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Having once held a senior role in the fire and rescue service and called for nearly three days to provide evidence to the Grenfell Inquiry I maintain a keen interest in fire safety. I learnt a great deal about fire investigation and safety during my time as Deputy Commissioner in London and quickly came to realise that it was very important, but also that it held out prospects for bringing about real improvements in the safety of the public.
Grenfell showed us what happens if fire safety is neglected or corrupted. So I have watched what came next with great interest. On the one hand it feels like the introduction of the regulator and changes to requirements, codes and qualification requirements have decent prospects for achieving better outcomes. But on the less reassuring side of the equation, it has become clear that there is a deep reservoir of serious and dangerous building and construction failure that will take decades to remedy.
The fact that we still seem to be in a discovery phase, where more and more buildings are identified as having serious defects is clearly of concern and the level of resources available for discovery and remedy seem to be stretched.
Councils should be told when buildings fail
But one of my reservations about developments post Grenfell is that they remain too narrowly confined to development in the fire safety industry. I admit to some scepticism about some of the industry, which feels dominated by retired fire service personnel, who of course bring fire service experience, but not necessarily a depth of experience in fire investigation or fire safety. Having poked that hornet’s nest, my bigger concern is that local councils are still so separate from the action. And consequently, residents have few opportunities to see in their locality what is or is not happening.
The government response to the second report from the Chair of the Grenfell Inquiry notes that “responsibility and oversight for… residential buildings is scattered across local and central government, multiple government departments, regulators, fire and rescue services and bodies that are not accountable to government. … this makes it easier for non-compliance to be missed and for there to be a lack of clarity about who should take responsibility for issues and risks.” It expresses a wish to remedy that, but the latest Minister recently accepted that there will still be some fragmentation into the future.
I think there needs to be a mechanism where, from their perspective, residents can see in one place what is being done to manage risk in their locality and have opportunities to challenge the responsible bodies.
There is a strong case for a new statutory duty upon local authorities which would require that councils be made responsible for the production and publication of a strategic annual report on fire safety in their areas.
At the moment, I strongly suspect that there will be few councils that could readily produce a list of the premises where they are the ‘responsible person’. And it follows that they will be unable to produce a list of the number where a fire risk assessment has been undertaken, never mind the date or quality of that assessment. Nor will they have any overview of the premises where they are not the responsible person, but where a serious fire could give rise to demand for their services.
For example, in the past 20 years there has been growth in the number of residential premises over shops and much of this will be occupied by publicly funded tenants. No one would seriously suggest that any local authority needs to know about the fire safety management in retail premises, but if there is a fire that makes the homes above it unavailable, or results in fatalities, that could change.
Similarly, publicly funded placements in poorly managed care homes would be difficult to defend in the event of a serious incident. The public might think that it is reasonable to assume that a local authority should have some kind of insight into whether a building in which they have an interest, but are not the responsible person, is well managed in fire safety terms.
Fire authorities and other regulatory bodies should have a duty to provide councils with information.
For example, which care homes are failing in their fire safety duties? Which sheltered housing? Which high rise premises? Which schools? And how is the fire and rescue service targeting its fire safety visits – does it accord with what the council knows about likely risk in the area?
Most fires result from action taken by people, from white goods and increasingly lithium-ion batteries, but some fires are made much worse by the building and what has been done to it. London Fire Brigade used to collect this data, but it is not routinely published. It should be and it should be included in the annual report. If the failing building is one where the council is the responsible person, then they will be able to explore why that failure occurred. There will be other failing buildings where the council is not the responsible person, but where they have a regulatory or other role and could bring some influence to bear.
Enhancing roles of existing regulators
Similarly, some bodies with regulatory or influencing roles fail to use the opportunities that are clearly available to them to enhance fire safety management. For example, the Care Quality Commission’s failure to give prominence to fire risk in their inspections of care homes and sheltered housing, even though these premises accommodate residents who are significantly at higher risk from fire. The CQC should be obliged to provide an annual round up of their work in each locality for inclusion in the annual report.
The findings of the Regulator of Social Housing are publicly available and full of important (and alarming) fire safety information, but you have to know it exists and it’s not easy to negotiate. It is not obvious that the recipient landlords have to be transparent about their response. In the same way as the CQC, they should provide an annual round up to each local authority for inclusion in the report.
Dealing with the aftermath
Next, the report would set out what disaster recovery plans it has in place, so that if the worst happens, there are procedures and people and resources to respond.
Finally, there are no systemised arrangements for how communications and recommendations passing between government, fire authorities, local authorities, coroners, and housing providers are received and dealt with.
For many years, between central and local government, there was a robust system of Local Authority Circulars. These are still issued, but in response to calls for less interference and less regulation, the number of these has diminished and, with that diminution a useful mechanism for prompting action and for being able to check that action followed has been lost. The annual report would disclose what had been received and report the action it has taken.
Such a report, presented to a meeting of the Council, would also provide a vehicle for the concerns of residents to be brought to prominence, if other mechanisms have failed them.
Audit tools
In the wake of the Lakanal House fire, in July 2014 I designed (and London Fire Brigade still publishes) three audit tools for use by local authorities, to enable them to seek assurance about the efficacy of key stages of their building programmes in relation to fire safety precautions, but in lay language.
Like other professions, those involved in building design and delivery have their own specialist vocabulary. But that vocabulary is then used to invite strategic decision-makers, such as councillors, to make vital decisions usually without the necessary expertise to penetrate or challenge those invitations. It was this problem that the audit tools were trying to confront.
The audit tool had three parts. In the first part, questions that those responsible for the governance and policies of an organisation should ask. For example, does the borough have clear policies stating that once refurbishments, modifications or maintenance works are complete, councillors will receive confirmation that the building will meet all necessary fire safety requirements?
In the second, which addressed cross-disciplinary working, to establish that the appropriate professional disciplines had been involved in planning for projects it asked officers to report on the arrangements in place for ensuring consultation across relevant departments and disciplines (whether provided by in-house staff or external suppliers), also including the fire service.
The third section was concerned with whether the different elements of specific projects were executed with fire safety in mind. For example, how did officers guard against individual design failures; against the use of incorrect materials; and ensure that no materials that might contribute to a fire were used?
The audit tools could be used to help with the interrogation of an annual report.
Fire safety still needs some help to bring it out of the shadows. The news regularly tells us about significant fires and about the trauma of living in high rise blocks that turn out to be unsafe, but it is very hard to find any focal or accessible places that bring everything together in one place. This proposal would remedy that and begin to provide the tools for some momentum around planning for safety.
Find out more about the Grenfell Tower fire in this review of the new documentary available on Netflix – Grenfell Uncovered is a powerful telling of an avoidable tragedy.
