The government must stop turning a blind eye to the industry-wide scandal the Grenfell Inquiry report exposes
Read into the detail of the inquiry report and the shape of a scandal across the entire construction products industry emerges. It is time to make them pay.
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Since the publication of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report at the start of this month, there has been a clamour for the manufacturers of the cladding and insulation products on the tower to be held to account.
It is easy to see why. The “systematic dishonesty” described in volume two of the report is the most shocking section - the actions of these corporations in pursuing profits and burying inconvenient fire tests can easily be portrayed as the dark heart of the whole scandal.
I do not disagree with this, but I would suggest the report actually makes the case for the government to go deeper and wider in response to the calls for some recompense.
The picture the report paints is not just of three rogue manufacturers fiddling the system, but a business model based on selling dangerous products which stretches across the industry.
Let’s look at the evidence. The story of the government’s failure to spot the warnings of dangerous cladding starts with a fire at a building in Knowsley, Merseyside, in 1991, where fire ripped up glass reinforced plastic panels fixed to the outside of the building.
The focus of the criticism in the report is on the Building Research Establishment (BRE) and its “basic error” in failing to realise that because the cladding on the building was Class 0 rated, it was still potentially combustible.
But what about the company that made and sold this product for use on a high rise? Had they never tested it for fire? Or had they tested it, discovered its danger and sold it anyway? The report doesn’t tell us, but either would be cause to be angry.
Then in the mid-1990s, the report describes a series of tests run (with government funding) on cladding systems designed to be “representative of systems in use at the time”.
The first of these tests was carried out on a system with “6mm polyester glass reinforced sheeting with a Class 0 certification”. The scientist carrying it out “expected the fire hazard to be limited by the fire properties of the cladding sheet material”.
Instead he witnessed “unlimited spread of the fire over the full height of the test facility” and flames that “reached the level of the roof 15 minutes after ignition”.
This material was tested as part of several systems and demonstrated “extensive surface spread of flame in nearly all configurations, often spreading to the top of the test facility”. To be clear - this is not the cladding later used on Grenfell. It is not a material made by Arconic, Kingspan or Celotex. Instead, it is another unnamed manufacturer, making another unsafe product and selling it for use on high rise buildings regardless of the risk.
Then we had a fire at Garnock Court in 1999, where panels which were supposed to be Class 0 rated violently spread a fire all the way up the building, with the loss of one life and the destruction of several homes.
The report says the product (GRP again) “generated a self-propagating fire” with “rapid external fire spread to the full height of the building” and the production of “dense black smoke”.
Samples were removed and tested to see if they obtained the Class 0 standard, with the discovery that they “reacted so badly” they “put the integrity of the test equipment itself at risk”. So what had happened when the company which made, sold and advertised this products ran this test? And why had it stayed on the market if the result was the same?
We then move forward to some more testing in the early 2000s where 11 products marketed as obtaining Class 0 and selected on the basis of industry intelligence about what was widely used at the time were tested to see whether or not they actually achieved the advertised standard.
Of all of those tested, only four obtained the grade they were being advertised as possessing. This, the report said, led to no action by government - no contact with trading standards, no contact with the manufacturers, no warning to builders or building owners.
“The discovery that the majority of a selection of typical cladding products marketed as Class 0 did not in fact meet that standard was simply ignored by the department... We do not understand its failure to act in relation to a matter of such importance,” the report says.
This is an entirely justified criticism, but what about the companies who were profiting from selling them and were (apparently) falsely advertising them?
Further testing was then carried out by the BRE in 2001 which included - notoriously - a test on a system containing ‘aluminium composite material’ (ACM) cladding with a polyethylene core. This meant the government witnessed its devastating fire performance and did precisely nothing to either amend guidance to ban it or check where it had already been installed.
There is no evidence that this cladding was made by Arconic - the company which sold the material ultimately used on Grenfell. In fact, given the varying market share, it is more likely it was made by another company. What is the story of their testing? What did they know about the risks?
The inquiry report does not shed light, but what we do know now is that pretty much every time you run a fire test on polyethylene-cored ACM you see what it will do in a fire. So either these manufacturers knew or they weren’t testing properly. Either way, it is cause for alarm.
And these tests were not only on ACM. A high pressure laminate system (effectively highly compressed wood and glue) also failed. Systems containing rendered insulation - phenolic foam, polyurethane, expanded polystyrene - all failed as well (the tests were not supposed to reflect real world systems, but they were still a potential cause for alarm).
Rendered polystyrene systems - a very popular building material, with the combustible insulation long believed to be compliant with our guidance because it is not used inside “a ventilated cavity”, has since been tested in Australia, with the conclusion that there is “clear test-based evidence” that the system will result in “vertical fire spread and pool fires” when exposed to a large fire source, with the report saying that this was “similar to that of [polyethylene-cored ACM]” and that the two systems should be given “the same risk ranking… when undertaking preliminary building risk assessments”.
So again, we ask the same question. Yes, we have a government failing to introduce tough guidance. But we also have an industry selling products which have serious risks.
