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Senior official said government did not need to ‘kiss the backside’ of Lakanal House coroner

News29.03.226.53 PM by Peter Apps

A senior official told colleagues that a coroner’s recommendation to encourage housing providers to fit sprinklers in high-rise blocks was “essentially pointless” and they did not need to “kiss her backside”.

Brian Martin arrives at the inquiry (picture: SWNS)

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In March 2013, following an 50-day inquest into the six deaths at the Lakanal House fire in south London, coroner Frances Kirkham wrote to the government recommending that housing providers should be “encouraged to consider” fitting sprinkler systems into other high-rise blocks.

But two weeks later, Brian Martin, the official responsible for building regulations guidance on fire safety, branded this exercise “a big and essentially pointless task” in an email to colleagues.

He said his favoured option was instead to “tell the coroner we’ve already raised this with social landlords… so we don’t plan to do anything”. “We only have a duty to respond to the coroner, not kiss her backside,” he added.

Mr Martin, who worked in the building regulations division, said in the email that he was intervening in the issue because the team responsible for dealing with housing policy “would not be able to come up with this” as they “struggle with big words”.

Asked today if the comments indicated that he did not take the recommendations seriously, Mr Martin said: “Clearly it’s an informal comment. I think I’m describing… that the statutory situation was that the department must respond within a fixed amount of time, but there’s no requirement on the department to do what the coroner recommends.”

“What was the basis on which you said it would be ‘essentially pointless’ to try to raise awareness of the coroner’s recommendation with all landlords?” asked Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry.

“As I recall regarding the retrofitting of sprinklers, the coroner’s recommendation was that landlords should consider retrofitting sprinklers, which is something that had been raised with landlords on a previous occasion,” Mr Martin said. “You would need a communications exercise to say, ‘please think of this thing’, knowing full well they had recently thought about this thing and they couldn’t afford it last time, so they probably wouldn’t be able to afford it now.”

He added that the department would not have been able to provide the necessary funding to implement the recommendation.

“There was a principle which applied in government policy, and still applies today, which is if a government department says to a local authority ‘you ought to be doing this extra thing’, then it is for that department to find the funding for that extra thing,” he said.

Then-communities secretary Eric Pickles ultimately wrote back in May 2013 to tell Ms Kirkham that the department had “recently written to all social housing providers about this” following the deaths of two firefighters in a tower block in Southampton.

An Inside Housing investigation in 2015 revealed that just 18 council-owned tower blocks of 2,952 in the survey had been fitted with sprinklers, despite the coroner’s comments.

One of these was Grenfell Tower, where internal documents show the block’s management company, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, were specifically told by government officials that the Lakanal House coroner’s recommendations would not be made mandatory.

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Earlier, Mr Martin told the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that the Lakanal House fire did not trigger a wider investigation into whether other buildings had similarly dangerous materials on their walls because the incident was not “severe” enough to justify doing so.

The inquiry saw that he had been made aware in November 2013 that panels fixed to the outside of Lakanal House, comprised of foam insulation and combustible high-pressure laminate boards, had drastically failed to meet standards when tested by the Metropolitan Police.

But no work was commissioned to assess whether or not similar products were being used on other buildings.

Asked if he was “never interested in doing a survey of what was out there to make sure the buildings people were living in weren’t dangerous”, Mr Martin said: “I think that’s a fair criticism. It was the nature of the work we did. We didn’t see that as our function.

“It would have to be a more severe issue to justify something retrospective. I think that’s probably a mindset that we adopted, probably inappropriately sometimes.”

“A more severe issue would be something like the fire at Grenfell Tower?” asked Mr Millett.

“That’s an extreme example, but yes,” replied Mr Martin.

“Well it’s the precise example because it was only after that incident that the British government decided to do something retrospective, isn’t it?” said Mr Millett.

“Yes, I think that’s a fair point and if we had thought this was a very severe situation we may have suggested more steps,” replied Mr Martin. “None of us looked upon this as something where retrospective action was necessary.”

Among the six deaths at Lakanal House were three children, including a three-week-old baby.

Mr Martin said he did not believe the external wall construction at Lakanal House was the cause of the deaths, saying it was “a much more complex issue than that”.

As he left the witness box for the lunch break, there was a call of “shame on you” from the public gallery.

