ao link
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In

You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles

There was an unpleasant echo of history in Robert Jenrick’s comments on cladding

The current scale of the building safety crisis demands leadership from the state as much as cash. But if Robert Jenrick lets himself think that a low number of fire deaths make this work unnecessary, he will be repeating the mistakes that led to Grenfell, writes Peter Apps

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Robert Jenrick addresses parliament (picture: Getty)
Robert Jenrick addresses parliament (picture: Getty)
Sharelines

The current scale of the building safety crisis demands leadership from the state as much as cash. But if Robert Jenrick lets himself think that a low number of fire deaths make this work unnecessary, he will be repeating the mistakes that led to Grenfell

Towards the end of his speech yesterday, Robert Jenrick told parliament it was important to place the risk the country faces from a fatal flat fire “in context”.

“Last year, the number of people who died in fires in blocks of flats over 11 metres was 10 – an all-time low – and fire-related fatalities in dwellings in England have fallen by 29% over the past decade,” he said. “By way of comparison, more than 1,700 fatalities were reported on our roads in 2019.”

There was an unpleasant echo of history in these words. In the years building up to Grenfell, many industry figures, union representatives and lobbyists approached Mr Jenrick’s predecessors and asked them to take the risk of a flat fire more seriously – only to find their approach rebuffed by the same argument. How can this risk be as bad as you say if so few people are dying?

As one of these lobbyists, Arnold Tarling, recalled in 2019: “Their argument was that year-on-year the number of people dying in fires is falling and therefore buildings are safe.


READ MORE

Grenfell cladding sales manager sat on report showing panels failed safety tests, inquiry hearsGrenfell cladding sales manager sat on report showing panels failed safety tests, inquiry hears
Leaseholders ‘betrayed’ by £3.5bn cladding fund, say campaigners and MPsLeaseholders ‘betrayed’ by £3.5bn cladding fund, say campaigners and MPs
The forgotten victims: the leaseholders the government’s cladding proposals do not helpThe forgotten victims: the leaseholders the government’s cladding proposals do not help

“And then when you would say, ‘yes, but we are not building like we used to, we are covering them with all these combustible materials that would go up like a horror movie’, they would say ‘well it hasn’t happened yet’.”

But it has happened now. The grieving family members of the 72 lost at Grenfell are all the context we should need to know that the risk to high-rise buildings is real.

Fire deaths have fallen as rates of smoking and chip pan use have reduced, and smoke alarm provision has got better. But residential fires can never be eliminated entirely if there is a risk buildings will explode in flames when they occur, that is a problem the government must fix – like it or not.

The grieving family members of the 72 lost at Grenfell are all the context we should need to know that the risk to high-rise buildings is real.

It is also worth stressing once more that a lot of this is the government’s fault.

A few miles away from where Mr Jenrick was talking, the sales person at the firm which sold the panels for Grenfell was explaining that the UK was “the market” for the deadly cladding fixed to the tower. She would rarely, if ever, sell a more fire-safe version to a UK client.

But in Germany, where restrictions were tighter, the company had the opposite experience. Clients exclusively bought the more fire-resistant panels because they were not allowed to use anything else.

Loose restrictions in the pursuit of economic growth has given us today’s crisis. And with so many buildings wrapped in dangerous cladding, another Grenfell-style fire remains possible unless and until it is prevented.

So what should the government do? The answer is the same now as it was in June 2017. It must lead the efforts to find those buildings where the risk is highest. It must then see to it that these buildings are made safe.

The problem we have currently is that it has resisted taking this sort of active control. We do not have a comprehensive list of affected buildings, or a proper way of sorting the most dangerous from the mildly risky.

Instead, there is simply government guidance suggesting all combustible materials must be removed from buildings and a panicked market trying to make sense of that in a world where almost all buildings have combustible materials on their walls to some degree.

The outcome is that 90% of all buildings fail fire safety assessments required by lenders. They then scrabble for the limited industry capacity to put them right and bill their leaseholders for a waking watch in the meantime.

We do not have a comprehensive list of affected buildings, or a proper way of sorting the most dangerous from the mildly risky

But bluntly, fixing 90% of all the UK’s 100,000 high and medium-rise buildings is not possible. The costs are astronomical – well in excess of the widely used £15bn estimate and well beyond what either the taxpayer or leaseholders or even an industry levy could provide.

Even if we were to shake the magic money tree hard enough to cover all this work, industry capacity is estimated at around 200 buildings a year. It would therefore take 450 years to fix all the towers currently failing EWS assessments.

What we need is something more sophisticated: a register, for example, that graded the risk from one to 10, then a plan to fix the most risky, put sprinklers and fire alarms in the medium-risk towers and simply leave the low-risk buildings alone. It is only government that can provide this.

But instead the only distinctions the government makes is to focus on above 18m buildings first – an approach Mr Jenrick himself dismissed as “crude” less than a year ago.

Yesterday, Mr Jenrick sneered at Labour’s proposal of a taskforce as “empty words”. But the truth is that until he sets up some means of taking control of this task of assessing and grading risk, that is how all his promises will sound.

It is possible (although by no means guaranteed) that the government may find that on a truer analysis of risk, £5bn is already enough to cover the worst affected buildings.

But if it does require more money, it must find the backbone to take it from those who have profited from this crisis and rule out billing the charges to leaseholders.

If loans can be structured over 50 years to reduce the cost to leaseholders, the same could be done to the various industries that have made their wealth from building the homes and selling the materials which we now know are unsafe.

This is what is required: leadership, clarity and the ability to think beyond the current structures. It is a complex task and would be easy to get wrong. But it should not be beyond the wit or the power of a government with a large majority and it must be done.

Whatever Mr Jenrick says, there have already been too many deaths.

Peter Apps, deputy editor, Inside Housing

Sign up for our fire safety newsletter

Sign up for our fire safety newsletter

Sign up for our Retrofit Challenge Virtual Summit

Sign up for our Retrofit Challenge Virtual Summit

If topics such as those mentioned in the above article are of interest to you, register for our Retrofit Challenge Virtual Summit here.

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Add New Comment
You must be logged in to comment.