‘A clear abuse of the regulatory regime, designed to mislead buyers’ - what the Grenfell Tower Inquiry said about Celotex
Our latest digest of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report findings details the key conclusions about major insulation manufacturer Celotex
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Who is Celotex?
Celotex is a medium-sized insulation manufacturer based in Ipswich, which has been supplying insulation products for use in the UK’s built environment since 1925. For at least 40 years, one of these products has been a plastic foam, with the chemical name ‘polyisocyanurate’ (PIR).
The inquiry said the firm’s “corporate culture [was] marked by a drive to create profits and increase the company’s share price with a view to a sale”.
In 2012, the firm was acquired by global giant Saint Gobain, which anticipated growth in the use of plastic insulation in the UK to meet climate change targets, and wanted to access the PIR market.
Saint Gobain’s management pressured Celotex to increase its product range, which resulted in the rebranding of one of its PIR insulation boards as ‘Celotex RS5000’ - and a marketing campaign which targeted it towards high rise residential buildings. Grenfell Tower was one of the first major projects to use this product, with it placed behind the combustible external ACM panels.
What did the report say about the firm?
The report described Celotex’s efforts to access the high rise market as “a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market”.
It said that it had introduced extra fire resisting boards into a pivotal fire test “to ensure that it passed” and then omitted this information from the report of the test, making the report “materially incomplete and misleading”.
This test involved testing a mock-up of an entire wall system, with a pass only justifying the use of that entire system. But Celotex “deliberately tucked that information away in the small print” of its marketing, instead suggesting the product could be used on any high rise, the report said.
This included Grenfell, where it presented the material as one which was “suitable and safe for use on Grenfell Tower, although it knew that was not the case”.
“The dishonest and cynical way in which RS5000 was tested and marketed reflected a culture within Celotex stretching back to at least 2009,” the report said.
Let’s dig into the detail a little more.
‘A clear abuse of the regulatory regime, designed to mislead buyers with a poor understanding of fire classification standards’
Before it developed and marketed RS5000, Celotex’s PIR-board was branded FR5000. This was the material the architects originally specified for use on Grenfell Tower.
This was a straightforward error by the architects - the insulation had not yet been tested, so could not meet the requirements for a high rise in any system. The misleading marketing by Celotex, pushing it for use on high rises, had not yet started.
But Celotex’s marketing of this product was still not entirely transparent. It emphasised that the insulation had obtained a “Class 0” rating for fire safety.
This standard was irrelevant to its use on the external walls of high rise buildings, where the requirement was for the higher standard of ‘limited combustibility’. But this was widely misunderstood in the market, where people conflated the two standards.
Celotex’s marketing literature described FR5000 as Class 0 “throughout” - a description which made no sense as Class 0 is a standard focused on the surface of a product only.
“That was a clear abuse of the regulatory regime,” the report said. “The expression “Class 0 throughout” was meaningless [and] can only have been designed to mislead buyers with a poor understanding of fire classification standards. Regrettably, Celotex clearly knew that many potential customers were ignorant and credulous in relation to matters of fire safety.”
It said this misleading marketing “laid the ground” for the “more fundamental mis-selling that was to follow”.
And it wasn’t just the material’s fire performance that was misleadingly marketed. Its insulating property (known as a lambda value) was also the subject of scrutiny by the inquiry, which uncovered a practice of “taking a number of measurements each day of the lambda value… and selecting for the purposes of the standards (and ultimately, of course, for the purposes of marketing) the most favourable measurement without declaring the rest”.
This practice was concealed from third-party certifiers, auditors and even Saint Gobain ahead of the acquisition.
“The lambda story is revealing. First, it is indicative of a culture in which breaking the rules and misleading external bodies was tolerated long before the advent of RS5000. It demonstrates an historic inability or unwillingness to challenge the honesty and good faith of company practices,” the report said.
‘Those decisions reflected a conscious decision by Celotex to manipulate the design of the rig’
Developing FR5000 into a product specifically targeted at high rise buildings was a job handed to Jonathan Roper, then a new recruit and a recent university graduate in his very early 20s.
After some time speaking to industry contacts and researching the market, he gained an understanding that a large-scale test could be carried out, which would justify the use of an entire system. But marketing could then present the product as suitable in general. He understood this was the approach being taken by Celotex’s competitor, Kingspan.
Mr Roper explained this to his manager, Paul Evans, in an email in November 2013. “It seems that Mr Roper had tapped into a growing awareness in the cladding industry that Kingspan was taking advantage of an erroneous certificate for [its insulation product], thereby mis-selling it,” the report said.
