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Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 33: ‘Isn’t that a serious gap in the scope of the policy that was meant to safeguard vulnerable people?’

Insight07.05.2111.30 AM by Peter Apps

A slightly disjointed week at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry saw further evidence from staff at building manager Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) interspersed with the views of a cladding expert. Peter Apps reports

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#GrenfellInquiry week 33: ‘Isn’t that a serious gap in the scope of the policy that was meant to safeguard vulnerable people?’ #UKhousing

A slightly disjointed week at the #GrenfellInquiry saw further evidence from staff at building manager KCTMO interspersed with the views of a cladding expert. @PeteApps reports #UKhousing

Grenfell survivors call for ‘no more government excuses’ after east London fire

“There was a bit of this attitude of, ‘well, it hasn’t happened so it can’t happen’”

The inquiry returned to topics first discussed almost a year ago this week, with the evidence of Jonathan Sakula (pictured above), a cladding expert with 30 years’ experience in facades in the cladding industry.

Mr Sakula was only appointed in October and completed his report in March, hence the timing of his evidence.

He was primarily asked to explain what a “reasonably competent” cladding contractor could and should have known about the risks of using the highly combustible aluminium composite material (ACM) panels selected for Grenfell Tower.

His view, in a nutshell, was that they should have been aware it was combustible and unsafe for use on a high-rise block.

This was because of well-publicised high-rise fires, mostly in the Middle East, between 2012 to 2016 that were linked to ACM and were well known in the industry.

Mr Sakula said contractors should have known from reports of the fires that ACM was “easily ignited and combustible”.

As a result, he said using the product on a high rise was “unwise” and failing to consider the “known combustibility” would “fall below the standard expected of a reasonably competent practitioner in the cladding industry”.

He agreed with counsel to the inquiry Kate Grange QC (pictured below) when she suggested to him that the contractor should also have been aware using the product on a high rise was “unsafe”.

However, Mr Sakula said he believed the risks were not taken seriously enough by some in the industry because the fires before Grenfell did not involve severe loss of life. “It was a failure of imagination,” he said. “There was a bit of this attitude of, ‘well, it hasn’t happened so it can’t happen.’”

He also addressed some of the arguments witnesses from cladding contractor Harley Facades advanced to explain their actions.

One of these was the firm simply inherited product selections made by architect Studio E and trusted it had done the work to ensure the products were safe and compliant.

Mr Sakula’s view was that both organisations should have satisfied themselves that the products were suitable, not rely on the other to do so.

He was also asked about a certificate from the British Board of Agrément (BBA) which appeared on its front page to say the cladding met the standard of ‘Class 0’, but made clear this was actually based on quite limited testing when read in full.

Mr Sakula said the contractor was entitled to rely on the BBA certificate “to a great extent” as the BBA was a “reputable body” and its statements were “to be trusted”.

However, he felt that it should have employed “somebody with technical or design responsibility” to read the certificate “in detail to ensure that the product was appropriate for its intended use on a project”.

He also said that rather than “take comfort” from the fact that the material was widely used on many other buildings, a reasonably competent contractor should have reviewed each job on its merits because “every building is different”.

‘A cladding contractor would have interpreted this that the use of [ACM] was still allowed’

Mr Sakula also gave some important evidence on the question of what government guidance that was in force when Grenfell Tower was refurbished did and did not say.

This has been a vexed question since the fire, with the government keen to distance itself from blame by insisting the use of combustible ACM cladding was “banned” in the UK by its guidance.

This requires a little explanation. Statutory building regulations simply state that the walls of a building must “adequately resist the spread of flame”.

But the government published official guidance called ‘Approved Document B’, which sets out in detail how to comply with this standard.

This document said the “external surfaces of walls” must meet the standard of Class 0. This has been widely interpreted in the industry to apply to cladding. But Class 0 is a flawed test for fire safety, becuase it primarily assesses how the surface of a product responds to flame, and dangerous ACM products have previously obtained it.

After the fire, however, the government claimed cladding should in fact have met the higher standard of ‘limited combustibility’, which many in the industry had previously thought only applies to insulation.

Mr Sakula did not agree that this was the case. “I just think that was a bit of a stretch,” he told the inquiry.

He also reviewed various other bits of industry guidance that said cladding should meet the higher standard of ‘limited combustibility’, but said the industry would have “deferred” to the standards in Approved Document B.

