Waking watches: the scale of England’s building safety crisis unveiled

With the widely publicised delays in remediation work, this strategy means waking watches become a permanent fixture. This is a worry. The NFCC’s guidance is clear that waking watches should be temporary, and whether a group of poorly paid security workers can evacuate hundreds of residents from a building in 10 minutes is doubtful.

It has been done: Inside Housing has seen evidence of successful evacuations led by waking watches in a housing association block in Plymouth. But it has also failed. In Vallea Court in Manchester, the waking watch was unable to warn all residents about a fire in May 2019.

This is not to blame the watchers themselves. As Mr Murphy says: “When I left firefighter training we were told, ‘You are the only people in the country who will run into a burning building.’ Asking someone to do it after half a day’s training isn’t just unsafe, it’s unethical.”

That said, horror stories about waking watches do abound. In one building in the North West, a resident describes their first waking watch service as “absolutely horrendous”. The resident says: “They were regularly seen asleep, watching TV and watching porn. After one week they still had not watched one whole half of the building – because it had not occurred to them to go around the back.”

This provider was replaced, but the replacement is still not perfect. “There is at least one person who spends the majority of his time smoking in the courtyard, specifically in the area where leaseholders have been prevented from parking their cars due to the fire risk,” the resident adds.

A few weeks ago an alarm went off in the temporary building where the waking watch is located. The residents decided to evacuate, but there was no sign of the watchers. These residents are facing one of the highest bills in the country for the service: it will average £840 each per month when it lands, with the bill for the first quarter of 2020 due imminently.

In Islington Gates, in Birmingham, Inside Housing has seen a breakdown for three leaseholders which shows they are paying £212, £349 and £563 a month respectively for waking watches, with even higher bills for insurance premiums.

In the immediate aftermath of Grenfell, 24-hour security patrols were introduced in a number of buildings known to have similarly dangerous cladding. This was formalised with the publication in October 2017 of guidance by the National Fire Chiefs Council for buildings requiring ‘simultaneous evacuation’ as a result of fire safety defects.

In that guidance, a ‘waking watch’ is defined as “a system whereby staff continually patrol all floors and the exterior perimeter of the building in order to respond to a fire, assist in calling the fire service and assist with the evacuation of occupants of the building”.

They are tasked with alerting all occupants to a fire requiring evacuation within 10-15 minutes of detecting it. This can be done by either activating a manual alarm or knocking on doors and sounding an air horn if no alarms are installed.

The guidance warns that this “is likely to be the least reliable [safety measure], most resource intensive, and may not be suitable for the highest-risk situations”. It adds that it is “impracticable for a long-term solution and should only be a short-term measure”.

In practice, waking watches are delivered by security agencies that charge a fee to the building owner for the 24-hour service.

These costs are high, but not unheard of. In the social housing sector, the figures being spent are eye-watering. Camden Council, for example, has spent more than £10.2m on waking watches across nine blocks, with the service in place from June 2017 to December last year.

In total, the 35 local authorities that responded to Inside Housing’s FOIA requests had spent £29.4m on waking watches for 134 council blocks over a varying period of time. Housing associations, for whom figures under the FOIA are not available, are spending similarly devastating sums: one source at an association quotes a figure of £30,000 a week. This is all money that has come directly out of budgets to repair social homes and build new ones.

But the costs are most devastating for individual leaseholders. In the worst cases, these can reach £800 a month, but an average figure is around £400. These are on top of bills for cladding removal and additional insurance premiums – adding up to service charge increases of thousands of pounds every year. These are costs that people cannot meet.

And the costs do not always end when an alarm system is fitted. Ritu Saha is a resident of the Northpoint building in Bromley, south London. She tells Inside Housing that a simultaneous evacuation fire alarm was fitted in July 2019, with the £120,000 cost split between the building’s 57 households. But residents then discovered that someone must be on site 24/7 to monitor and deactivate false alarms, to lessen the call-out burden on the fire service.

Residents began doing this themselves, but their insurer insisted that someone must be employed for the task. This costs £11,000 a month, resulting in an average £200 monthly increase in service charges.

“It effectively means we have to pay for a 24-hour concierge service,” Ms Saha says. “If that does not change, it’s finished. Nobody in Bromley is going to be able to afford to pay service charges like that so nobody will buy the flat.”

Source: London Fire Brigade

This cost pressure comes at a time when people are uniquely precarious and vulnerable when it comes to their finances because of the economic meltdown resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

“Many leaseholders are not able to afford existing payments and many more will not be able to afford any further costs due to increased waking watches,” says the resident from Raphael House in Ilford. “Many are having mental health issues due to the constant stress, which is amplified by COVID-19. Many will lose jobs.”

New NFCC guidance, specifically about waking watches and coronavirus, warns that the services remain “essential” during the outbreak. There are concerns that staffing numbers could dry up, but these fears are muted at the moment.

A source at a large London housing association says: “It’s something everyone is focused on at the moment. We’re monitoring it on a daily basis and across the G15 [group of large London landlords] everyone has full coverage. There isn’t an issue with supply of labour yet. My impression is that people want to get out of the house and want to get paid.”

The government has also confirmed that waking watch staff are key workers, and can continue to work during the lockdown and send their children to school.

This may, of course, change as more people become unwell, but a source from Manchester is also relatively relaxed about staffing levels. “I don’t see they will be massively impacted now pubs and clubs have been closed, as many are provided through security companies,” they say.

There are additional concerns about spreading the virus. One leaseholder comments: "Because the nature of waking watch is to go from door-to-door constantly we have raised the concerns of spreading Covid 19 within the building as they had no gloves or sanitiser. And only an external portaloo for hand washing with no hot running water." Mr Murphy suggests watchers could be provided with spray detergent to clean as they go, but it is not thought this in place anywhere yet.

There are also fears that the lockdown will slow work to fit alarms and remove cladding, meaning waking watches and the resultant costs stay in place for longer. With the economy grinding to a halt and workers being forced off many cladding remediation sites despite government advice that they should stay open, this sadly looks a likely outcome.

It appears this stopgap solution will be a feature of life in many buildings for quite some time yet.