But Mr Roper expressed some concern. He warned that it might not be possible “to find or design a suitable barrier in which we have enough confidence that it can be used behind a standard ACM panel which we know will melt and allow fire into the cavity”. This was, of course, the material which it was ultimately paired with on Grenfell Tower.
He suggested the firm might take the view that “realistically our product shouldn’t be used behind most cladding panels because in the event of a fire it will burn”.
Celotex’s management however were keen to pursue a testing and marketing route similar to Kingspan’s, and its first test on the product was run at the Building Research Establishment facility in February 2014.
This failed when the external boards cracked due to the heat of the flame, allowing fire to reach the combustible insulation.
But rather than stop, the test was rerun with design changes including placing fire resisting magnesium oxide boards close to the weak points in the system and reducing in the gap between the external cladding panels to almost zero. “Taken collectively, those decisions reflected a conscious decision by Celotex to manipulate the design of the rig in order to ensure [it passed],” the report said.
As discussed in a previous summary, the inquiry panel has concluded the BRE’s burn hall manager was aware of the changes Celotex was making - despite his stringent denials.
The team at Celotex which had run the test then returned to their headquarters and produced a slideshow briefing for their senior management, including chief executive Craig Chambers, which explained that there was confusion in the market, and that clients would buy an alternative to Kingspan’s product if offered one.
The report said the meeting was convened to “decide whether to take advantage of that confusion, and if so, how”.
These slides openly referred to the addition of the fire resisting board, with the report adding that parent company Saint Gobain “may have been” sent a copy as well.
But the management group at Celotex did not want the presence of the boards to become public knowledge. They told Mr Roper to make new slides for “general business use” which made no reference to the additional fire resisting boards.
The BRE issued a report of the test which also contained no reference to the addition of the boards. The report said its staff member, Phil Clark, “deliberately omitted any reference to them” because he knew that mentioning them “would significantly undermine the commercial viability of the product”.
Now Celotex needed to market the insulation.
‘Thoroughly misleading and deliberately crafted to mislead the reader’
Celotex’s marketing literature contained statements saying that its insulation was suitable for use on buildings above 18m in height.
The inquiry panel described one such document as “thoroughly misleading and… deliberately crafted to mislead the reader into buying RS5000 for use on buildings over 18 metres in height”.
Celotex did also publish a “compliance guide”, which included an explanation that it had to be used within the tested system to comply with requirements.
However, the description of the system included in this guide contained no reference to the secret magnesium oxide boards, meaning that it did not accurately describe the tested system and “the disclaimer was effectively meaningless, as Celotex well knew”.
Celotex was then able to obtain a certificate from Local Authority Building Control (LABC) which contained a statement saying the material was “acceptable” for use on tall buildings.
LABC had copied this wording directly from Celotex “even to the point of including the transposition of a typographical error”.
But the report said “the wording and the message it was intended to convey was untrue and misleading”.
This was the certificate provided to Harley Facades, the subcontractor which fitted the material to Grenfell Tower.
Slides produced by one of Celotex’s sales people in 2015 show the firm had split the market into three tiers - those who would not use combustible insulation, those who questioned its use and those who would ask no questions. Harley was in the bottom tier.
The inquiry said that Celotex’s approach “reflected a deeply cynical view that there were ignorant or reckless contractors in the market of whom advantage could be taken without any regard for the safety of occupants”.
What has Celotex said?
In its closing statement, Celotex emphasised that the design and compliance of the system at Grenfell Tower was the responsibility of the “designers, contractors and consultants engaged” and that these professionals had “failed to have any, or any adequate, regard to their design and compliance obligations”.
It said it had “no contractual obligations” to the design of the facade of Grenfell Tower, adding that warnings that its product would burn in a fire were included in its health and safety datasheet.
It said that the use of magnesium oxide boards and their omission from the test report and marketing literature “involved unacceptable conduct on the part of a number of former Celotex employees”, but added that it had “no impact on the specification and use of RS5000 at Grenfell Tower”, because the construction professionals involved did not rely on the detailed testing information. Since the fire, it has run the test without the additional boards and passed.
It added that expert evidence shows the fire spread was caused by Arconic’s ACM panels “and not the insulation behind it”.
This is part of a series of digests on the findings of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report. Previous posts have covered:
RBKC and the TMO as client and building control
I’ll continue to publish posts like this over the coming weeks alongside more general content. Subscribe to keep up to date.
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.
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