“A cladding contractor would have interpreted this that the use of [ACM] was still allowed,” he wrote in his report.

None of this excuses the actions of the Grenfell Tower contractors: their use of combustible insulation put them in breach of the government guidance on any reading and Mr Sakula agreed that specific terms in their contracts would have prohibited the use of a combustible cladding product on the tower in any event.

But it leaves the government with difficult questions to answer.

Not only must it now explain why their guidance was so defective as to allow the use of dangerously combustible cladding on high rises, but also why it has spent the past four years telling us it was not.

‘Peter Maddison has suggested and I have agreed that we don’t hold any more open meetings’

Turning to the evidence of KCTMO, Peter Maddison (pictured above), director of assets at the organisation, continued his evidence this week. One of the first topics he was asked about was how KCTMO had consulted with residents about the planned refurbishment of the tower.

He was shown a KCTMO document from August 2013 that set out a plan for consultation and noted “a perception by residents that TMO doesn’t respect them”, which was driven by “inadequate and intermittent communication [which] has also given residents cause for distrust”. It said meetings regarding the project were “acrimonious and unproductive”.

Mr Maddison agreed the report was an accurate reflection of the situation at this time and said some of the bad feelings came from the delays to the refurbishment.

At the end of 2013, KCTMO took the decision to scrap public meetings regarding the refurbishment altogether and instead rely on drop-in sessions and newsletters.

Mr Maddison said this was the preference residents expressed in consultation and that the decision was made due to poor attendance at previous meetings.

But KCTMO minutes from November 2013 painted a different picture, recording that “it has been agreed to hold no more public meetings due to the stand being made by the Grenfell Tower leaseholder group”.

In his witness statement, Mr Maddison disputed this by saying it was “inaccurately recorded”.

“Why did you not correct the minutes?” asked Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry.

“I don’t know that I picked up that nuance,” Mr Maddison said.

A further email from a local councillor referred to the fact that “Peter Maddison has suggested and I have agreed that we don’t hold any more open meetings” due to “disruptive” complaints being made at them by tower resident Ed Daffarn.

Asked about this email, Mr Maddison said he disagreed with it. “I felt the key issue… was that the consultation meetings weren’t effective and that we should do something different,” he said.

‘I wonder if you could advise on the point at which his comments become libellous?’

On a similar theme, Mr Maddison was also interrogated about the period when Mr Daffarn and others attempted to establish a residents group within the tower but were initially denied recognition by KCTMO.

This stretched back to January 2014 when the organisation initially told Mr Daffarn “the TMO are unable to recognise Grenfell Tower Residents Group” as there was another residents association covering the whole estate, which by this stage was barely functioning.

In April 2015, Mr Daffarn, along with neighbour David Collins, again sought recognition for the group. Once more, he was told that “this group will not be recognised” due to the existence of the other residents association.

This further refusal came just days after Mr Maddison had sent an internal email to colleagues at KCTMO complaining about the blog Mr Daffarn contributed to which raised concerns about the refurbishment.

“Mr Daffarn is continuing to agitate in Grenfell Tower,” Mr Maddison wrote. “He is clearly distributing misleading information. I wonder if you could advise on the point at which his comments become libellous?”

He attached a screen grab of a recent blog showing an early meeting of the group Mr Daffarn had established, highlighting several passages including one that said “the TMO have worked to prevent tenants and leaseholders from forming any form of collective representation”. But wasn’t this precisely what happened?

“It was certainly true, wasn’t it, that there had been past attempts by residents to gain a united voice for the Grenfell Tower community which had been refused by the TMO?” asked Mr Millett (pictured above).

Mr Maddison said he did not agree, claiming the group KCTMO had refused to acknowledge would not have been part of the refurbishment consultation.

The residents group was finally recognised in July 2015, after the intervention of the local MP.

‘I apologise, that’s a mistake in my witness statement’

Finally, Mr Maddison was grilled at length about how complaints from residents were handled by KCTMO, with reference to several specific complaints about fire safety covering the renumbering of floors in the tower and gas works carried out by the National Grid after the main refurbishment completed.

One complaint stood out, however. Mr Daffarn (pictured above) complained in August 2015 that the door of his neighbouring flat, Flat 136, was left standing open after the tenant moved out and main contractor Rydon carried out some work.

Mr Daffarn’s evidence was that the ‘self-closing’ device was holding the door ajar. We now know that many self-closing devices in Grenfell Tower had faults, which is thought to have been a major cause of the spread of smoke within communal areas on the night of the blaze.

