‘Ignorance, complacency and a failure properly to manage its staff’ - what the Grenfell Tower Inquiry said about Harley Facades

The cladding sub-contractor "must bear a significant degree of responsibility for the fire”, in the words of the report. What did it do wrong?

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What role did Harley Facades play? 

A sub-contractor, Harley was appointed to take care of the external facade works to Grenfell Tower, including the cladding - producing detailed design drawings and overseeing the installation. 

It was appointed with a “letter of intent”, the terms of which made it responsible for ensuring that the design of the facade “complied with all statutory requirements, including the requirements of the Building Regulations”. But this letter was never signed or formalised into a proper contract and Harley argued that it had never fully understood the extent of its obligations. 

The inquiry panel rejected this. “Simply failing to understand the contract and following industry practices will not do,” it said.

This means Harley held an important legal responsibility relating to the cladding - and one which it failed to live up to.

‘They simply assumed that it was safe because it had been used on other projects’ - the selection of the ACM cladding

Before even being appointed to the job, Harley had met Studio E, the architects, for coffee and given advice about the cladding - and discussed the use of various cladding materials including the highly combustible aluminium composite material (ACM) which was ultimately specified. 

The report says this conversation focused only on price and aesthetics - not compliance with fire safety requirements. “[They] simply assumed that it was safe because it had been used on a number of other projects involving tower blocks,” the report said.

“That assumption was born of complacency and incompetence,” it added. 

As the months progressed, Harley’s team pushed for the use of the cheaper ACM panel - and particularly the Reynobond brand made by Arconic which was ultimately used.

The report said there was a “close business relationship between Harley and Arconic” which meant Harley could obtain “a significant reduction in the price of Reynobond panels”.

This discount helped make sure Reynobond PE was the cheapest available for the tower, and since this was the main reason it was specified, the report concluded that “Harley’s involvement thus made a significant contribution to the eventual use of ACM PE on Grenfell Tower”.  

Like the architects, Harley was provided with a ‘British Board of Agrement’ certificate which appeared to indicate the panels had a ‘Class 0’ rating and were therefore compliant with the (dangerously low) standard in official guidance for high rise cladding projects. 

But like the architects, they did not read this certificate in detail - with Ray Bailey, the managing director of the firm, saying he was only interested in whether it confirmed the Class 0 rating. 

In fact, the report concluded that Harley barely read the certificate at all. “It is difficult to resist the conclusion that no one from Harley gave any serious consideration at all to the current BBA certificate,” it said. 

Had they done so, they would have realised there were important caveats about its use.

‘It suggests quite strongly that Harley knew more than it was willing to admit about the dangers of using ACM’ - What did Harley know?’

One of the key claims made in defense of those involved in the refurbishment is that while they might have been culpable of various types of poor practice, incompetence and complacency, they didn’t actually know they were doing anything dangerous.

The report casts serious doubt on this assumption - particularly in relation to the Harley witnesses. 

For instance, a previous fire at another Harley project in London - Taplow House in Camden in 2012 - had resulted in investigations which had shown serious damage to the ACM. 

“Ray Bailey told us that the fire at Taplow House had demonstrated to Harley that ACM would burn,” the report said. 

Daniel Anketell-Jones meanwhile, Harley’s design manager, had been to a conference in 2014 which featured a presentation about the risks of high rise facade fires. 

He claimed not to remember it, but the next day his brother Samuel, a junior designer at Harley, sent an email to Arconic’s sales person asking for details of a more fire retardant cladding option.

The report said that this email, particularly when viewed in light of the conference, “suggests quite strongly… that Harley knew more than it was willing to admit about the availability of a fire-resistant version of the Reynobond panel and the dangers of using ACM with an unmodified [polyethylene] core”.

A later, now notorious email, was shared between the design team in 2015, when discussing the need for two-hour fire breaks in the cavity between the cladding panels and the external wall. 

Daniel Anketell-Jones wrote in this email:  “There is no point in ‘fire stopping’, as we all know; the ACM will be gone rather quickly in a fire!” One of the team at architects Studio E (Neil Crawford) replied to say that “metal cladding always burns and falls off”. 

