Red tape cuts left officials “unable” to escalate fire safety warnings in years before Grenfell, government admits

The government has admitted that officials had “felt unable” to escalate warnings about fire safety in the years leading up to the Grenfell Tower fire because of its drive for deregulation.

Jason Beer QC, representing the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, told yesterday’s hearing of the Grenfell Inquiry that a policy of cutting red tape under David Cameron and Theresa May had constrained officials working on revisions of building regulations.

In his closing statements for module six of the inquiry’s second phase, Beer said: “The department would accept that deregulation played a part in underpinning a culture in the department where officials felt unable properly to escalatewarningswhen they were raised or to progress work in response to recommendations.”

The inquiry has already heard that government officials hadfailed to implement changes to the regulationsrecommended by a coroner following the 2009 Lakanal House fire in Camberwell, south London, which killed six people.

到2017年6月格伦费尔大厦(Grenfell Tower)大火时，这些规定仍未改变，尽管2013年开始对这些规定进行审查。那场大火导致72人丧生。

Beer conceded yesterday that thedelay in completing the reviewwas “primarily demonstrative of an under-appreciation of the risks by the department in not updating [fire safety guidance] sooner, based upon afalse understandingthat the system was generally operating as it should be”.

他还表示，由于该部缺乏正式的监管角色、依赖行业以及财政限制，该部错失了研究监管体系有效性的机会。

> Also read:Decay, delay and deregulation: what we have learnt from the Grenfell Inquiry

Brian Martin, the official responsible for fire safety guidance in buildings for nearly 18 years before the Grenfell tower fire, has previously said he considered himself to be the “single point of failure” in an under-resourced department.

Refuting this, Beer said “in reality responsibility was not one that could possibly fall on one person’s shoulders”.

Martin hadauthored two amendments to the guidance in 2006which have been repeatedly raised in the inquiry as creating uncertainty in the construction industry over which types of products were prohibited in cladding systems.

While Beer accepted that these amendments were “capable of causing confusion”, he insisted a “competent professional” would have realised that any combustible material would not be compliant in the wider context of the regulations.

He said: “The department would suggest that it is plain that the professionals engaged in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, and those professionals engaged in the construction and refurbishment of other high-rise residential blocks in the country, cannot claim to have seriously turned their minds to the question of compliance… in any meaningful way.”

Beer added that local authority building control bodies and approved inspectors had also not been “competently applying their minds” in allowing tall buildings to be clad with combustible cladding panels and insulation products.

But a lawyer representing the manufacturer of the ACM cladding panels installed on Grenfell Tower had said earlier in the hearing that the belief that combustible materials did not comply with regulations “lacks plausibility”.

包覆层公司Arconic法国分公司AAP SAS的代表斯蒂芬·霍克曼QC说，目击者“对他们面前的一切视而不见”。

他补充说:“随着人们对形势的意识不断增强，甚至在格伦费尔火灾发生之前，就没有人愿意正视遗留问题，也就是当各方决定使用可燃材料的建筑不再是安全的施工方法时，在处理这些建筑遗留问题时都要面对的问题。”

And Tim Green, representing insulation manufacturer Kingspan, described the government’s failure to recognise that ACM panels posed a significant fire risk despite a series of tests in 2001 as “shocking”.

He said the regulatory system in the years before the Grenfell fire had failed to “recognise the importance of the test data held by the government, or the importance of the multiple other reports of concerns about… ACM”.

他补充说:“这次失败的部分原因是监管机构或相关政府部门没有强调测试数据需要进行透明的整理和共享，即使是政府持有的数据。”

The inquiry has heard how the ACM tests, commissioned by the government and carried out by the Building Research Establishment, had resulted in “catastrophic” failure and was extinguished after just five minutes when flames reached 65ft, twice the height of the test rig.

But no action was taken by officials following the tests, and the results were not shared with the industry. Martin has previously told the inquiry that they had“只是被遗忘了”。

Module six of the inquiry has looked into the government’s role in setting the regulatory regime in the years before Grenfell. The next module of the Inquiry will hear from expert witnesses.