Mr Daffarn’s complaint was not upheld by Mr Maddison, who told him the door was not broken and that Rydon’s staff were able to return and simply close the door.

This resulted in an angry response from Mr Daffarn, who felt Mr Maddison was calling him a liar.

But this week, Mr Maddison’s witness statement appeared to contradict what he had told Mr Daffarn in 2015. In his statement he said: “The door closer was repaired and an apology was given.”

Asked about this, he said: “I apologise, that’s a mistake in my witness statement… I think my solicitors have drafted that wrong.”

“I feel bound to suggest to you that when you said in your statement that the door was repaired, that was true, and that was true because it was broken earlier,” said Mr Millett.

Mr Maddison denied this, saying he had taken Rydon’s assurance that they could simply close the door “at face value”.

‘Isn’t that a serious gap in the scope of the policy that was meant to safeguard vulnerable people?’

Mr Maddison was followed by Teresa Brown (pictured above), director of housing at KCTMO, who was primarily questioned about the lack of personal emergency evacuation plans, or PEEPs, for residents of the tower.

This is a major topic for this section of the inquiry, which began with lawyers for the bereaved calling the fire “a landmark act of discrimination” against people with disabilities and noting that disabled residents of the tower died at a far higher rate than other occupants.

But it is also one that takes us into systemic, not just local, issues. KCTMO did not provide PEEPs – but neither did the vast majority of social landlords managing tower blocks around the country.

Ms Brown’s evidence gave us some insight into this. Asked why KCTMO did not develop such plans, she cited its reliance on the stay put policy and guidance published by the Local Government Association (LGA) in 2011.

This guide, commissioned by government in the aftermath of the Lakanal House fire, said preparing such documents was “usually unrealistic” and advocated reliance on stay put instead.

“We were operating according to that guidance in a way that I think other organisations across the country were,” said Ms Brown.

But lawyers for the bereaved are arguing that a statutory responsibility to provide means of escape in an emergency to all residents should not have been overridden by the guidance.

This is an awkward topic for the inquiry as one of the experts advising it on these matters is Colin Todd, a fire safety consultant who was the primary author of the LGA guide.

Ms Brown was shown a draft vulnerability policy which said the provision of PEEPs to KCTMO residents could be done in an “ad hoc and/or self-nominated” fashion.

But she accepted that this was not publicised to residents, leaving them unaware of it. The final policy made no reference to PEEPs.

“Isn’t that a serious gap in the scope of the policy that was meant to safeguard vulnerable people?” asked counsel to the inquiry Andrew Kinnear QC.

“So we weren’t looking to evacuate our residents, we were looking to utilise information in emergency situations to provide support,” Ms Brown said.

KCTMO actually had a major warning before the Grenfell tragedy of the potential need for PEEPs, when a fire at nearby Adair Tower got out of control and triggered a block-wide evacuation.

An emotional Ms Brown said data gathered by KCTMO to identify vulnerable residents was used when responding to this fire, but it did not prompt consideration of the need for evacuation plans.

“When we did a review, there was no recommendation from the LFB [London Fire Brigade] or from anybody else to have changed that,” she said.

It is worth emphasising here that the first phase of the inquiry recommended the adoption of PEEPs, but the government has so far not taken this up, after being lobbied by industry representatives who called it “totally impracticable”.

A legal challenge by bereaved families has resulted in a consultation on it being reopened but it has not yet progressed.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry: week 33 headlines

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The company that managed Grenfell Tower did not prepare plans to evacuate residents with disabilities during a fire due to its reliance on government-endorsed guidance, its former director of housing has told the inquiry.

‘Competent’ contractor would have known Grenfell cladding was unsafe, says expert

A “reasonably competent” cladding contractor should have known that the combustible panels used on Grenfell were unsafe for high rises, a cladding expert told the inquiry.

KCTMO director called Grenfell resident blog that raised fire safety concerns ‘agitating’ and ‘libellous’

A resident of Grenfell Tower who raised fire safety concerns on a blog was accused of “agitating” by a director of the building’s management company, who instructed colleagues to investigate whether the resident’s criticism could be considered “libellous”, the inquiry heard.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry phase two: weekly diaries

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Week one: A vivid picture of a broken industry

After a week of damning revelations at the opening of phase two of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Peter Apps recaps the key points