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Sprinklers: now a necessity?

Sprinklers have become one focus of attention since the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Should social landlords now be installing them as a matter of course? Nathaniel Barker takes a closer look.  Illustration by Nick Lowndes

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Sprinklers: now a necessity?

The horrific Grenfell Tower fire, in which at least 80 people lost their lives, has sparked an intense, national debate on fire safety in social housing. Within this debate, an accepted wisdom in some quarters has been that sprinklers could have prevented the disaster.

Indeed, many councils far and wide are now scrambling to install sprinkler systems in their high-rise buildings. In so doing, some are committing vast proportions of their perpetually stretched capital budgets, with little certainty over whether the government will eventually help foot the bill.


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In the dash to make these buildings safer, it’s vital that we get our priorities straight. Because, as with any unpredicted additional cost of housing provision, it is the tenants who will ultimately feel the pinch. With that in mind, Inside Housing has taken a closer look at sprinklers – to find out if this retrofit is the right fit.

The answer?

Ian Gough, senior technical advisor at the British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association (BAFSA), is, as you may expect, firmly in the ‘yes’ camp.

“Sprinklers invariably prevent fires escaping from the room of origin,” he says.

Assuming the prevailing understanding that the Grenfell Tower blaze was started by a faulty fridge-freezer, he believes a properly installed system would have suppressed the fire before it crossed the threshold.


For our exclusive searchable database of fire risk assessments in tower blocks click here


Not everyone quite agrees, however. “Really, sprinklers are unsurpassed in their ability to perform when required,” says Jim Glockling, technical director at the Fire Protection Association, which represents fire safety engineers, officers and insurers. “But in respect of Grenfell, where we had uncontrolled fire spread up the side of the building, that is the sort of recipe that could defeat a sprinkler system.”

There are limits to the power of sprinklers. “Sprinklers are good – they are very good – but they’re not a magic bullet,” says Edwin Galea, director of the fire safety engineering group at the University of Greenwich’s mathematical sciences department. “A sprinkler system doesn’t compensate for having a dangerous facade on a building. It helps, but it doesn’t compensate.” Given the choice between living in a building with a Grenfell-style cladding system and sprinklers, or a building without either, Mr Galea says he would take the latter.

“A sprinkler system doesn’t compensate for having a dangerous facade.”

What’s more, he adds, if a fire starts outside the building – possibly caught from a burning car, or a pile of rubbish – and spreads rapidly up its exterior, a sprinkler system is of little use.

That perhaps puts the sprinkler debate in some sort of perspective compared to all the other aspects of fire safety which have been cast under the spotlight in recent weeks. “Effectively, you should not be using sprinklers to make up for design deficiencies elsewhere,” says Mr Glockling.

 

Research appears to corroborate that view. A 2005 study by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) concluded that: “For the majority of scenarios experimentally studied, the addition of residential sprinkler protection proved effective in potentially reducing casualties in the room of fire origin and connected spaces.”

However, it added that sprinklers were “not found to be a complete panacea”.

Burning funds

Experts appear broadly pro-sprinkler, then, but what are the associated costs? That, it seems, is a difficult question to answer. “I can’t give you any idea of how much it’s going to cost,” says Mr Galea. “There are wildly varying costs depending on individual buildings.”

The councils which have so far ventured to provide cost estimates for retrofitting sprinklers in their high rises have floated starkly disparate figures. Stockport Council, for example, surmises that the work in its 22 blocks could cost £5m, or £227,272 per block. Sheffield City Council has estimates in a similar region, at £6m for 24 buildings – £250,000 per block.

However, head down to the South Coast and the picture is very different. Southampton City Council is looking at a £12m cost for 19 residential towers, and Portsmouth City Council £12.2m for 13. That’s £631,578 and £938,462 per building respectively.

The differences aren’t just regional, though – there are clearly numerous factors involved here. Scale could play a role, for instance. Birmingham City Council believes retrofitting sprinklers in its 213 high rises could cost £31m – a huge amount of money, but a relatively modest £145,540 per block.

