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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Let’s not loose sight of the fact that the cladding manufacturer and supplier only recommended that particular cladding for use on building of less that two storey’s!
Who allowed it to be use against the manufacturer’s recommendation?..who pushed it through to that end?
the penny pinching council!
The fire resistant version was and is available but costs way more!
Exactly. Why should safety be an expense instead of default? The argument that adding a second stairway would reduce the chance of the apartments being sold is also weak – and any decent council would fight it. Every building should offer the maximum possible safety to its residents and there needs to be a solution to fire fighters being able to access high levels quickly.
The argument is not that second staircases reduce the saleability to developments, but rather than they take up valuable floorspace that should be used to squeeze yet more apartments out of a development.
Make that the well-oiled council and it’ll be closer to the truth.
Everyone but the local cat population seems to be getting the blame for this. But who in their right mind takes a perfectly safe concrete (or other) building and covers it in stuff that will burn all the way up the building? Before we had this cladding, if a fire broke out in one apartment it would quickly be brought under control and there would not be this out of control fire racing all over the outside.
—-Because of the Climate Change Act in 2008 and governments determination to use renewables which greatly increase the cost of energy, they simultaneously had to embark on other things, like smart meters in order to ration and control energy use etc etc and also insulation in houses and cladding on high rise buildings. So government can blame Fire Brigades and Construction Companies and make every excuse under the sun but their absurd energy policies based on this evidence free “climate crisis” has caused this disaster.
You forgot quite a number of other things but the primary cause for the loss of life was that the fire brigade “forgot” (by dictat of someone nameless) that their primary duty is rescue of persons, not putting out the fire (which they didn’t anyway). This has now happened several times, but the recent fire where everyone was rescued shows that it is now being considered. All the other stuff about the construction, poor workmanship, wrong materials, poor design, lack of maintenance etc. is true of nearly every building in Britain. These are all distractions, because the more the blame (reason) is spread, the less it is noticed. The reason is simple, none of our supposed “Public” services is fit for purpose, Police , Fire, NHS, and most of the alleged “Civil service”. It is because Politicians don’t care, and couldn’t fix them properly anyway because they are clueless about pretty much everything. I am going to exclude Reform from that because it largely consists of businessmen with experience of real life, the rest are useless dreamers.
No, you are wrong. They had written instructions that the fire commander could not evacuate the building whilst there was a “stay in place policy”. Have you heard all the evidence, as I have? I suspect that this support is either you have something to do with the fire brigade, or worse you wrote the absolutely stupid instructions! The “forgot” was not the men on the ground, It was the command structure, somewhere. The enquiry tried slightly but got nowhere to establish who and why.
No, you are wrong. The ‘stay put’ policy had been in place for decades for sound reasons, this didn’t stop firefighters from attempting rescues, no ‘written instructions’ were in place to stop them doing it. Speak to the firefighters that were there…
Agree that cladding and insulation with the wrong materials is the main fire danger. Insistence on insulating homes with cavity wall materials can also impair ventilation and lead to the spread of thing like black mold. The environmental lobby is making our lives so much worse. But although a concrete/steel/glass building won’t go up like a torch, the writer of this piece describes a non cladding fire, as I understand it. Her argument seems to be that compartmentation failure can allow a dangerous spread of smoke, even where there is no flammable cladding in place. The truth is that far too many new builds are bodge jobs. That’s because the NHBC guarantee is barely worth the paper it is printed on. Builders and other contractors are adept at dodging responsibility. They set up SPVs to construct each block then wind the company up when the building is complete. They also subcontract, creating layers of responsibility, so that it’s impossible to get to the bottom of who should pay out when things go wrong. A young friend of mine spent his life’s savings on a penthouse in Kentish Town, which turned out to have so many construction problems it has been condemned. He’s thrown good money after bad trying to sue those responsible. It has cost him his physical and mental health and he has not retrieved a penny. Nor, probably, will he. Frankly my message to young homebuyers is this. If it’s new build, don’t touch it. If it’s leasehold, super super don’t touch it, because you aren’t actually buying anything just renting it for a very long time. Which I admit doesn’t leave first time buyers with many options. Maybe, once they realise the truth they’ll join the fight to change this crazy British system.
On commercial buildings, you missed another point. Some years ago, I used to work in one, which was owned by the insurance firm Zurich, and from time to time we had to do emergency exit exercises using the stairs only, and gather up in allocated areas outside in the street. At the time, I was working for a different firm, that rented space from Zurich.
Tower blocks aren’t built to be inhabited¹ but because they maximise the number of flats per acreage which can be sold to would-be buy-to-let landlords who’ll hope to be able to eventually pass them on to the next gullible person and make some money from that because of “rising house prices” and accrue some tax-positive losses in the meantime.
