Whenever there’s a fire in a tower block, bewildered residents tell the cameras the same thing. “We didn’t hear the fire alarm. I never even knew there was a fire, till I saw the smoke/my neighbour came knocking”. That was the story again, after fire gutted a tower bock in Dagenham, just days ago. But the reality is worse than those residents are aware. There are no alarms, because residents are not supposed to evacuate high rise buildings in the event of a fire.
The policy is called Stay Put.
The Report of the Grenfell Inquiry, published yesterday, confirms that Stay Put was at least partly responsible for the tragic loss of 72 lives. The report warns that, as long as Stay Put is the standard response to residential fires, especially with so many towers being insulated with new and untested materials, the danger of another Grenfell remains. Yet incredibly, it seems that Stay Put will be the standard response for years to come – possibly forever – for hundreds of residential blocks.
The reason is the differences in regulations between residential towers and commercial buildings like offices, hotels and shops. Commercial buildings require intelligent alarm systems, two emergency staircases, firemen’s lifts and sprinklers fitted throughout. Blocks of flats on the other hand are almost always built with just one emergency staircase. Only since 2020 have they required sprinklers in buildings higher than 11 metres.
The argument from developers is that second staircases take up valuable floorspace, rendering some developments not commercially viable. Successive governments bought this thin gruel argument, even though residential buildings present arguably greater risk. Unlike offices, they are occupied 24/7 and they contain children, the elderly and the disabled.
In the event of a fire in a tower block with just one staircase, the problem is this: if residents make their way down, they will impede fire crews trying to get themselves and their equipment up. So instead residents are told to “stay put”, till the fire service comes to rescue them. And no alarm is sounded.
Developers’ justification for Stay Put is that modern tower bocks are built with something called “compartmentation”. Each flat is supposed to be enclosed in its own concrete box, preventing smoke and flames from spreading from one flat to the next, for up to an hour. This supposedly gives the fire service plenty of time to get on site and extinguish the fire or get people out.
But this reckons without several very serious flaws in the process of building and managing modern flats.
First, as Grenfell showed, some of the materials used in construction can accelerate the spread of fire. Composites make up a growing proportion of building materials. New ones are being developed all the time. Can we really trust that the laziness, cost cutting, ignorance and outright deceit that led to the use of ACM cladding on Grenfell and hundreds of other residential towers have disappeared from the building trade?
Add to this an alarming shoddiness in the construction of many of those flats. I am sitting on the 31st floor of one such, marketed as a luxury block and designed by one of the most prestigious names in residential development. A decade ago, the extractor above a grill in a restaurant kitchen on the ground floor caught fire. That extractor was clogged with fat and when a spark drifted up from the grill, the fat caught light immediately. The fire burned for nearly an hour unseen. Within that hour, smoke had begun drifting out of everyone’s light fittings, 30 floors up. The smoke had got into our ceiling voids. Unknown to us, as we sat down to our dinners on that November night and wondered about the strange burning smell, the corridors outside our flats were also filling up with deadly smoke. That couldn’t have happened, had our flats really been the sealed boxes they were sold as. But of course they weren’t.
During construction of a block of flats, a series of trades will follow one another, bringing in services like electricity, broadband and plumbing. Each trade will gouge holes in the walls between flats, common parts and riser cupboards, to accommodate pipes and wiring. Too often no one fills in those holes. It’s quicker and cheaper just to shove some plasterboard over them and paint. Who’s going to know what lies behind?
Eventually that night a neighbour came banging on my front door. I opened it to find, to my shock, he was holding a wet towel over his face and the lift lobby behind him was filled with smoke. We were lucky. Our building is one of a tiny handful where a second staircase has been extended beyond the commercial floors to the full height of the building. This staircase was a few steps from my front door. I believe it saved my life.
From my window I can see a tower completed only a couple of years ago. It is 73 storeys. It has two staircases for the first 11 floors, because these floors contain a hotel, but just one staircase for the hundreds of residents that occupy the 62 floors above. That block has already suffered one – thankfully small – fire.
After our fire, we were assured the problems had all been fixed. The compartmentation was fine. It wasn’t until over a decade later, after the passing of the Building Safety Act and a snap fire service inspection, that we discovered this wasn’t the case. Almost every flat has had to have its compartmentation reinforced. God knows what might have happened if there’d been another fire over those 14 years.
That brings us to the third problem for modern flat dwellers. Almost all flats in England and Wales are sold as leasehold. The leaseholder doesn’t own the flat, just the right to inhabit it for a set number of years and the obligation to pay for all repairs and maintenance. The person responsible for carrying out that maintenance will be your freeholder, who will certainly collect your money, but may not spend it on the repairs you need. And if they don’t, again how are you to know?
Our neighbours at another Docklands estate suffered a serious fire three years ago. It appeared that their fire safety systems had not been properly maintained. Their fire escape filled with smoke because extractor mechanisms weren’t working. Several residents, including two small babies, came within minutes of losing their lives as a result.
All this becomes more urgent because of the new Government’s mad rush to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years. Of course the country needs those homes. But as campaigners have petitioned Government year after year, unless there is proper consumer protection to drive up build quality, and unless leasehold is radically reformed to give flat owners control of the management of their own homes, we will never be sure we aren’t creating yet more death traps.
The Building Safety Act, passed in 2022, is a sprawling, contradictory piece of legislation that puts most of its weight behind trying to prevent fires like Grenfell happening in the first place. Laudable though that may be, fires will happen and the key for any high rise residents is that they can get themselves and their families the hell out, if the worst comes to the worst. Mandating intelligent alarms, second staircases, firemen’s lifts and the retrofitting of sprinklers would have been the way to go. The Act has nothing to say about any of it.
Thanks to tireless campaigning by the Grenfell survivors and others, two emergency staircases will finally become mandatory in residential blocks over 18 metres from October 2026. But even then, any building which has already begun construction, even if it is just basic piling, will not have to comply. If, as seems likely, the bulk of Labour’s new homes are flats, then at 300,000 dwellings per year, by the time the new regulation kicks in, nearly a million more flats may have been built with no second staircase and the Stay Put policy, with all the dangers the Grenfell Inquiry has clearly established, will stay put.
Margaret Rothwell is a pseudonym. The author is a member of the campaign group, Free Leaseholders.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.