A spokesperson for BAFSA said that in addition to more obvious factors such the size of the block and whether corridors and lobbies are also protected, unit layout, the availability of water supply and mark-ups added by preferred main contractors can all push up the bill.

Incidentally, BAFSA and the Fire Sector Federation have both estimated that retrofitting sprinklers in Grenfell Tower would have cost £200,000.

“That doesn’t seem like a great deal of money,” says Mr Glockling. Perhaps not, particularly when one considers the now-infamous renovation of the tower in 2016 cost £10m. But for cash-strapped councils straining under the Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap, any new level of investment is a lot of money, and there are ongoing maintenance costs associated with sprinkler systems.

A cost-benefit report carried out by the BRE on behalf of the Chief Fire Officers Association in 2012 found sprinklers are a cost-effective measure in “most blocks of purpose-built flats and larger blocks of converted flats… where costs are shared”.

Yet that was five years ago, a very different time in market terms. Moreover, Inside Housing revealed that in 2015, fewer than 1% of council tower blocks had sprinklers fitted within their homes. However, more had systems covering communal areas , after coroners recommended that social landlords consider retrofitting sprinklers in high-rise blocks following inquests into the fatal fires at Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 and Southampton’s Shirley Towers in 2010.

John Bibby, chief executive of the Association of Retained Council Housing, anticipates an issue there.

“If everybody now starts rushing to put sprinklers in their buildings, the question is whether the sprinkler industry is capable of coping with that, and are the costs going to go up to deal with that?” he says.

The capacity of sprinkler-fitting firms has rarely been tested at the scale we might be about to see in this country, and the costs remain a relative unknown.

“It is the landlord’s responsibility to ensure that people are safe. Cost should not get in the way.”

However, there is another strand to the sprinkler cost discussion. “Other fire protection measures are really only geared up for protecting life,” says Mr Gough. “But sprinklers protect both life and property. Can you afford to lose your housing stock? Can you afford the legal costs of not having these measures in place?”

Mr Glockling echoes that point, and adds: “At the moment our building regulations are about life safety and life safety only, and even then they have a very limited remit. I believe that if people understood this – the very low bar that building regulations actually set – then at the time of procurement they might be persuaded to take extra measures like adding sprinklers.”

With the loss of social housing – yet another conversation in the Grenfell debate – a huge risk in itself, needing sprinklers merely to make a building technically safe might not be enough.

“Even with some tower blocks which are not overclad, some of those councils are saying for reassurance’s sake we’re going to retrofit sprinklers anyway,” says Mr Bibby. “And the reassurance factor is not to be underestimated. We may get a problem whereby some tall buildings become difficult to let. That may well be a problem to some local authorities, and they may have to step further than they actually need to fill their stock.”

In the past, sprinklers have often been as unpopular with tenants as they have with treasurers. But that was pre-Grenfell. Now, that could easily change.

The Westminster wallet

Inside Housing’s Never Again campaign calls on the government to fund the retrofitting of sprinkler systems in all tower blocks across the UK (except where there are specific structural reasons not to do so), in recognition of the fact that without this there would inevitably be a piecemeal response with tenants footing the bill.

So far, communities secretary Sajid Javid has insisted that “any work that is necessary” should be carried out, and where councils “cannot afford it they should approach us”. We sought a little more clarity on this point, to be told: “It is the landlord’s responsibility to ensure that people are safe, and cost considerations should not get in the way of this. Where work is necessary to ensure the fire safety of social housing, we will ensure that lack of financial resources will not prevent it going ahead.”

And despite Mr Javid’s assertion last Thursday that no local authorities have yet asked for assistance from the government to pay for extra fire safety measures, five claim to have done so, with no response at the time of writing.

“I don’t want my residents feeling unsafe, I don’t want them going to sleep wondering what could happen,” says Muhammed Butt, leader of Brent Council, which has earmarked an initial £10m for fire safety upgrades in its blocks, including sprinklers, and is one of the authorities to have contacted the Department for Communities and Local Government. “But that £10m should be coming from the secretary of state.”

Whether the government will put its hand in its pocket to fund sprinklers remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that doing so may represent one step towards ensuring a disaster like Grenfell never happens again.

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