London, in which three women and three children died in July 2009.

The fire service was criticised at an inquest into the blaze for its lack of consistency in telling residents to “stay put” or “get out”, but a review of the policy determined that it should not be altered.

Baird, who advises seven major housing groups on fire safety, said the principles of the policy are based on flats that can contain a fire for at least 60 minutes, sometimes up to three hours, before the fire service arrives.

However, he said this “60-minute box” principle could go out of the window if major refurbishment works have taken place.

“If it’s your flat that’s on fire you evacuate, if it’s not your flat then you’re ‘normally’ safe to remain where you are,” he said. “The thing that conflicts with that is if there’s been some refurbishment work done and that has altered that compartmentation.”

Baird said major refurbishments could leave a building “like swiss cheese”, full of holes that would accelerate the spread of the blaze.

“If there’s evidence that the floors may have been reconfigured, heating systems may have gone in and external cladding has been fitted – that changes the parameters [of the advice to ‘stay put’],” he said.

“If that has been done inappropriately, or hasn’t been checked properly, or the holes they’ve made haven’t been filled properly – potentially you have a building that’s like swiss cheese, it’s got holes all the way through it, which can unfortunately only be sometimes realised after the event of a fire.”

Baird described the fire as “unprecedented” in his experience and that he had received emails from five of his housing clients, who own blocks like Grenfell Tower, asking what advice they should give residents.

Placing wet towels by the front door help stop smoke fumes from entering a flat, Baird said, but that tactic would be futile if the tower block has a common ventilation system between flats.

Mike Tobin, the technical director of Security and Fire Experts Ltd in Bury, Greater Manchester, said: “As a rule, the ‘stay put’ policy works but I think this is such a tragic incident there’s so many potential issues that make it a one-off.”

Tobin said the “stay put” policy was the long and short of advice to residents in tower blocks and that it was for someone “far higher than my pay grade” to decide whether it should be reviewed.

He described the inferno as a game-changer for the fire safety industry. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “This will change our industry whether we like it or not. There’s too many deaths for it to go without something coming out of it. They might look at what Scotland is doing, putting sprinklers in all new communal buildings, but that would not have stopped this fire.”

A senior firefighter in the north-west of England, who did not want to be named, said he had never seen anything like it in his 32 years in the fire service. He said it was so “out of the ordinary and as yet not understood”.

“Conventional wisdom may not fit this scenario,” he said.