The inquiry saw that in response to a colleague suggesting that debris from the burning panels may have caused the Lakanal fire to spread downwards, Mr Martin responded saying the debris could have been from “bird netting or some other crap”.

He added in the email sent in March 2013 that he thought the investigation was “over-egging the impact of the panels”.

“It’s difficult to remember what I was thinking about this particular email, but I think there had been a lot of focus on these particular panels when a lot of the issues at this incident were internal,” he said.

“One can detect from the documents I’ve shown you that your position seemed to be one of taking the emphasis away from the impact of the panels and focusing more on the effect of burning debris blowing out of the flats… is that fair?” asked Mr Millett.

“I wasn’t trying to detract attention from the panels. We were just discussing what we thought about the incident,” replied Mr Martin.

Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry (picture: Grenfell Tower Inquiry)

Mr Martin was also asked at length about his witness statement to the Lakanal House coroner’s inquest and the oral evidence he gave about the building regulations contained in Approved Document B.

He has previously told the inquiry that a redrafting exercise in 2006, which added the words ‘filler material’ to a section covering insulation was done to impose higher fire standards on a wide-range of materials used in an external wall.

The interpretation of these two words is critical to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s work, because they determine whether or not official guidance permitted the combustible cladding of the kind used on the tower.

Mr Martin claims they should have covered the internal core of a cladding panel, and this interpretation was adopted by the government after the fire, but has been hotly contested by many industry figures ever since.

The inquiry saw today that Mr Martin never mentioned the words ‘filler material’ in his evidence to the Lakanal House coroner. He also did not explain that the changes to the guidance in 2006 were supposed to extend the application of the guidance to a wider range of products.

He said this is because the panels on Lakanal House were used as insulation, which meant they were not impacted by the introduction of the words ‘filler material’.

“Were you trying to avoid scrutiny by the coroner of the words ‘filler material’ because you knew it was less than clear and, as you told us in your evidence here, you were unhappy with it?” asked Mr Millett.

“I don’t think that’s what I was thinking, no,” replied Mr Martin. “I think I was just focused on answering the questions I was asked.”

The inquiry continues with evidence from current Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis beginning tomorrow. Mr Lewis was housing minister from July 2014 to July 2016 and had been a junior minister in the department since 2012.

Mr Martin will then conclude his evidence in the afternoon, following Mr Lewis’ examination.

Who is Brian Martin?

Picture: SWNS

Brian Martin had been responsible for official building regulations guidance on fire safety, contained in Approved Document B, for almost 18 years by the time of the Grenfell Tower fire.

He was the person within the department “to whom others would turn” to answer questions on this topic.

When she gave evidence, Melanie Dawes, the former permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), was asked if it was “pretty dangerous” to have the responsibility for all this “falling on one man’s shoulders”.

“Yes, I do. I think it ’s a single point of failure that had been allowed to be created,” she said. Asked to explain how this happened, she said it reflected budget cuts, the localism agenda and the fact that “regulation was not seen as something valuable, it was seen as something that created costs and burdens”.

Mr Martin has no formal fire safety or engineering qualifications. His qualifications amounted to a diploma in building control surveying obtained around 25 years ago.

He had trained as a joiner and carpenter after leaving school, before rising to site manager. Asked if this gave him any fire safety experience, he said: “I would have installed some fire doors.”

Aged 22, he became a building control surveyor, working first for Westminster, Tower Hamlets and Dartford councils, and did review fire strategies for some complex projects, including the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.

In 1999, he applied for a job at the Building Research Establishment (BRE), the former national testing centre which had recently been privatised. The BRE had a contract to support the government with a review of Approved Document B and within weeks of starting, Mr Martin was seconded to the department’s offices for two to three days a week to support this work.

Mr Martin would go on to take a permanent role at the department in 2008 as ‘principal construction professional’. This saw him take on primary responsibility for Approved Document B. The inquiry has already heard about many critical warnings regarding the looming danger of a cladding fire which were issued to him in this role.

In November 2017, five months after the Grenfell fire, he was promoted to head of technical policy, leading the team of specialists who oversaw changes to building regulations and guidance.

However, in September last year he moved to the planning directorate. He said he had been “encouraged” to find a new role given “the challenges associated with my attendance at the inquiry and the attention I was getting in the press”.

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