Dangerous buildings protected by ‘waking watches’ have seen 300 fires since Grenfell, new figures reveal

London has 289 of the buildings (68%) with waking watches and the London Fire Brigade has responded to 263 fires in these premises since Grenfell.

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Notes: The following fire authorities said they currently have no waking watches: Shropshire, Staffordshire, Guernsey, Norfolk, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Isle of Scilly, Cornwall, Durham and Darlington, Avon, Humberside, North Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, and Devon and Somerset. Fire authorities for East Sussex and Scotland said they do not record a figure. Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue service did not respond to the FOIA request, but the figure was taken from a report of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority taskforce on fire safety. It is the total number of buildings with ‘interim fire safety measures’ – the majority of which are understood to involve waking watches.

Source: Responses to Inside Housing FOIA requests, February and March 2020

A waking watch is put in place when a residential building switches to a ‘simultaneous evacuation’ policy due to serious fire safety issues – typically combustible cladding on its walls.

They are supposed to be a temporary measure, but Inside Housing’s data shows they have been in place for years in many places, with some stretching right back to June 2017.

There are concerns the current crisis could extend their use, with work to remove cladding and install fire alarms delayed.

Separate FOIA responses from local authorities reveal the huge cost to the public purse of providing these services, with 34 councils spending a combined £29.4m for watches at 134 buildings over varying timescales.

The largest bill was £10.2m paid by Camden Council in London for waking watch cover at nine towers running from June 2017 to December last year.

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Source: Responses to Inside Housing FOIA requests, January and February 2020

Lord Gary Porter, building safety spokesperson at the Local Government Association, said: “Waking watch services are not a long-term solution to protect residents in dangerous buildings, but a short-term solution until dangerous cladding can be removed.

“The current coronavirus pandemic poses a serious challenge to remediation works but the government has been clear that it wants this work to go ahead and we support that, subject to appropriate health and safety advice.”

In the private sector these costs are met by leaseholders, with some paying up to £840 a month each to keep the services in place – on top of bills to remove the cladding and soaring insurance premiums.

The services must be kept in place to avoid the fire services evacuating the buildings, rendering the residents homeless.

In a statement, various cladding action groups across the UK said the coronavirus outbreak had made these costs particularly difficult to meet.

“The huge additional and ongoing costs that many leaseholders have to pay as a result of living in dangerous cladding blocks means they face an impossible decision about work and self-isolation. No income means no ability to pay for the waking watch required for them to stay in that building,” a spokesperson said.