Thread by @PeteApps

I think a question left hanging a few times on Newsnight last night was: Is the current building safety remediation effort an overreaction?

Here's a thread trying to answer it. In a nutshell - it's more a case of trying to solve the wrong problem in the wrong way (1/?)

You have to go back to the beginning a bit to explain how we ended up here. Grenfell was clad in an extremely combustible material called 'ACM'. For the first 18 months or so after the fire, that's all the government was focused on remediating.

But then in autumn 2018, things started to change. Civil servants were sent some testing showing a popular non-ACM system failing pretty badly. There was mounting concern about other materials which were also very flammable.

At this point the govt made what is still it's biggest mistake and published an obscure document called 'Advice Note 14'. This advised the owners of blocks of flats that no combustible materials should be on their walls at all, unless the entire system had passed a test

This was a catastrophic error because guidance for the prior 30 years has been permissive of combustibles in lots of ways, so buildings have lots of it (see pinned tweet for more detail). The government was effectively asking for the remediation of half the country's tower blocks

Why would they do such a thing? I think the only possible answer is some degree of arse-covering. They have never wanted to accept their guidance was in any way deficient pre-Grenfell. There is a lot of liability hanging on that, and some reputations too.

So this advice was basically a reinterpretation of the rules that had existed for 30 years. When it was extended to incorporate medium rises in January 2020 we suddenly hit the situation where almost every building was non-compliant, or could not be shown to be compliant

What's happened since is really a big buck passing exercise where no one really knows what's safe and what isn't and no one wants their hands (or personal liability insurance) dirtied with the responsibility of being the one who says 'it's probably ok' when it might not be.

The result is we're trying to get all the combustible materials we've installed over three decades off walls. This is an impossible task. It would take us somewhere in the region of 200 years to do it, by which time there probably won't even be humans on current trajectories

I think what's really critical to understand is that it's not really an issue of 'overreaction', but trying to solve the wrong problem. We are trying to achieve compliance with the govt's reinterpretation of historic guidance, not to save lives in fire.

You can see this by looking at what else the government is doing on building safety. We've put £30m into retrofitting fire alarms. That's equivalent to 0.6% of the building safety fund, despite it being a specific recommendation of the Grenfell inquiry.

And that is still £30m more than we've put into sprinklers, and £30m more than we've spent to prepare escape plans for residents who would struggle to evacuate. We are not seeking to protect lives. Big cladding fires mostly kill people who can't escape or are warned too late.

What would I do? Take £2bn of the £5bn and put sprinklers, manual fire alarms and personal evacuation plans for disabled residents in pretty much every building in the country. Then fund government-led inspections of the external wall and fix the ones...

... that are actually really dangerous - even with active fire protection in place. Such systems do exist, are out there and will kill more people if they aren't remediated. Part of the problem at the moment is not seeing the wood for the trees.

One of the things that really worries me is that people will see the current position as an overreaction, but therefore conclude we might as well just do nothing. We cannot afford to if we want to avoid another tower block disaster.