Buildings with Grenfell-style cladding may still be unsafe to occupy despite government reassurance, says inquiry expert

In her report on the inquiry’s interim recommendations, she said: “My primary concern, currently, is that the starting position by [the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)] appears to be that the high-rise buildings with unsafe ACM cladding remain safe to occupy. Not the opposite.

“I am unclear how this position has been derived and validated by the MHCLG.”

She said the work to assess whether or not the buildings were safe “has been delegated to individual local authorities to determine, but I can ascertain no minimum safety standard requirement”.

Currently, buildings clad with ACM are required to switch to an evacuation policy, which usually requires the use of a ‘waking watch’ to raise the alarm if there is a fire.

In a fire in a block in Manchester this year, the watch failed to alert all of the residents of the need to evacuate.

Dr Lane added that there has also been no evidence to demonstrate that fire services have the necessary equipment and strategies to evacuate or fight a fire in an ACM-clad building – with particular regard to the presence of vulnerable residents who would struggle to evacuate themselves.

“Clarity on all the issues above would result in a subset of buildings that may in fact be unsafe to occupy at this time by some, or potentially all, types of residents,” she added.

She said the issue required “prioritisation at a national scale” to direct resources to fixing the most at risk buildings – work which she said “will take years to plan and deliver”.

“This time frame is very significant. Because it means the risk to life is therefore not short term, how are the current mitigation measures considered fit for purpose in this longer timescale?” she said.

“Again, this will impact what buildings can be categorised as safe to occupy, over this period. I cannot find such clarity in the evidence provided from the MCHLG.”

The government has provided £400m to pay for cladding removal in the social housing sector and £200m to cover costs in the private sector.

Dr Lane called on Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the judge leading the inquiry, to recommend the development of a standardised method for calculating the risk to life, nationally led prioritisation of the work and the publication of minimum mitigation measures for the interim.

Sir Martin elected not to make recommendations on these points but did call for the remediation work to be completed “as vigorously as possible”.

In a letter obtained by Inside Housing in May, Sir Martin signalled that he would limit his recommendations to issues relating to the specific evidence called in phase one – despite calls from the experts for “urgent and very far-reaching reform”.

But the letter added: “The fact that the chairman does not consider it appropriate to make any particular recommendation at this stage should not be taken as an indication that he does not regard the matter as important or that he will not make a recommendation in due course.”

Elsewhere in Dr Lane’s report, she called for significant changes to the testing and certification of materials in light of evidence about the cladding system installed at Grenfell Tower.

She said a certificate published by the British Board of Agrément (BBA) in 2008, which said Arconic’s ACM cladding met the standard of ‘Class 0’, contained “a startling series of omissions” regarding further test data carried out during the nine years it was in operation.

As a result, she called for a recommendation that certificates should no longer be published “without all the test data upon which they rely – pass and fail data – being made fully available”.

The BBA does not carry out tests itself and is currently reliant on manufacturers to provide this data.

She also criticised the ‘large-scale testing’ regime – calling for a “moratorium” on new data from BS 8414 tests and a new test which better reflects real world buildings.

Among the expert reports submitted to Sir Martin, there was wide support for a move away from blanket ‘stay put’ to a position where plans are available to evacuate a building if necessary. This recommendation was adopted by the report.

However, fire safety consultant Colin Todd said such a change was unnecessary.

“In my opinion, very little evidence has come to light thus far to suggest the need for urgent, immediate recommendations by the chairman of the public qnquiry. Accordingly, I strongly recommend that any interim recommendations that are made be kept to a minimum,” he said.

“In particular, I do not consider it appropriate, at this stage, for recommendations to be made in relation to policy, guidance or standards, or in relation to the stay put strategy that continues to be adopted in relation to new purpose-built blocks of flats.”

Mr Todd was the principal author of a 2011 guidance document published by the Local Government Association, which advised reliance on the stay put strategy. He declared this to the inquiry and in his report.

Dr Lane advised additional research on the required widths of staircases to support an evacuation.

While this is frequently cited as a reason why evacuation would be impossible, she said there was “no evidence” that the stair widths at Grenfell Tower would have made the stairway impossible during an all-out evacuation.

She described the current regulatory regime on stay put as “not fit for purpose”.