There is evidence that at this time the reason the government did not introduce higher standards than the insufficient ‘Class 0’ rating was industry pressure.
It should have shifted to a tougher European standard, but had received representations from industry bodies that products could be “prevented from continuing” on the market as a result and that the move to European standards therefore “should not happen”.
At one stage, officials (working alongside the BRE) even deleted an express warning about the potential danger of Class 0 products from an official document. The report said it was “difficult to accept” that this was an oversight, and concluded instead that it was the result of “commercial considerations”.
So we have - from the early 2000s - a situation where dangerous cladding products are being sold across the board with the government turning a blind eye and actively enabling the behaviour by keeping a dangerously misleading standard in play in the official guidance.
We can roll forward through the years. A 2005 fire at The Edge in Salford, which spread within ten minutes from the point of origin on a second floor balcony to the top of the 19-storey building.
Again, this is not the material used on Grenfell, but a sandwich panel with combustible polystyrene insulation packed between two metal sheets.
The BRE’s report concluded that even if the “construction had complied with current guidance, that would not have restricted the speed at which the fire had spread” and that “the fire and rescue services had grave concerns that a fire of that nature could quickly get out of control and put the lives of occupants at risk”.
Again - the criticism of government to ban these products and warn loudly about their use is very valid, but someone else was making it, testing it, selling it and profiting from it.
Then there is the Lakanal House fire in 2009, which killed six people after spreading via external wall panels and ripping through the interior of the poorly maintained building.
These panels were ‘high pressure laminate’ cladding, made by a company called Trespa, with foam insulation held between them.
When tested during the police investigation after the Lakanal fire, they found they did not meet the Class 0 standard, and according to the BRE report “allowed fire to pass from one side to the other in less than five minutes, with total collapse of the panel occurring within seven minutes”.
Why was this product on the market? How had it been tested? How was it advertised? We don’t know, because there has never been a public inquiry into Lakanal and the inquests did not go into this sort of detail about the construction products.
But we do know that after being made aware of this discovery, the London Fire Brigade alerted central government about it, with a warning that it had “become aware that this type of panel has been supplied by more than one company”.
The government did nothing, with senior adviser Sir Ken Knight writing back to say that “it was felt at this time there was insufficient information to warrant alerting housing authorities and/or property owners to the specific matters raised”.
Since Grenfell, there have been very serious, life-threatening fires involving HPL cladding. Rendered polystyrene is also being pulled off hundreds, if not thousands of blocks. Composite wooden balconies have ignited like tinder and started fires which have ripped through whole buildings.
The broad picture appears - to me at least - fairly clear. There is an industry-wide, very long-standing practice of selling materials for facades which are potentially dangerous.
This has been enabled by the government’s retention of Class 0 and its willingness at several pivotal moments to turn a blind eye to the scale of what is going on. It’s right that the officials and ministers involved are criticised for that.
But that criticism should not obscure that this behaviour has been carried out by the companies which have made and sold the products and banked the profits from selling them. They are the ones with the contract with the end consumer, and the duty to provide a product which - to use the construction sector lingo - does what it says on the tin. If they have failed to do that, they should pay.
Maybe some of these cases will start to drift through the Technology and Construction Court, now that the report is in the public domain and within the hands of lawyers.
Maybe after enough of these cases are litigated and won, some sort of industry redress scheme will have to emerge, as it sometimes does when PPI, diesel fuel or tailpipe emissions are missold.
But that would be a long, slow, winding and uncertain path, which the government could expedite by taking matters into its own hands.
If the state were to - as it did in the 1990s and 2000s - take random samples of popular products and test them against their advertised standards, it would have clear evidence about who has been misselling. It could then use primary legislation to ban building control from signing off anything made by that company for use in any application - not just higher rise buildings.
Then it could introduce a “responsible product manufacturers scheme” where the manufacturers have to commit to certain standards of transparency going forward and pay compensation (a levy over a long period of time) to make amends. Compliance with these conditions would mean having their ban lifted.
In a few small steps, you have an enormous pot of money to help remediate buildings (the government could spend up front, and recoup over time from the levy) and have held to account those who are (arguably) most responsible.
This means brave government, but it is not unprecedented. The mechanism described above closely resembles Michael Gove’s actions with primary developers.
It means taking on an industry which - while apparently a niche part of the construction sector - is actually in possession of an enormous and well-funded lobbying organisation, connected in a few small steps to the giant multinational plastics and raw materials companies whose power and influence is far greater than one small government department.
But it is time to take this fight on. Our government failed to stand up to this industry for three decades. They were allowed to sell products with a fire risk that was never properly considerd. What happened at Grenfell and is now happening with the remediation of buildings elsewhere was the obvious and foreseeable consequence of this behaviou. It is time now to start making that right.
This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.
If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book. Or you can buy a copy here.
Composite doors that passed bs476 include models with cores that melt when tested and release (likely highly toxic) smoke. There is no smoke control part of this test, so not a fail... but when you do the burn test you can see the door is unsafe as it belches out smoke. they were still marketed as ok and are now defended by manufacturers and developers on the basis that they 'met the standards of the time' and any failure is due to inadequate maintenance.