Disguised by luxury: fire safety flaws in private blocks revealed

Across London, enforcement notices on private blocks flag up problems ranging from lack of up-to-date fire risk assessments to potential breaches in compartmentation in buildings (meaning fire could spread quickly).

Nadeem Ghous-Chaudary, property services manager at Kings Reach Flats Management, the organisation on which the LFB served the enforcement notice for Rennie Court, says it has now either resolved or is in the process of resolving all the matters contained in the LFB notice. He says the block does now have an up-to-date fire risk assessment.

He adds that he thinks enforcement notices served since Grenfell may also reflect a change in approach from the LFB – meaning notices are likely to be issued in situations where they would not have been before the Grenfell tragedy.

“What we have learned is that post-Grenfell, the LFB has considerably tightened up its procedures,” Mr Ghous-Chaudary says. “We have had previous inspections with the LFB and the last one was 2016 which was passed with a clean bill of health.”

There are other indicators outside of enforcement notices that also give cause for concern. Freedom of Information Act requests by Inside Housing found that out of 53 councils with more than one privately owned tower block, 16 – or 30% – did not have information about the cladding installed on all of those blocks.

This is something that is of huge concern to some senior council figures. At the end of November, Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle City Council and senior vice-chair of the Local Government Association, told a Treasury select committee that an issue that “really horrified me was that we knew the situation with the tower blocks that the council owns but we didn’t know the situation with the other tower blocks in the city because we have a deregulated building inspection process which meant that, not only did we not have oversight of them, we had no records of them”.

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Mr Forbes told the committee that as a result “I was unable as a local authority leader in my area to give guarantees about public safety and that really, really worried me – that we had no ability to guarantee that we at least understood the position and know what to put right”.

Mr Forbes added that in the majority of cases it had been private developments “where we had building inspection issues because we just didn’t know what the situation was”. It had been difficult to arrange inspection of privately owned blocks in some cases because the owners were not based in the UK, he added.

He also raised the subject in his response to the independent review of building regulations and fire safety being carried out by Dame Judith Hackitt.

In a letter to the review, Mr Forbes said the council tried to use building regulation records to identify high-rise buildings in the city.

“It quickly became apparent that in many locations developers have been able to build properties without local authority oversight of building regulations,” he wrote. “In some cases these buildings have been using materials that have since been found to pose a risk, but there has never been any requirement of the developers to register this information with the local authority. The privatisation of fire safety rules must now be reviewed.”

A spokesperson for Newcastle Council says it did not previously maintain a list of privately owned tall buildings within its borders as there is no requirement to do so. It has now identified 60 privately owned residential buildings taller than 18 metres.

“Not all councils are keen to talk about this issue.”

It has not yet identified the owners of all these buildings as “the priority has been to engage with owners of those buildings where the local authority considers the owner should be making further investigations of external cladding”.

Not all councils are keen to talk about this issue. Richmond upon Thames Council, for example, turned down an information request for a list of privately owned blocks and whether or not they had cladding, stating that identifying buildings with an issue “could cause widespread public panic”.

The LFB has also been worried about the broader issue. At a meeting of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority on 23 November, LFB commissioner Dany Cotton said that it had conducted 458 initial inspections to check general fire precautions in blocks of all ownership types with aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding.

But she added: “While engagement with responsible persons at the affected premises we have been notified of has generally improved, officers remain concerned that there is still potentially a large number of privately owned residential premises that have yet to engage with the testing process.”

"In many locations developers have been able to build properties without local authority oversight of building regulations", Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle City Council

Far from being safer than blocks owned by councils and social landlords, it may even be the case that privately owned blocks are proportionally more risky.

A briefing issued last month by the LGA’s Fire Services Management Committee suggests: “From what we have heard from the construction industry, it seems ACM cladding has been more widely used on private high-rise residential buildings than on social housing tower blocks. The proportion of private high-rise residential buildings with ACM cladding that needs to be removed may well be greater than in council and housing association buildings.”

It added that the number of affected council blocks amounted to no more than 3% of the total number of council-owned blocks.

“If the number of private residential buildings with ACM cladding is higher than in the social housing sector this will have significant resource implications,” the briefing reads.

Inside Housing understands that work to identify the locations of privately owned blocks across England has largely been completed.

But six months on from Grenfell, the ownership status of many of these blocks has yet to be established, along with whether or not they have ACM cladding.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has appointed relationship managers to help the seven councils with the largest number of private high-rise residential buildings.

A spokesperson for the DCLG said it has been “working with councils and private residential landlords across the country to identify buildings that might be at risk and ensure action is taken to make them safe”.

“DCLG has appointed relationship managers to help the seven councils with the largest number of private high-rise residential buildings.”

So, what about Mr Javid’s big question? The evidence seems to suggest that problems with cladding and fire safety in privately owned blocks exist on a similar – or possibly greater – scale to those in the social sector. Worse, council leaders in a number of areas are as yet unable to guarantee the safety of all their citizens as a result of a lack of historic information and complicated ownership arrangements.

As to the future? A spokesperson for the LFB states: “Every building owner, regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector, should engage with the DCLG’s programme of cladding testing and review their fire risk assessments accordingly.”

A spokesperson for Newcastle Council says it would be “wrong to presume” that fire safety was any less of an issue in private than social blocks.

While a conversation about social housing in the UK is clearly needed, it should not distract from systemic safety issues that have the potential to affect all high-rise residents.