The reason Keir Charmless and his band of very merry people of indeterminate gender want more of them to be built is not that homes are needed but that they’re being bribed by the people who want to build them.
¹ The inner town area of Reading is mainly composed of two types of buildings: Tower blocks full of empty offices and tower blocks full of empty flats. Despite this, and despite the fact that more are being built all the time, renting a flat there is absolutely unaffordable (>>£1000/month for anything larger than a cupboard with toilet). Ergo: They’re meant to be empty.
Yes but the main point is that without cladding to try to keep energy prices down since the government energy policies are forcing them up these building s would not go on fire like this. This NEVER happened before cladding. A fire would maybe occur in one flat but could easily be controlled by the Fire Brigade with minimum damage to the rest of the building. —-It is Government Energy and Climate Policies that are to blame here for this.
Lessons?
How about not flooding the housing market with immigrants so that substandard stock like Grendel can be demolished?
But without cladding this building would not have burned like this. —–I get your point about immigration of course.
The lesson? That ‘stopping’ climate change is more important than Human life.
But for ‘reducing the carbon footprint’ of that block of flats, exterior cladding would not have been fitted and the whole train of events that followed, would not have happened.
The lesson. Get the hell out if there is a fire because no one else will be care.
Do it on the cheap and keep your mouth shut and if anything happens then run for the hills. That is the British model baby, cover your own ass as they say. You sold out the virtue of your country long ago and it isn’t coming back.
You sold it all. Remember Sid in the 1980s when it was all about privatization and a shareholder democracy. Share ownership is more concentrated that ever. Most Brits don’t have a few hundred put aside to cover a basic emergency like a new washing machine or fridge. Paycheck to paycheck and virtually nothing left once the rent and bills are paid. What kind of life is that?
I am so tired of people writing that cliched and fatuous statement every time humans behave predictably irresponsibly to a criminal degree.
“We Still Have Not Learned” that people do bad things and other people let or help them. Hitler did not kill millions of Jewish or disabled people and political opponents in concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands of Germans did it directly and indirectly. And millions of other Germans played their part too.
Germans do not have the monopoly on being evil.
Grenfell is one more example of what humans do.
The lesson no one learns is how does anyone stop people behaving in an evil manner?
Or is the lesson that we will all just let them and be in small or big ways complicit in the evil and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it happening all over again ….
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again …..
and again.
’They’ don’t learn, ‘they’ don’t have to, just play the blame game and pass the cost onto residents to replace deadly cladding
They don’t want to learn, because that would mean admitting to someone being culpable, to having transparency and accountability.
Those “in charge” want none of those things, but are more than happy to keep receiving the bungs, the honours (knighthoods, Lordships), and fringe benefits.
If something goes wrong (as it will and does), then its just a frantic scramble to find someone (anyone) to pin the blame on.
Public office should by default mean responsibility, culpability, transparency and accountability. It also means you are a servant (not master) of the public, your responsibility is first and foremost to them – the people you serve!
And ‘responsibility’ includes knowing what you are doing.
There are too many ‘being responsible’ that haven’t a clue about about ‘the basics’.
For example, the A’ level Physics course provides enough information to understand that, with current technology and affordability, windmills cannot provide a reliable source of Electricity for the UK, now, let alone after NET Zero has been implemented, with petrol/diesel/gas energy sources being abandoned.
Yet, Miliband plough on.
And, hopefully, most secondary school should be able to TEACH the subject. And, according to wiki, he has a A’ level in Physics!
No wonder our country is doomed.
Very interesting article.
Except for one section:
“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?…
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.”
Leaseholders ALREADY HAVE THE LEGAL RIGHT to take over management of the building if they wish. Does that necessarily lead to better management? Or does it sometimes lead to more cost cutting to keep maintenance charges down?
And in how many cases do leaseholders actually want to make the effort to deal with that management?
Control by leaseholders is not a panacea, especially as most of them typically can’t be bothered to take an interest in the management of their building and just want someone else to worry about it.
So what’s the answer? I don’t know, but the fashion for whining about the leasehold system definitely isn’t it.
Wrong wrong wrong. Leaseholders do not necessarily have Right to Manage. Especially if there is any commercial content in the building. I’m not saying RTM can’t go wrong. Of course on rare occasions, it can. But if the board of a RTM company mismanages funds or does not attend to repairs in a timely manner, the leaseholders can replace them. Also they have rights to see documents supporting accounts. Freeholders cannot necessarily be replaced. And try interrogating their accounts and see how far you get. Our freeholder removed £600k from our reserves and we cannot find out where that money went, without going to court. We have to go to court just to get our windows cleaned. Leasehold is a scam, an absolute and utter disgrace that should have been outlawed decades ago.