Dr Jonathan Evans is the CEO for Ash & Lacy, a leading UK-based supplier of components and systems for the Architectural market.
We discuss with Jonathan about the measures for UK Building market, after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which costed the lives of 72 people in a several fire on 14th June 2017.
Dr Jonathan, earlier this month, was the 7th sad anniversary of Grenfell Tower tragedy
Indeed.
There will be many heartfelt tributes and it was another very painful day for the survivors and bereaved who wait patiently for justice and truth.
However, I’ve come to feel that it is actually more significant in terms of the need for change and professional responsibility because, seven years ago, was the last day we went about our lives oblivious to the mistakes that had been made many years before and the dangers that had been created.
Neglections, misinterpretations and misjudgements, that horrifically ended the lives of 72 innocent people who put their trust in our industry, and endangered many others including those who bravely attended the fire.
Many, many more will be burdened with mental and physical consequences for the rest of their lives.
Unlike what we’re unhelpfully led to believe, the construction industry does not have a monopoly on unscrupulous behaviour and bad culture, but the next time you read or make a claim about fire performance or how ‘tolerable’ a risk may be, please remember the images in this video.
Apart from the collective responsibility, there is also the personal one. Each one of us is a part of the Construction Industry after all and our own actions do matter.
The night of the Grenfell Fire in 2017, I flew back from holiday and went straight to the office to look through our records.
One by one I called the installers relating to any project where it looked like we might have supplied polyethylene-cored ACM on a tall building. All we usually had to go on was the quantity ordered or a panel schedule. I’ve never known people call me back so quickly.
The last of the buildings we identified was reclad by the end of 2018. One was even reclad in the Summer of 2017. Ironically, they all missed out on government funding by acting so swiftly.
One of my criticisms of the DCLG post-Grenfell process was that despite my encouragement, nobody wanted to ask the suppliers where all the buildings were. Instead, governments relied on building owners to send samples of their cladding to labs for testing.
The further you go back, the poorer records will be, but with sufficient perseverance, you can get a fair idea where all these dangerous buildings are and those who know best are the people that fabricated and supplied the stuff in the first place.
In the UK, after over 7 years, 430 out of 496 known ACM buildings over 18m have now been reclad but 16 still haven’t begun their remediation. (There are thousands of blocks between 11-18m considered unsafe that haven’t begun remediation.)
The EU needs a structured plan to urgently rectify such buildings too (and lower) but apparently hasn’t even begun looking for them.
Competency and knowledge is useless without the leadership and conviction to do something with it.
It cannot be a UK issue, right? There should be buildings with flammable materials all over Europe.
Definitely. In January 2024 for example, a fire destroyed a warehouse in St. Petersburg belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer.
Fire spread to an area of 50,000 square meters (about 538,200 sqft).
https://lnkd.in/e2uHRJn9
There have been numerous high profile fires like this in warehouses such as Ocado, Amazon etc but the first image below struck me as relevant to the interpretation of our Building Regulations.
After the car park fire at Luton airport and numerous school fires, there are renewed calls for mandatory sprinklers in such buildings here. The arguments to change BB100 etc are often focused on avoidable serious disruption to our children’s education etc. and consequences such as business interruption, property loss etc are often cited as things we need to regulate against.
However, and I’ll repeat that no matter how convincing, these arguments are defeated by Regulation 8 in Part 2 of the Building Regulations.
More specifically, it is how this Regulation is interpreted that’s the problem.
Whether it’s in business, personal life or an incident inquiry, if you can’t find the root cause of a problem it will more than likely reoccur.
Dame Judith Hackitt has reviewed the regulatory ‘system’, not the Regulations themselves. To be fair, that’s precisely what she was asked to do in true civil service style – “Always dispose of the difficulty in the title. It does less harm there than in the text” (Sir Humphrey Appleby, “Open Government”).
I’m usually told that this primary legislation is beyond challenge – too difficult. Not the kind of thing an entrepreneur usually accepts, but pragmatically, maybe changing the way the regulatory intent is ‘interpreted’ in the light of new events and knowledge is more achievable.
When you look at this aerial image and the thick black cloud of smoke, would you say that the ‘health and safety’ of the people ‘in the vicinity’ of it was/could have been affected? Or what about the firefighters that attended? Look at the cancer rates of those who attended 9/11.
Other factors that could be taken into consideration are mental health impacts, trauma and the wider environmental damage.
We can’t control the contents of buildings like we can the structure, so does Regulation 8 oblige designers to consider the impact of those nearby and the dangers to firefighters both immediate and long-term? Maybe it will take a ruling following a claim from fire brigade unions or local residents.
‘Just getting the occupants out alive’ in my opinion is not a sufficient threshold
We all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet to drive change and protect our environment, schools, public buildings, workplaces etc. from contamination, disruption and loss whether that’s through regulation on property protection fire performance, sprinklers or toxicity.
If we can’t change the wording of Regulation 8 or get Part B excluded from its limitations, then we must focus on modernising our interpretation of it.
What is your opinion on the regulatory changes?
Well, since the Grenfell fire, I have on occasions highlighted the 2016 BRE report on External Fire Spread that concluded that Approved Document B did not need to change, authored by Crowder, Shipp, Cole and Holland. Published just a year before the Fire, the report infamously refers to serious external wall fires as being “unfortunate but rare” and confirms that combustible cladding is permissible (in clear contradiction to the Department’s attempts to assert since 2014 that cladding should be considered covered by clause 12.7, and therefore required to be limited combustibility).
