‘This is going to go badly pear-shaped’: what will PAS 9980 mean for the building safety crisis?

Assessing the workmanship is also tough without an intrusive survey. This means fire engineers may well have to be engaged on a vast number of blocks, just to answer the initial question about whether a detailed assessment is required. That will amount to an extraordinary amount of work. 

“A huge problem with this is who the bloody hell is going to do it?” says Mr London. “There are not enough fire engineers in the country to do 10% of the buildings that will need to be assessed over the course of the next few years.”

The government insists that this will not be a problem, with a spokesperson insisting full assessments will not be necessary for lower height buildings and those with brick and masonry construction. It is also spending £700,000 to train new assessors. 

But this capacity needs to build up fast. If not, it risks leaving building owners – and residents – stranded. Dr Evans says it is already hard to find a fire engineer with space to do new work in 2022.

“Even if it’s all glowing passes and green lights, there’s going to be a process of years while we wait for the fire engineers to finish all the assessments,” he says.

But such an outcome is unlikely.

“The reality is the defects we are finding in these buildings require remediation, which will be difficult and expensive to do,” says Mr London. “Clients are not asking for remediation because they are being difficult, they are doing it because they are being advised by fire engineers and forensic architects that it is required.”

“Engineers are required to be independent of mind and it is them that have to sleep at night knowing they have said the building is safe”

Where risks are found, the guidance directs the assessor to classify the external wall as one of three categories: low, medium or high risk.

In medium-risk buildings, the assessor is invited to consider that while the risk from the fire spread is enhanced, it is also “tolerable” and therefore there is “potential to accept the risk without remediation”.

“That is the category into which the vast majority of buildings are going to fall, but it is utterly useless,” says Dr Evans. “Because that is where the misalignment between safety and insurability really hits hard.”

PAS 9980, he explains, does not assess the insurability of the block or its compliance with regulations. Instead, it is purely an assessment of resident safety.

And while the government seems to deem a fire where everyone escapes alive as an acceptable level of risk, insurers and lenders are as interested in the impact on the building.

“They will say that because we are in the business of insuring buildings and using them as collateral, if everybody gets out but the building can’t be extinguished and burns to the ground, that’s no good to us,” says Dr Evans.

Therefore, remediation work may still be required to keep insurance premiums within a reasonable range and to give lenders the confidence to offer mortgages.

The government insists it is intending to “drive out excessive risk aversion from the insurance industry” - but ultimately it is up to insurers to decide their view of risk. 

It also remains to be seen whether fire engineers – even with Mr Gove’s exhortation against excessive caution – will be willing to put their name to an assessment which finds a risk but declares it tolerable.

The guidance repeatedly asks for proportionality, but leaves it to the subjective judgement of the assessor to decide what that means.

“No one will want to be the person who signed off a building as fine where eight people later die in a fire,” says Dr Evans. “Engineers are required to be independent of mind and it is them that have to sleep at night knowing they have said the building is safe.”

Conflicting messages

We have seen this in action already with a draft version of PAS 9980 resulting in demands for an expensive remediation of a below-18 metres-block in south London. There is nothing in the new guidance to suggest similar conclusions will not be reached. It also conflicts with recent messaging about fire safety.

“People have seen recent fires on the news. They have heard the questioning at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry,” says Dr Evans. “Dame Judith Hackitt [author of a key government review] is asking people to adopt a state of ‘chronic unease’ and to take a hard line on safety, but the government is saying ‘calm down, you don’t need to go mad about this fire safety lark’.”

As a hypothetical example, Dr Evans considers the position of a block below 11 metres clad in the same aluminium composite material as used on Grenfell Tower.

“No one is going to sign that off as tolerable,” he says. “But that is still thousands of blocks which will need to be remediated and there is no money to pay for fixing them.”

“There is one instance I’m aware of where a ground-floor bungalow is absolutely engulfed in aluminium composite material,” says Ms Bowring. “The resident of that is someone in later living, and therefore the assessment is absolutely going to be that it all needs to come off. Proportionality is about more than just height.”

There are also legitimate fears that a soaring demand for work will see less competent assessors enter the market – something which is undoubtedly already a problem.

“There are so many cowboys out there doing EWS1 assessments. The number of cowboys is going to increase exponentially and that means you are going to get wild divergences in approaches and results,”
says Mr London.

Another hole in the plan is what to do about non-cladding defects which emerge – such as balconies (which the guidance specifically identifies as a potential risk), insulation and missing fire breaks.

There is no government funding for these works at any height, but Mr Gove has also promised protection to leaseholders against paying for them. How will that hole be filled?

A government spokesperson says building owners are responsible for fixing all defects, including non-cladding issues, and says it will impose a solution in law if they do not act. 

But this is the same line it has been relying on for years. In private blocks, the building owner is likely to be a shell company, interested in the freehold only for the ground rents. 

In the social housing sector, meanwhile, the building owners are social landlords. This means vast costs could be heading to the sector, where they cannot find a contractor to hold to account. 

“The idea that they are going to get results saying they don’t need to do anything is entirely misguided. In the majority of cases, it will say they do need to do remediation work”

The Fire Safety Act will pull in far more blocks than the sector has yet considered – low rises which have previously not been surveyed and blocks without leaseholders which have not yet had EWS1 assessments.  

“This catches every one of the multiple-occupancy buildings social landlords own,” says Mr London. “Even if the assessments come back saying there’s no risk, the cost of doing them is huge.

“But the idea that they are going to get results saying they don’t need to do anything is entirely misguided. In the majority of cases, it will say they do need to do remediation work. The cost of this legislation to the sector is far larger than the Building Safety Bill in my view.”

This comes at a moment when social landlords face unique cost pressures, from net zero to the need to maintain their ageing housing stock. The money they have to meet these requirements is not conjured from the ether – ultimately it comes from those who pay them rent, and who face the sharpest increase in years in April.

What should be done instead? This has never been a problem with easy solutions, but Dr Evans has set out a plan for an alternative; one which is much more prescriptive, where information on the building type, external wall and other key factors are simply inputted into a grading system, which returns a risk score and this determines whether or not the building is remediated.

Such a system may not be perfect, but it would at least be simple and consistent. The road we are heading down appears anything but.