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.
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Thanks for this article. Very sad.
The cancer of socialism. Congratulations to everyone who voted Labour – hope you are satisfied.
When you home school your children, you typically will not have grooming gangs waiting outside the doors of your house to kidnap them. (its their culture) While the school administration and police and MI5 look the other way.
I’m dead against Ms Phillistine’s intent to educate good little socialists. Beware Ms Phillistine, some of these kids will develop an annoying habit of thinking for themselves and growing up to be contributors to the Daily Sceptic.
Ancient history now, but my recollection of attending a 1960s grammar school turned comp is that teaching of history stopped at 1914, perhaps out of respect to central characters still alive and kicking. Teachers kept their politics out of the classroom.
As for home schooling, what about socialisation (for want of a better word)? Even more anciently, as a sheltered only child in the late 1950s, one of my early memories is learning the right body language in the school playground when the lads from the council estate were on the warpath. Later, standing up to them at football and cricket helped no end. First to school got to bat first – get in, play down the line and make the little buggers learn some patience!
Stand by to be told nowadays I’d be knifed. The school’s still there, with the emblem on the gable end, saying “Built in 1911.”
And as an afterthought – school, sport and wandering round the village were for me a bit of an escape from a home that could be a tad claustrophobic. Yet more of mum, dad, two grannies and a grandad might not have done me any favours.
Witness the teenage only tearaway from the next street rebelling big time against older mum and dad and the childless auntie and uncle living a few doors away…
I home educate my daughter and the socialisation part is always misunderstood (I’ll never forget a school mum during lockdown telling me I was lucky as I was “used to it”. Er, no. I’m definitely not used to enforced isolation for weeks or months on end!) She and her friends attend groups and meet ups several times a week with other home educated children. If we wanted to, we could be out and occupied every day of the week. Of course, a family could choose not to attend anything, but in those cases it would usually be a child who is not coping or “socialising” at school anyway and is having other difficulties. They are actually much more likely to re-engage at some point in small scale home ed activities than in a noisy school with hundreds or thousands of pupils.
Home education doesn’t suit everyone, or course not, some children thrive in the busyness of school. The point is that parents should be free to choose what is right for their child at that particular time in their life. Some of the home ed children I know have gone back into school at some point, particularly as teenagers (when as you say, they start to wish for more independence). They usually seem to cope and adjust fine, if it’s something they want.
Just sweeping up a day or two later on recent articles. All I can fall back on is personal experience, albeit a very long time ago.
More recently, we never considered home schooling for our offspring, if for no other reason than both of us worked hard to keep the family finances on the straight and narrow. Neither job could be done as working from home. Nor would I have wanted that. Work for me was a necessary outlet from domestic life. May sound selfish, but neither of us wanted our kids 24/7/365.
Early days yet, but both our offspring are now taking the first steps in independent adult life. So far, so good, touch wood.
Yeah sure, I get that it’s absolutely not for everyone, or practical for everyone, nor did I say everyone should want to home educate or even that it’s better than school for all children. Just adding in my experience on the socialisation aspect and getting generally annoyed with the authorities for this latest intrusion!
Indeed. Governmental tentacles know no bounds. Sharp scissors needed. Good luck with keeping the octopus at bay and swimming on in open water.
My home-edded three enjoyed regular, organised group meet-ups with an educational focus, sports activities for home-edders, group day trips as well as joining in with clubs that were out of school hours – eg swimming and youth groups (not to mention meeting other families for friendship). There is so much going on now it’s more a question of what to turn down rather than worrying about not getting enough socialisation. How much more realistic too to be socialising with mixed age ranges and adults rather than 30 of the same age.
Part of me hopes that Labour keeps this shit up and that Starmer is still in charge at the next election. They will be annihilated just like the Tories were, always assuming they don’t cancel the election first.
Warning: Labour has votes at 16 waiting in the wings.
And they are very keen on Reform apparently, so that may backfire.
“It is only the right to refuse, without penalty, the state’s offer of free education which restrains schools from becoming institutions of undiluted indoctrination”
Very interesting article, but I think this claim is way OTT, indoctrinators in state schools may actually go harder as more people escape their net.
I would like to see state schools OFFER “associate membership” to home-schooled children, for things such as libraries, sports and language facilities, and taking formal tests.
An enlightened state could also OFFER to train parents in how to be educators, this could be tacked onto the adult education sector.
Childcare + brainwashing = State education
The Minister was asked in Parliament to give one example of a child in home education being harmed who wasn’t already known to Social
Services. She could not – there have been none!
Perhaps the Physician in this case the Government needs to heal itself, and look at its failures which continue to occur to this day of young girls in the Governments care, thousands of who have been raped and tortured, and even murdered by gangs of organised Pakistani men.
Sort that before you take away the children of the 99.9999 percent who safely educate and care for their children.
BTW Has everyone noticed how we have been conveniently moved on from the child rape gangs
YES !!….
Strange how the two poor kids in this story are connected to our cultural enrichment programme !
The heading on this piece is too charitable. It should instead be “The Blob Has Sunk to New Depths in Its Quest to Destroy Education”
I no longer have children in the Education System, so I’m somewhat on the periphery of this issue.
However, a couple of recent events highlight that Schools are currently not the centres of excellence for child wellbeing, and that is without even considering the immense damage done by schools and government policy in the entire “Covid” debacle.
Last week a child was murdered in a Sheffield school by another pupil who had the previous week being caught with a knife. This information was withheld from being reported due to the other pupils ethnicity and issues releasing this information may have on the community, or some other such BS excuse.
Also, fairly recently something very similar had happened in a London School.
This has the putrid stench of the MSM cover-up regarding the rape gangs.
Also, I absolutely won’t mention Southport.