Four years ago, at the Grenfell Inquiry we heard from one of the report’s authors, that in 2012 (coalition Govt) the BRE had renewed its contract with DCLG having accepted a clause prohibiting the BRE from recommending changes to regulations or statutory guidance, formalising an agreement stretching back 10 years or so (Labour Govt). David Crowder admitted the report was consequently flawed in a number of respects. For example, I have pointed out that it curiously ignored the critical ACM fires in the UAE. We were told other significant case study omissions were also deliberate, to support the view that guidance didn’t need to change.
You may think now that my view is that this exonerates the BRE, but far from it. Refraining from making recommendations that Regulations etc need to change is one thing but opining that they don’t, is quite another.
The Engineering Council requires engineers to review evidence objectively and without bias, or allow others to be misled. They should “reject bribery and improper influence”. Everybody associated with the production of such reports had a responsibility to uphold those principles – we are an industry that cannot exist without integrity. The contract should never have been accepted on such terms and the reputation of the BRE and those involved has been damaged, arguably irreparably.
Frankly, given we’ve heard the BRE allowed its published views and conclusions to be influenced as a contractual condition, can we believe anything it has ever produced? Our nation needs the BRE and it is crucial that it is rigourous, independent and transparent. It must be overhauled and rebranded.
Also, can we believe any report that the Department has ever commissioned? What about the 2017 report that concluded the toxicity of building materials did not need regulating?
The BRE was the ‘go to’ expert that provided the engineering credibility to support the politically-motivated, continued use of combustible construction materials. Lately, LUHC rhetoric is that developers and manufacturers should be responsible for the removal of these materials, and must pay up accordingly or face serious consequences. I suspect, they would struggle to legally enforce that. They certainly can’t morally.
Could BS 8414 testing reduce future devastations?
This is a good question. There’s no doubt the systems involved in these terrible fires would fail an BS 8414, but the test is expensive, waiting lists are long and it’s (inc. BR 135) widely criticised and not universally accepted.
I’ve increasingly seen the 8414 as a high-power reaction-to-fire test, built in unrepresentative conditions with too many variables and insufficient classification differentiation. If you simplified the 8414 and measured smoke/toxicity, droplets/debris and graded the flame growth rate, it would be much more effective at showing designers how materials behaved in real fires (remember, Class B has a similar loophole to Class 0).
You would then set application-appropriate flame, smoke and droplet/debris classification requirements.
You know what that would give you?
It would effectively give you a “combustible ban” but based on large scale testing, enhanced with controls on low melting-point materials (particularly when used as load bearing components). Importantly, it would also close the loopholes (such as for thin, unmodified polymer sheet).
Many people have argued that the combustible-ban is a clumsy, prescriptive, knee-jerk reaction, but if the test and classification standards were fit for purpose, it’s effectively what we’d end up with anyway.
What about the height of 18 meters?
For me, it just adds up on the confusion. The Cube fire on November 15th 2019 was a brutal reminder that buildings up and down the country have dangerous materials on their walls. It exposes the impotence of the government’s Building Safety Program and the futility of derogating the dangers of non-ACM materials such as High-Pressure Laminates.
No lives were lost but many have lost precious belongings and have had their lives and educations traumatically disrupted. Government advice and the Building Safety Program has focused on buildings ‘over 18m’. Initial reports suggested The Cube was ‘under 18m’ which is a significant issue in at least three regards:
(a) in assessing whether the scope of the remediation program is adequate;
(b) in giving clues to the possible causes of the rapid spread of fire (due to the significant step change in building material performance requirements by Approved Document B around this level);
(c) was this building, which without question failed the Building Regulations B4 functional requirement/statement-of-the-obvious, compliant with approved guidance?
Members of the public were vocally surprised that the building was reported as ‘under 18m’ as the seven-storey building clearly appears to be over 18m in height. However, those familiar with our Approved Documents know that nothing is simple. It transpires that The Cube incident highlights at least two further issues with AD B. Firstly, it’s very easy even for professionals and third party certifiers to get the cladding specification wrong on a building of this height. Furthermore, the origin of this confusion dates back to changes made nearly thirty years ago and are reminiscent of those widely discussed in relation to the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
Those who’ve followed the Grenfell Class 0 cladding debate will be familiar with articles in Inside Housing that describe events and changes in AD B leading up to the tragedy. There was a subtle wording change in the 2006 AD B edition that allowed combustible insulation to be used ‘above 18m’ via the BS8414 + BR135 system testing route. Guidance changes relating to The Cube bear many similarities.
Confusion highlighted by The Cube results from AD B comprising two height thresholds – building height dictates the cladding requirements and storey height dictates the insulation requirements. For the vast majority of (residential) buildings there is no practical difference, but for a building around seven storeys like the Cube, it can be crucial.
AD B 2019 Table 12.1 shows that the reaction-to-fire classification requirements of the external surfaces (i.e. the cladding) vary with respect to ‘building height’:
However, in Clause 12.6 you can see that the reaction-to-fire classifications of insulation products etc. are defined in relation to whether the building has ‘a storey 18m or more in height’. It then cross references the reader to the associated Diagram D6 in Appendix D. As you can see, the key measurement is to the floor finish level of the top storey which is likely to be around 3m lower (in the case of a flat roof, more if pitched) than the ‘building height’. As a result, a building that is required to have limited combustibility insulation is at least 21m in height, whereas for the cladding to have elevated reaction-to-fire properties, it is only 18m. It’s possible that there are a disproportionate number of non-compliant buildings within this 3m zone.
I have written a very detailed article published in LinkedIn here.