By Danielle Aumord

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) ignored calls to include stronger warnings about building failures and when to revise ‘stay put’ advice, in draft national guidance it prepared for central government following the Lakanal House fire.

Peter Cowup, former head of operational policy at the LFB, has accepted that the absence of details of when and how to reverse a stay put policy during a tower block fire was a ‘fundamental omission’ from its training package.

He also agreed when questioned about whether it was ‘ultimately your responsibility’ to ensure this training was implemented, the public inquiry heard.

The lack of training for the reversal of the ‘stay put’ advice has been a major point of investigation at the Grenfell inquiry, after it heard evidence from officers in charge on the night of the fire that their training didn’t prepare them for the flames spreading up the building.

The coroner who investigated the 2009 Lakanal House fire, which killed six people in Camberwell, South London, recommended that incident commanders be trained to recognise when to move away from ‘stay put’ only four years before the Grenfell fire.

In light of this, the omission of details of when and how to reverse a ‘stay put’ policy during a tower block fire has been a crucial part of the public inquiry’s investigation into what happened on 14 June 2017, when 72 people lost their lives at Grenfell.

Passages on the reversal of ‘stay put’ were added by officials at the department then known as the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) before the document was published in 2013, due to the need to comply with the recommendations made by the Lakanal House coroner.

But when the LFB published an initial version of its local guidance – the Policy Note 633 – it didn’t include any of these passages.

The public inquiry heard that Patrick Utting, a former station manager who helped to develop the LFB’s policies for incident commanders, was unable to explain the absence of key passages on the ‘stay put’ policy he drafted.

This is a key factor to the blaze at Grenfell because residents were continuously told by firefighters at the scene to stay put until around 2.47am. This was almost two hours after the fire had started, and after the flames had spread both up and around the tower block.

This had fatal consequences because by this late hour many residents had lost the opportunity to escape with their lives.

It’s been noted that incident commanders in charge of tackling the blaze have previously told the inquiry that their training didn’t prepare them for the circumstances they faced.

Serious shortcomings were also found within the LFB control room on the night of the Grenfell fire. Control room operators have been accused of failing to tell affected residents to leave the building and offering assurances that they would be rescued which ‘lulled [residents] into a false sense of security,’ the inquiry heard.

Training of the fire brigade’s control room operators before the Grenfell fire was also found to be insufficient and described to the public inquiry as ‘ad hoc’.

The failures have been described as ‘systemic in nature’ following on from the Lakanal House fire, where six residents lost their lives after being advised by control room operators to also stay put.

Witnesses at the inquiry heard that the LFB’s training was not planned in an ‘appropriate and robust manner’ despite several warnings that it needed to be improved.

LFB manager Joanne Stibbards even wrote a ‘scathing’ internal review of the brigade’s post-Lakanal training in a 2011 email, which was shown to the inquiry. Ms Stibbard criticised PowerPoint presentations used in 2010 to train staff responsible for answering emergency calls – within which she pointed out incorrect and contradictory advice on high rise buildings. ‘I feel if we were to take this PowerPoint to the Lakanal Board, we would be severely criticised. It fails to cover some issues we have already informed the board are dealt with. It is neither positive, grammatically correct and does not emphasise the alternative escape routes,’ she said.

Scott Hayward, a former LFB operations room manager, told the public inquiry that the training provided to control room staff was limited because of budgetary constraints and struggles with a new IT system.

He also admitted that between 2013 and 2017 the training also didn’t cover all the criteria promised by the fire brigade to the coroner responsible for the Lakanal House fire inquest.

The public inquiry continues.