Fire authorities ‘complacent’ before Lakanal blaze
Fire authorities were complacent about policing social housing before a fatal blaze last year, a senior fire safety manager has said.
Nigel Charlston, from West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, told delegates at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s annual conference, that attitudes to fire safety in social housing had changed since the Lakanal House fire in Camberwell, on 3 July last year. Six people died in the blaze, which spread much more quickly than expected.
Mr Charlston said that when it came to fire legislation: ‘I have to hold my hand up and say we have been complacent’.
With regards to social housing, Mr Charlston added: ‘We have probably been complacent here [too] because there have not been many problems.’
He explained the enforcement of fire safety regulation had not been ‘top of our pecking order’ because a tragedy such as Lakanal had not happened before.
But he said the situation was improving. He explained the West Yorkshire fire service had met with major housing association managers in its area after the Camberwell blaze to improve fire safety.
He said that the PVC on the facade of Lakanal House had melted and dripped down which was ‘very unusual’. ‘If the fire had happened in November that wouldn’t have happened,’ he said.
He said many of the fire risks in residential tower blocks were due to changes made to doors and windows, and items put in the corridors.
‘I would like to see in all tenancy agreements that you can’t touch the communal areas,’ he said.
The Lakanal blaze prompted Inside Housing to launch its Safe as Houses campaign to improve fire safety in tower blocks.
Nick Rutter, managing director of home safety products company Fire Angel, said at the same session: ‘It has never been easy to protect tenants.’
He talked of challenges, such as language and cultural barriers to people understanding devices such as smoke detectors and encouraging tenants to pay money for an alarm or detector in a property which was not their own.
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Readers' comments (1)
kass | 23/06/2010 1:09 pm
This article proves that the social tenants died in the fire for no other reason than being social tenants. That is the sector of our population where clients, customers and whatever else you want to call tenants are nothing else but second class citizens, devoid of any real power to enforce their rights and protect themselves.
Now the excuse start rolling in, like tenants refusing to buy their own fire alarms even though we know the fire spread very fast into sections of the block where it was not supposed to spread in the first place. And all other poppycocks about challenges when any challenge should have been met before the fire killed people.
I strongly hope the surviving victimes and the families of those hwo sadly dies, go on with camqpign and court cases and never stop until they get reall justice, Because only if they get real justice tenants everywhere can hope not to be treated as second class citizens and end up dead for being social tenants.
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