Both later claimed they had no idea the material would burn, but just that it would come loose and fall from the building as the aluminium fixings melted. But the inquiry rejected this evidence. “We are satisfied that Mr Crawford and Mr Anketell-Jones knew that ACM was combustible,” it said. 

The choice of insulation

By the time Harley came onto the job, the architects had already selected Celotex FR5000 - a polyisocyanurate rigid foam board which was combustible and never complied with the rules for use on a high rise. 

But this isn’t quite what Harley purchased. Instead, the firm brough Celotex RS5000 - materially the same product but misleadingly marketed by Celotex as a new insulation which was suitable for use on high rises. 

This was a result of some very direct sales effort by Celotex. Even before they started work on the Grenfell project Harley - which did many high rise cladding jobs around London and the south east -  were being targetted by Celotex’s sales people. 

Jonathan Roome, one of their sales team, had been in contact with Harley about other projects and knew they were starting work on Grenfell Tower.

Mr Roome knew the RS5000 product was not really suitable for use on all high rises, the report said, and “could be used only in cladding systems that were identical to the system tested” by Celotex in May 2014. But he still emailed Harley telling them it was “Acceptable For Use In Buildings Above 18m in Height” and attended their office to give a sales pitch.

Asked why he didn’t question this, Ray Bailey said he confused the ‘Class 0’ rating the product was advertised as possessing with the tougher standard of ‘limited combustibility’, which would have made it compliant.

Internally, Celotex had a chart of potential customers which it split into tier one, tier two and tier three. Tier one customers would never buy combustible insulation, tier two could be persuaded to and Tier Three always used it because they were ignorant of the restrictions. Harley was categorised as tier three by Celotex. 

“That reflects 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,” the report said. 

It was also critical of Harley’s general lack of knowledge of the rules and regulations relating to the area it worked in.

“Harley’s striking lack of technical knowledge and its failure to implement any proper system to monitor and improve it fell far short of the standard of a reasonably competent cladding contractor,” the report said. “That fundamental failure was the cause of much of its inadequate work on the refurbishment.”

However, the report’s view of Mr Anketell Jones - who went on to ask Celotex further technical questions about the testing of the RS5000 product, was that he knew more than he let on.

“It is difficult to believe that Mr Anketell-Jones was as ignorant of matters relating to fire safety as he would have had us believe,” the report said. “Accordingly we can place little reliance on his protestations of ignorance or lack of expertise.”

The missing cavity barrier

Harley’s work included producing fabrication drawings for the cladding which “contained a series of fundamental errors” relating to the use of fire barriers in the cavity between the external wall and the cladding panels.

Critically, they did not include a barrier at the top of the window openings - which is where the fire ultimately escaped from the flat where it started on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower. 

Harley should have been well aware of this requirement - the aforementioned fire at Taplow House was prevented from spreading to the external wall by a cavity barrier. 

This was specifically raised by the manufacturer of the barrier - Siderise - when it saw Harley’s drawings. It annotated one of them with the words “weak link for fire”. 

But Ben Bailey, the 25-year-old project manager and son of Ray, did not act on this - explaining that because a separate dispute about the necessary strength of the barriers was later resolved, he thought it was no longer necessary. 

The report said this explanation was “far from satisfactory” and “made no sense”. “It was foolhardy to ignore the very clear warning about the design of the window,” it said.

Harley then sub-sub-contracted the installation of the barriers to a building firm Osborne Berry, whose work was terrible - barriers were upside down, back to front or completely absent, which the report said reflected a lack of oversight from Harley.

“In our view the defects in the installation of the cavity barriers reflect a serious lack of competence on the part of Harley itself and Osborne Berry,” the report said. 

“We consider that Harley’s work on the refurbishment was characterised by a failure to take its responsibilities seriously, ignorance, complacency and a failure properly to manage its staff,” the report said in its conclusions on Harley.

“As the specialist contractor responsible for the external wall of the tower, the standard of Harley’s work fell well below that to be expected of a reasonably competent cladding contractor and it must therefore bear a significant degree of responsibility for the fire.”

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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