Fire safety concerns raised before tower block blaze

Sheila Keogh, health and safety advisor at the local authority, was read internal emails which showed one member of staff continually raising the issue with senior members of staff at the council, and clearly telling them in April 2008 the council was in breach of the Fire Safety Order 2005.

The order, which came into effect in October 2006, handed the responsibility for fire safety from the fire brigade to the council.

A fire risk assessment had not been done on Lakanal House when a fire spread rapidly through the 14-storey block killing three women and three children on 3 July 2009.

The emails read out yesterday at Lambeth Assembly Hall started in November 2006. Counsel to the inquest James Maxwell-Scott questioned Ms Keogh, who joined the council in June 2008.

‘It seems that the positioning in 2006 was that all Southwark sites where staff worked had had fire risk assessments on them but that residential properties had not,’ he said.

Ms Keogh answered: ‘Yes, it looks that way.’ The jury heard that it was not until May 2009 that a borough-wide fire risk assessment programme really got underway.

In cross-examination Ms Keogh said she was concerned that it took so long for the fire risk assessments to start after she had arranged for the London Fire Brigade to train housing officers.

‘It looks like the fire risk assessments didn’t start for another four or five months [after training],’ she said. She wanted the training to be a ‘fresh’ in housing officers’ minds when they did the assessments.

Zahra Al Tai, representing the partner of Catherine Hickman, 31, who died in the fire, asked if, after all her work to arrange the fire risk assessment training, she would have expected it to be of a higher priority. ‘I would have expected it to,’ Ms Keogh answered. She said management wanted all staff to be trained before assessments started, but she did not know why that was.

She also said when she joined Southwark the staff member who had been continually trying to raise the issue with senior management ‘was very, very frustrated and cross that nothing was really moving fast’.

Part of a letter from the London Fire Brigade’s assistant commissioner for fire safety regulation, Steve Turek, to Southwark Council, sent in March 2009, was read out to the inquest.

He warned the local authority about various fire safety hazards fire fighters had noted in London residential blocks that should be investigated in its fire risk assessments. He said in previous incidents lack of fire stopping in blocks had allowed rapid fire spread, meaning tenants had become trapped and needed to be rescued.

Helen Udoaka, 34, and her 20-day-old baby Michelle Udoaka, Dayana Francisquini, 26, and her two children, three-year-old Felipe and six-year-old Thais, died with Ms Hickman in the fire.

All the evidence in the inquest is expected to have been heard by Thursday next week.