What Australia is doing to prevent a repeat of Grenfell

Later, an investigation revealed the building had been fitted with aluminium cladding with a polyethylene core. When this cladding was tested for flame resistance a few months later, the test was abandoned after 93 seconds due to the ferocity of the flames.

Now, three years on, hastened by the disaster in London, the Australian Senate’s Economic References Committee – tasked with investigating the blaze – has published an interim report recommending several changes to avert a further disaster.

As the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire gets underway this week, and a long-awaited look at building regulations also gears up for action, we look at what the UK sector should learn from the work already carried out on the other side of the world.

Broader focus

According to a fire safety engineer quoted in the committee report, a kilogram of polyethylene when burned will release the same amount of energy as one-and-a-half litres of petrol. Each square metre of the cladding has around three kilos of plastic in it, meaning each sheet is like attaching five litres of petrol to the outside of the building.

Lacrosse, unlike Grenfell, was a modern, newly built tower and the cladding was installed as part of the construction process. In common with Britain, building regulations prohibit the use of flammable material on tall buildings. Australia has found itself grappling with the same questions facing policymakers in Britain: how widespread is the use of this cladding? Why did the system of regulation fail? And what should be done to prevent it being used in the future?

In answer to the first, state governments are currently undertaking audits to establish the full extent of the problems. But Phil Dwyer, national president of the Builders Collective of Australia, believes it will prove to be widespread, telling the committee he estimated the full level as “tens of thousands of buildings”.

This may be another indication that Australia is further ahead of the UK in its response to the issues. While our government has a narrow focus on perceived problems in the social housing sector, the debate in Australia is broader. In Australia, explains Adam West, business development manager at the New South Wales Federation of Housing Associations, the social housing sector is much smaller and primarily made up of building managers rather than owners and developers, as is the case in the UK. The 31 social housing towers in New South Wales have been deemed safe.

“Cladding is being found mainly on private buildings and on hospitals, schools and universities, which is where that 10,000 figure is coming from,” he explains.

This may well reflect the final picture in the UK as well. Last week, the government quietly revealed that 85 of 89 privately owned cladded tower blocks had failed combustibility tests. So both countries appear to have an industry-wide issue to solve.

So what was wrong with the regulations to allow this to come to pass? The system of regulation, the report said, was “inadequate and too easily evaded”. Australian building regulations are contained in the National Construction Code. These are performance-based regulations, meaning that rather than ruling one type of product compliant or non-compliant, they set a performance standard which the building or system as a whole must achieve. This has the benefit of flexibility in a world where techniques, materials and new technologies are rapidly evolving – but it also opens the door to loopholes.

In particular, the committee heard evidence that the code can be “fragmented, confusing, lacking in definitions [and] contradictory”. This causes confusion in the industry, and there is a lack of oversight to ensure that builders are getting it right.

“You need qualified, trained people to understand how a performance-based code works,” says Neil Savery, general manager of the Australian Building Codes Board, which helps try and set consistent codes between various state territories. “At the same time [as the code was introduced] we had a process around the country of deregulation or reduction around regulatory requirements for things like mandatory inspections.”

All this is eerily similar to England. The building regulations’ Approved Document B was described as a “most difficult document to use” by the coroner investigating the fire at Lakanal House in London in 2009. Like Australian standards, they are performance based: apparently requiring materials of limited combustibility, but leaving enough room for industry bodies to sign off on lower-quality systems based on desktop studies.

In Australia, like England, there is no regulator or arm of government upholding standards. This effectively allows the building industry to pay a consultant to check their work. This is obviously not a system which creates the incentive for rigorous application of standards.

To overcome these issues, the senate committee recommended some tough changes.

The potential for professionals to misunderstand the complex building guidance led the committee to recommend a national licensing scheme for all trades and professionals involved in the building industry, which would require continual professional development. This would also allow those who breached regulations to be struck off – adding teeth to the regulations and removing the incentive to chance it with a cheaper product that may be borderline in terms of compliance.

It also called for mandatory on-site inspections by regulators throughout the construction process. “It is evident that there needs to be a central oversight role independent from the industry to provide assurance to the public,” the report says. It also called for mandatory inspections by fire authorities to ensure compliance and safety, specifically fire safety.

While these are recommendations that would undoubtedly send shock waves through the industry either in Australia or the UK, they are surely worth considering given what Grenfell has shown us about the high price for failure.

Zero tolerance

But improving the system of regulation is only half the battle. The real challenge is achieving compliance with those regulations and the Australian senate committee noted some real issues with how to deal with this in the context of the sometimes dubious nature of the building industry.

It noted that with many building products being imported from overseas, certificates are often unreliable or issued by companies which do not fully understand Australian standards. It also noted evidence that “fraudulent or misleading” product certification was rife.

Another problem, of which there have already been accusations in the UK, is product substitution. “Substitution occurs… when a builder or somebody involved in the purchasing process is looking to save money,” said one witness to the inquiry, with another warning it is “a major problem within the building industry”.