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Celotex hid details of Grenfell insulation test from own sales team, inquiry hears
The manufacturer behind the insulation product used on Grenfell Tower restricted details about safety testing from customers and its own sales staff, the inquiry into the fire heard yesterday.
The manufacturer behind the insulation product used on Grenfell Tower restricted details about safety testing to customers and its own sales staff, the inquiry into the fire heard yesterday #UKhousingJonathan Roome, a major projects and specification manager at Celotex in 2014 as part of its sales team, told the inquiry that test data “weren’t allowed out of the business, out of the custodians of those documents”.
“We were only shown what we were allowed to be shown,” he said of his own team.
The RS5000 insulation product used on Grenfell Tower and sold by Mr Roome to the relevant sub-contractor, Harley Facades, passed a large-scale fire test known in the industry as a BS8414 in May 2014.
The test pass was the basis of Celotex’s regular claim in marketing material that RS5000 was “therefore acceptable for use in buildings above 18m in height”.
But, crucially, the pass only certified the product for use as part of the same cladding system tested – which was comprised of cement fibre panels and differed dramatically from the building envelope it was used in at Grenfell.
Mr Roome agreed multiple times that this statement, by not including the caveat that RS5000 was actually only acceptable on tall buildings as part of the exact system that passed the test, was “misleading”.
“Do you accept that the words on top of those pages in the banner [on a product sheet for RS5000] were apt to lead the reader to think that Celotex RS5000 was suitable for use on all buildings above 18m in height?” asked Richard Millett, lead counsel to the inquiry.
“That would be the case, could be the case, yes,” Mr Roome replied.
“It is misleading because it doesn’t contain the caveat?” Mr Millett said.
“Yes,” Mr Roome replied.
Inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick concluded in his phase one report that the combustible insulation – made from a plastic called polyisocyanurate – “more likely than not” helped fire to spread up Grenfell Tower.
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He said that he had not seen the full test report at the time RS5000 was sold for use on Grenfell Tower in 2015.
“It wasn’t until much later when I was asked to attend a meeting with the lawyers for Celotex a couple of a years ago… that I was finally shown the full test report,” he said.
In August 2014, Mr Roome contacted Harley to announce the launch of RS5000 and provided the firm’s Daniel Anketell-Jones with a copy of the test report for the BS8414 test.
But this test report – provided to Mr Roome by a Celotex colleague – had been “filleted”, the inquiry heard, chopped from 12 pages to four with page numbers removed.
The removed pages featured details about the construction of the tested cladding system.
Mr Roome said he did not notice this at the time and Mr Anketell-Jones never raised questions about it.
Under pressure from Mr Millett, Mr Roome admitted that he never pointed out to Mr Anketell-Jones the caveat relating to the compliance of RS5000 but agreed that it “would have been important”.
Pushed on why not, he answered: “I was dealing with a specialist in that field… and I was expecting the knowledge to be there to disseminate the information that I was giving him.”
He denied deliberately keeping quiet on this point in the hope Mr Anketell-Jones would not pick it up.
Emails shown to the inquiry yesterday revealed that Mr Roome asked senior colleagues at Celotex to “invest” in further testing of RS5000 a few months after its launch in August 2014 because uncertainty from customers was making it hard for him to compete with rival manufacturer Kingspan.
His request was never granted. Mr Roome told the inquiry yesterday that he “was never given a reason” why not but insisted he “had no reason to believe it was a risky product” at the time.
The inquiry also heard that in January 2015, a company called Hadley Steel Framing warned Mr Roome and Celotex colleagues that it had conducted a fire test using RS5000 and the results were “not good”.
Researchers had expected the insulation to last up to 120 minutes, an email showed, but around 85 minutes in “it started to smoulder and then it simply combusted and set on fire”.
In 2018, it emerged that Celotex placed fire-resistant boards between temperature monitors during the May 2014 safety test – now withdrawn – despite these not being shown on drawings in the test report.
The inquiry continues.
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