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Greyfriars House, Solihull
Greyfriars House, Solihull

Reassuring tower block tenants post-Grenfell

The Grenfell fire has caused anxiety among tower block tenants. Martin Hilditch visits one high rise in Solihull to find out how the landlord is attempting to allay fears. Photography by Adam Hughes/SWNS

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Reassuring tower block tenants post-Grenfell

“I’m on the second floor – I could put sheets out of the window.”

Resident Sandra Harrison is discussing how she could evacuate her flat in Greyfriars House in a hurry if a fire broke out in the building.

“I saw the Grenfell fire on the news – it went all the way up the building,” she says. “It is quite worrying.”


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Ms Harrison is standing in the downstairs hallway of her block, in front of the lifts, chatting to members of staff from Solihull Community Housing (SCH). They’re spending time in the block today as part of a massive programme of engagement with tenants following the Grenfell tragedy, in which at least 80 people died.

Jo Cooper, customer liaison officer at SCH, talks through the issue with Ms Harrison and says that she would be safest staying in her home if a fire were to break out elsewhere in the block. She details the fire protection inside the building – such as fire doors, which are designed to keep fires contained at their point of origin.

Ms Cooper says there is “plenty of time once the fire brigade is called” for them to tackle a blaze before it spreads.

Inside Housing has travelled up to an overcast Solihull to find out more about high-rise residents’ concerns following Grenfell – and how SCH is looking to deal with them. It’s a snapshot of the kind of engagement taking place across the UK as residents seek answers about tower block safety – and landlords look to reassure them.

“The fire is playing on the minds of some of Solihull’s high-rise residents.”

Along with Ms Harrison, 5,000 of Solihull Council’s residents call high-rise flats their home.

The council – through its arm’s-length management organisation SCH – is responsible for some 37 blocks throughout the town. Thirty-two of these were covered in external wall insulation in a major programme of work between 2013 and 2015.

Although none of these blocks are clad with aluminium composite material (ACM) – the cladding system used on Grenfell Tower and which is currently subject to a government testing programme – obviously for SCH tenants, like other tower block residents across the UK, the Grenfell fire raised worrying safety questions.

A look at SCH’s Facebook page in the days after the fire gives a decent overview of these concerns.

“Have you checked the cladding on all buildings to see if it’s safe, as so many aren’t?” one woman writes almost a fortnight after the fire. Two days earlier she wrote: “There need to be sprinklers put into all high rises, plus fire alarms in all the halls of the flats.”

Another concerned resident wrote: “Are the fire doors going to be checked to make sure the gaps between doors and frames are correct? A badly fitted fire door is not a fire door!”

And the ‘stay put’ policy for SCH’s blocks is also a cause of concern. One woman writes: “I’m on the 10th floor and disabled. I use a scooter to get around the shops or to go out anywhere. If there was a fire I don’t know how I would get down the stairs, so I would be one of the dead.” (Inside Housing has already written about some of the questions the fire raises about allocation policies, see ‘Housed too high?’).

When SCH posts on Facebook telling residents of one block not to worry if they spot a fire engine outside because there has been a false alarm, one resident states: “Thanks for telling us. People are very much on edge at the moment – I keep smelling smoke at night.”

Giving reassurance

Clearly then, despite living in blocks without ACM cladding, the fire is playing on the minds of some of Solihull’s high-rise residents. For SCH, like many landlords, the level of concern has prompted a programme of engagement work to reassure residents, take on board feedback and answer pressing questions.

Posts on SCH’s Facebook page
Posts on SCH’s Facebook page

Apart from responding to the queries that have come through on Facebook, staff from SCH have staged a series of events – like the one Inside Housing is attending today – in each of its 37 tower blocks. These involve two or three members of staff turning up for two hours per block at pre-arranged times (advertised via leaflets and posters in blocks as well as online) to meet tenants face-to-face and address their fire safety concerns.

Ms Cooper says: “In order to be proactive and raise people’s awareness we have put stuff out on the internet and now we are doing personal visits to each block. We have a fire safety expert for each session as well.”

Step forward Martyn Thomas, clerk of works at SCH. He’s headed along to today’s session with a sample of the Rockwool insulation that is on the outside of SCH’s blocks.

“We are showing our residents what is covering the building,” he says. “It’s reassurance really.”

A briefing on fire safety management issued to Solihull Council by its cabinet member for environment, housing and regeneration states that the Rockwool panels are “non-combustible” and that, as part of the approval process, “three fire tests were conducted at the Fire Research Establishment and the best combustibility result was achieved by Rockwool”.

The statement continued: “A further test was conducted, leaving a blowtorch against the Rockwool product for 30 minutes, and although the product produced smoke it did not ignite or significantly degrade”.

Mr Thomas says: “Project managers did a lot of investigation work before they decided on the final model to use on the buildings.”

