The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
The statement was made by lawyer Jason Beer QC, acting for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities during the ongoing inquiry into the Grenfell fire.
Beer began by saying the government was ‘deeply sorry’ for its ‘past failures’, admitting it had not ensured the Building Regulations were being followed. He added that the government had ‘trusted’ that builders, inspectors, and suppliers were ‘following the law and doing the right thing’ and that it ‘greatly regrets that it took the Grenfell Tower tragedy to lay bare that this trust was both misplaced and abused’.
However, the lawyer said the government did not take responsibility for confusion caused by official advice in Approved Document B (ABD), which sets out how to comply with Part B of the Building Regulations, covering fire safety.
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The statement comes despite the inquiry’s architectural expert, former HKS director and RIBA president Paul Hyett, saying that in his opinion ABD had endorsed the installation of combustible cladding at Grenfell.
Earlier this week a lawyer for a group of bereaved survivors and residents claimed the government had known about the misleading guidance but decided to ignore it for years.
Before its amendment in 2019, ADB suggested that cladding products with a Class 0 rating would comply with a requirement not to have combustible external walls. However, Class 0 is measure of surface fire spread, not of limited combustibility. The aluminium composite panels that were primarily responsible for fire spread at Grenfell Tower had a Class 0 rating due to their aluminium surface but their plastic core meant they were highly combustible.
Despite this, Beer insisted: ‘Had the Building Regulations, British Standards and statutory guidance been followed and enforced with reasonable diligence, a large-scale cladding fire could not have happened.
‘The department’s view is that the meaning of the regulations, and of ADB read together with the regulations, was sufficiently clear at the time of the refurbishment of the tower that no competent professional, acting in good faith, should have misunderstood or misapplied the statutory requirements.’
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He added: ‘A competent professional would have taken appropriate advice in case of uncertainty, not least where the issue involved fire safety.’
However, the inquiry’s architectural expert suggested last November that he would have been satisfied that a product with a Class 0 rating, such as the rain screen panels installed on the Grenfell Tower, complied with Building Regulations, given the guidance in ABD.
‘I would have looked, in terms of considering the [Class 0 rating] in relation to the performance of the Reynobond ACP panel, only at the rating given to the product as a whole. I would not have made any enquiry of the elements of the product,’ Hyett said.
‘I didn’t consider the outer face of the aluminium composite panel to be, in its own right and separately, the surface of the whole wall. I would not, therefore, have interrogated the core of [aluminium composite panels] at all.’
Hyett was also asked by the inquiry whether, when specifying rainscreen cladding panels, a competent architect would have sought the advice of a specialist fire engineer to check the fire resistance and fire load of a cladding panel as a whole.
He responded: ‘If I was to say yes I would be going way beyond what I think architects normally do. That might be a criticism of us all, but I still feel that the ADB document is one plank on which we rest most of our thinking.’
On Monday, Stephanie Barwise, a lawyer for bereaved, survivors and residents affected by the Grenfell Tower tragedy, said the government ‘appreciated both the Class 0 conundrum and its knock-on effect of causing confusion’.
She quoted a technical director at the government, who said in 2013 that, under ADB, ‘you can have a thin surface that gives you the [Class 0] performance and back it up with something less desirable’.
Elsewhere in the government’s 15-minute opening statement to the inquiry on Tuesday (7 December), Beer said that ‘errors and missed opportunities by the department and across industry may not have caused the fire, but cumulatively they created an environment when such a tragedy was possible’.
He added that, since Grenfell, the government had sought to rectify the regulatory problems by producing legislation for a new building safety regulatory system, which will include new regulators for both high-risk buildings and construction products.
The inquiry continues this morning (8 October) with the testimony of Barry Turner of the Local Authority Building Control.
When the only defence the government has for its total complicity in this matter is to say “the advice it out there…..somewhere…. (but ahem, inferring not on the documents we provide which is where it should be, and worse those documents were wrong and we knew)”, you know its getting over the target at last.
I think that most of us were complacent in our thinking up until the fire, having learned in CPD after CPD that a serious fire in a residential building, with danger to life was a most unlikely scenario. I am sure that colleagues across the industry lost that complacency the morning after the fire. It is notable that the government persists in complacency and denial despite all of the evidence so far presented. If the regulations were fit for purpose then why the mad rush to revise them so significantly?
The damage was done when the Conservatives privatised the Building Research Establishment. As a result, instead of setting standards it had to compete in checking buildings for adherence to standards – which if it had done seriously would have been commercial suicide.