Council pleads guilty to Lakanal House fire safety failures

The fire at Lakanal House in 2009 caused the deaths of six people, including three children.

At Southwark Crown Court this morning, the council pleaded guilty to all four counts brought by the London Fire Brigade. These included failure to carry out risk assessments, failure to take precautions to prevent fire spreading and protect escape means, failure to take fire precautions to protect employees and non-employees, and failure to ensure the building had a suitable system of maintenance.

The court heard extracts from a report by fire safety expert David Crowder. His report revealed that timber staircases that cut across general use corridors were “very weakly” boxed in and provided “negligible protection” which “seriously compromised” the escape route.

No doors in the building had fireproof strips or seals and suspended ceilings did not have cavity barriers which could have reduced the risk of the fire spreading, it said.

The council accepted that, had these problems been rectified, the fire risk would have been “significantly reduced”.

Richard Matthews QC, representing the council, said it is of “enormous disappointment and regret” that improvements the council made in 2006 and 2007 “did not identify defects”.

The council has offered to pay £300,000 of the London Fire Brigade’s legal costs and is also expected to pay a fine after the judge passes sentence on Tuesday.

The fire was caused by a piece of electrical equipment and spread up the outside of the building into a flat above and out into the corridor. Burning debris fell onto several floors below, starting separate fires.

The prosecution’s lawyer, Stephen Walsh QC, said the prosecution was concerned with the fire risks before the fire occurred rather than the deaths themselves. These were investigated in a coroner’s inquest in 2013.

Lakanal House has been empty since the fire but the council plans to move tenants in again in March after an £11m refurbishment is completed.

Since 2009 the council has spent £62m on its fire risk assessment programme and associated fire safety works for all social housing in the borough and meets regularly with the London Fire Brigade.

The London Fire Brigade had brought 22 charges against the council but these were amended to four charges, agreed by both parties.

Stephanie Cryan, cabinet member for housing at Southwark Council, said: “We took the decision to plead guilty to all four counts of breach of fire safety regulations associated with the Lakanal building on 2 July 2009, the day before the fire. This is because, as an authority, we fully accept responsibility for the fire safety of all our council homes. The fact remains that the council did not have a fire risk assessment for Lakanal in place on this date. Without this record, we can never categorically decide on the fire safety of the building before the fire happened.”