Ms Harrison says she is reassured about the cladding because since the fire “my daughter researched it at school; she was going on about how it is not flammable”.

While Solihull has not sent its panels off for government testing because they are not ACM, the council has “commissioned a construction and fire safety assessment of the external wall insulation fitted in [its] high rises to provide additional reassurance”.

As clerk of works at SCH, Mr Thomas’ role includes assessing works undertaken by contractors on buildings and checking building and refurbishment work to make sure the quality meets specifications.

Typically, the clerk of works is referred to as the “eyes and ears” of an organisation on site. The job has come in for some attention since the Grenfell fire, with a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) statement about the blaze bemoaning “the virtual disappearance of the role of the clerk of works or site architect and the loss of independent oversight of construction and workmanship on behalf of the client”.

Certainly Mr Thomas thinks the role is important (although clearly he is an interested party). “We work closely with our project managers to make sure that all the specifications [on work] are followed through,” he adds.

Also on hand today is Robert Hulland, cabinet member for environment, housing and regeneration at Solihull Council. As a former firefighter, with 32 years’ service, this is an issue that is close to his heart.

“I have been to many, many fires in flats over the years – I couldn’t even tell you how many.” In almost every case the fire was contained, he says, but he adds that he has also experienced the devastation caused by the spread of fire in a block. “There was one in Birmingham. We lost a firefighter that night. It spread up a floor via the window.”

A fire broke out on  the roof of Cheshunt House in Chelmsley Wood in May this year
A fire broke out on the roof of Cheshunt House in Chelmsley Wood in May this year

Checks in place

Mr Hulland says that his first reaction when he saw the Grenfell fire was that the building had been “modified”. “The second thing was: have the management systems broken down?”

The management oversight of Solihull’s blocks was one of the first things checked after the Grenfell fire, he says. “The following day the chief executive [of the council] was asked about whether the emergency plan was up to date. He said ‘yes’. He knew that if it hadn’t been, he would have been sacked.

“The big concern for us as a council is the people,” he adds. “We know our buildings are safe. We have proper risk assessments. We have got a system of proper inspections.”

Solihull already conducts annual fire risk assessments of all of its high-rise blocks (a key demand of Inside Housing’s Never Again fire safety campaign). Following the fire, an “in-depth quality audit” is being carried out on a sample of risk assessments by the West Midlands Fire Service and Solihull Council. The existing risk assessments were carried out by an in-house team at SCH.

All of which brings us to the ‘stay put’ policy operated by the council. Its ongoing advice to tenants – based on the recommendations of the fire service – is to “stay put in the event of a fire unless the fire is in the occupiers’ flat, in which case evacuate”.

This is obviously a topic which has come under much scrutiny since Grenfell – and SCH staff members confirm it is one of the areas that residents have been most concerned about. An investigation carried out by SCH into a fire in the stairwell of one of its blocks, Merton House, back in 2013, shows exactly why this is such a complicated debate.

A report carried out by the Housing Quality Network (HQN) into the fire revealed that it started in an item of furniture left by an unknown person on a fourth floor staircase.

While the blaze was contained within the staircase, a flashover (the simultaneous ignition of all the combustible materials in a space) occurred “totally involving all floors of the staircase above the third floor to such an extent it destroyed the door leading from the stairs to the roof”.

The HQN report states that the fire didn’t penetrate any of the flats due to the effectiveness of the fire-resisting doors. It suggests that “if a fire alarm had been installed people may have been in the staircase when the fire flashed over, resulting in serious injury or death”. It concludes that “the stay put policy was effective and probably saved lives”.

A few weeks before Grenfell, SCH had a blaze on the roof of a 10-storey block called Cheshunt House.

Mr Hulland says that after the blaze he “went top to bottom and looked at the various floors in between”.

“There weren’t many things [areas of concern] that we found. It gave me comfort that the management had a culture of safety.”

Mr Hulland’s report on fire safety to the council states that in order for ‘stay put’ to be effective, “it is essential” that flats remain compartmentalised so fire can’t spread and that “this is underpinned by the fire risk assessment process and constant vigilance by staff” including “robust checking of any work carried out on blocks”.

As SCH’s staff report, there has been much concern from tenants of its blocks following the Grenfell tragedy. Issues such as ‘stay put’ policies, risk assessments and sprinkler systems (which SCH is considering for its blocks) will continue to be high on the agenda both in Solihull and across the UK. As RIBA has mentioned, the need for specific roles, such as clerk of works, is also likely to attract further discussion.

Underlying it all is the trust between residents of high-rise blocks and the organisations that own and manage the buildings they live in. Some, like SCH, have understood that the strength of this relationship is more vital than ever. There’s a long road ahead but – in Solihull at least – a start is being made.

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