By Danielle Aumord

Former managing director, Dr Debbie Smith, at the Building Research Establishment (BRE) didn’t tell an emergency meeting convened by government in the days after the Grenfell Tower fire that official tests had revealed the risk of the tower’s cladding material 16 years earlier.

She denies deliberately colluding with a government official to keep this information from ministers.

Dr Smith also denies being more concerned about money than safety, after an email showed her fretting about the loss of BRE’s “fire safety mantle” to “a competitor” if the competitor helped to prepare joint industry guidance on dangerous cladding.

The inquiry also heard that a “catastrophic” result of an official fire test on cladding meant that the government was “in no doubt at all” that the aggressively combustible material later installed on Grenfell “should never ever” be used on tall buildings from as early as 2002.

The BRE were contracted by the government to carry out this particular set of tests. Dr Smith, who was the managing director of the company at the time of these tests, told the inquiry into the fatal blaze that it was up to the governmental department that contracted them to release the results.

The British government was even warned in the early 2000s that the UK risked becoming a “dumping ground” for inferior construction products if tougher European fire standards were not implemented, but didn’t transition to them amid pressure from industry lobbyists.

At the time, the European Union (EU) had developed new fire tests which graded materials alphabetically from A1 (the best) to E (the worst). This represented a more sophisticated testing method than the British standards that underpinned Class 0.

For context, Class 0 is a national fire safety product classification, based on two, old smallscale tests on individual products or materials – namely BS 476-6 and BS 476-7. The tests only deal with the spread flames over the surface of a material. But class 0 and the BS 476
tests don’t measure the combustibility of a material such as an aluminium compositive material (ACM) cladding panel, which Grenfell was wrapped in as a part of a regeneration programme completed in 2016.

The UK was supposed to adapt to the standards of the new fire tests developed by the EU, but not all the industry representatives wanted the standards raised because combustible insulation products which could obtain a Class 0 rating by virtue of their foil facing wouldn’t be able to achieve Euroclass B, which was set to be introduced as the equivalent.

An email was shown to the inquiry from the industry’s lobbying group, warning that such products could be “prevented from continuing” and said the move to European standards therefore “should not happen”.

But the government appears to have resolved to go ahead with the change. Minutes from meetings shown to the inquiry showed that it intended to enter a transition phase where both Euroclass B and Class 0 were both acceptable within the marketplace.

The government would then require Euroclass B for all new products before eventually making the European standard the only relevant requirement and withdrawing the British standard for these products. The transition was meant to take approximately three years, but it never actually happened. Instead, the British industry remained stuck in an indefinite transition period until 2018 – a year after the Grenfell fire.

Despite failures to alter this guidance in the early 2000s, the relevant passages in Approved Document B did change in 2006 following a 2005 fire at a building in Salford called the Edge.

Approved Document B is a governmental document covering fire safety matters within and around buildings in England.

The walls of the Edge were made of metal panels held together with highly combustible polystyrene, which resulted in the fire spreading from the second floor to the top of the 19-storey building in less than ten minutes. At the time of the fire, the tower block had only recently been completed and was only partially occupied.

The panels used on the Edge had a Class 0 rating and were used in compliance with Approved Document B. But a report from the BRE said the fire service had “grave concerns” for the safety residents had the premises been fully occupied.

On 18 January 2005, Brian Martin, a senior civil servant, emailed the government to say that the “guidance is in need of clarification”.

He wrote: “This appears to be as a result of changes in construction practice whereby the intent of the original guidance has been circumvented.”

He attached a potential new wording which said that insulation products and “any other material” used in an external wall should meet the standard of “limited combustibility” which is a tougher test than the Class 0 test.

Technically what was being suggested here initially was for combustible cladding to be banned outright, but this isn’t what transpired because Mr Martin also said that his wording still needed “some work”, as in its current form it would’ve “prohibited timber-framed buildings”.

It was then that a redraft of Approved Document B was written, consulted on and republished in 2006; but this still caused some confusion. For example, the paragraph that Mr Martin had identified as in need of an edit was amended to say that “any insulation product, filler material…etc” should meet the standard of limited combustibility.

The origin of the word “filler” within this context appears to have come from a consultation response submitted by the National House Building Council (NHBC), a large building control firm, but the term was never actually formally consulted on and the meaning of the word “filler” was not made clear.

Government officials claimed that the words “filler material” should have covered the core of an ACM panel, yet inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, ruled that ACM cladding was the “primary cause of fire spread” and that the Grenfell refurbishment didn’t comply with building regulations.