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Peter Apps

2 Nov, 11 tweets, 2 min read

Report from today at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

Government officials amended national firefighting guidance to include passages on abandoning ‘stay put’ advice after the LFB officers who first drafted it omitted any reference to doing so, inquiry hears

insidehousing.co.uk/news/governmen…

A short explainer of what this important but technical section of evidence has been about.

National fire services set their own local policies. But they are guided by standards set nationally by central government.

The last two days have looked into how the national guidance on high rise firefighting (Generic Risk Assessment 3.2) came into being.

This guidance is important because it did contain passages encouraging the reversal of 'stay put' advice if a fire got out of control

This guidance was published by government (DCLG) but (we have learned) it was actually prepared for government by officials at the LFB.

Part of the point was to take account of the Lakanal Fire - which killed six in south London in 2009.

Yesterday we heard that when LFB consulted on this document, various respondees advised clearer sections on rapid fire spread and reversing stay put as a result. These changes were not incorporated. insidehousing.co.uk/news/lfb-did-n…

Today we learned that DCLG officials actually pushed pretty hard in a lenghty back and forth with the LFB for clearer guidance on this point, following the coroner's investigation into Lakanal and a specific recommendation on this point.

But LFB didn't do it - they changed the guidance but not in this way. Ultimately, DCLG took their draft and unilaterally added the statements on reversing stay put etc.

LFB then failed to incorporate this into their local guidance and training: no specific training was given to incident commanders on reversing stay put before Grenfell. We all know what happened on the night.

All of which begs the question: why such a strong reluctance to move away from stay put within the LFB?

It also begs a serious question of govt - why did they insist on this for firefighting guidance while publishing guidance to housing providers at...

... around the same time which encouraged near-total reliance on 'stay put'? Why tell fire services of the need to evacuate with one hand and building owners it isn't necessary with the other? There is an obvious gap there which Grenfell exposed.

Of course - we are still seeing reluctance to move away from total reliance on stay put. Key recommendations from the inquiry on this point on evacuation plans for disabled residents and manual fire alarms remain on the back burner (ends)

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Peter Apps

@PeteApps

29 Sep

New: Residents at a 22-storey tower block owned by Clarion in east London were told today they need to move out due to safety concerns

insidehousing.co.uk/news/residents…

This one, by the way, is not about the 2000s/10s industry and government balls up of cladding, it's the 1960s/70s industry/gov balls up of large panel system construction. And not dealing with that despite knowing about it for 50 years (plus)

But a very tough day for an east London community who now face upheaval, home loss and uncertainty about whether they can stay in their community. The one consistent thing with badly built buildings: people suffer.

Read 4 tweets

Peter Apps

@PeteApps

8 Sep

Update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

Any fire risk assessor who does not make the increased risk to disabled high rise residents clear is not making a "suitable and sufficient" assessment, says expert

A large part of this morning spent on the issue of evacuation plans - and what should have been done for residents who were unable to use the stairs to evacuate

As we now know, at Grenfell no specific provisions were made for many disabled people in the tower, and reliance was placed on 'stay put' (something that was and remains true of many other tower blocks)

Read 19 tweets

Peter Apps

@PeteApps

3 Sep

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.

Read 15 tweets

Peter Apps

@PeteApps

2 Sep

https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/1433543656036659200

This is a very strong offering from Newsnight which - following several reports over the last few months - has dedicated its entire show to the building safety crisis and has nailed the key points. No government representative willing to argue its case on air.

https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/1433543656036659200

Will this finally be the moment this national scandal becomes a national leading story in the way it should be? Maybe. But there have been several times over the last four years when I thought that was about to happen and it hasn't yet.

I think the thing is though this story just won't ever go away. However exhausted the campaigners get (and many of them are - it has been a hell of a slog to this point), people have no real choice but to keep fighting.

Read 5 tweets

Peter Apps

@PeteApps

6 Jul

The Building Safety Bill was never intended to solve the problem of fixing existing building safety issues. Unsurprisingly, it provides no real answers.

The big question is why - four years on - has the government not looked for a proper legislative solution to this crisis?

To those who are newer to the story, the BSB implements Dame Judith Hackitt's review of construction practices. This is all about building new buildings and maintaining them - not getting cladding, timber balconies and dodgy fire breaks off existing towers.

Instead, this bill ultimately retains the status quo for remediation. Requiring building owners to explore other options is a gesture. For most people, extending the right to sue is as well (sue who? for what?)

Read 14 tweets

Peter Apps

@PeteApps

24 Jun

Update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

KCTMO chief executive questioned over alleged 'concealment and half truth' and 'attempt to blame the fire service' in response to Grenfell residents raising concerns about fire safety in 2010

So this morning, Robert Black - the former chief executive of KCTMO - continued giving evidence to the inquiry about fire safety issues in the build up to the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017

A particularly interesting run of questions covered a fire in the tower in April 2010, when some recycling bags piled up in a communal area were set alight. As we know from previous witnesses - this exposed a serious fault with the tower's smoke extraction system...

Read 22 tweets

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