“Without A Proper Fire Risk Assessment, Assumptions Are All You Have.”

BBC Radio 4’s investigative consumer programme Face The Facts opened its new series today by looking at the issue of fire safety in high rise blocks following various BBC investigations in the light of the Lakanal House fire last summer. The programme asked whether there were specific issues with the design of high rise blocks of flats in terms of fire safety, and if so, how these would be understood, assessed and dealt with.  The presenter, John Waite, focused on the fact that, despite the new fire safety regime having been in place for more than three years, at the time of the fire, there was no fire risk assessment in place for Lakanal House – nor, as it turned out, for many other council tower blocks in London. He interviewed Iain Cox, Berkshire’s Chief Fire Officer and the Chief Fire Officers Association’s Director of Prevention and Protection, who explained the move to the new risk-based fire safety regime and the changes to the system of inspection and enforcement.  He stressed that fire safety was the responsibility of those who owned and managed the building, not the Fire Brigade: ‘We do not own the problem, we enforce it.  They know their buildings better than we.’ Southwark Council’s executive member for housing, Cllr Kim Humphreys, was pressed hard on why the Council had completed nearly three times as many risk assessments of tower blocks after the Lakanal House fire as before.  He argued that Council staff had needed to be trained to undertake the risk assessments. However, he was also forced to concede that they had wrongly presumed that training, provided by the London Fire Brigade, would meet the requirements, and it now realised that complex buildings such as tower blocks have deeper issues.  The risk assessment for Lakanal House’s neighbour, Marie Curie House, was subject of an enforcement order from the London Fire and Emergency Protection Authority, which described it as ‘not suitable or sufficient’ and required 11 corrective actions.  Southwark Council is undertaking £4m of upgrading work to this and two other blocks which also have enforcement notices. The problem is not confined to public sector housing.  The programme also highlighted a privately owned block in Halifax which had been closed, and the residents moved out, after it was declared unsafe following a fire risk assessment conducted after the Lakanal House fire which found a range of failings, including the fact that the fire doors did not self-close and would not provide the minimum 30 minutes resistance.  The previous owners insisted that they had operated a regular programme of assessment and action and that the problems had emerged since the building had gone into receivership.  The receivers denied this, and the local fire brigade said that they were not aware of the assessment programme.  The fire brigade were questioned as to why they had not raised any concerns about fire safety in the building when they were being called to the block almost weekly to free people trapped in the lifts. The worrying conclusion of the report was that checks on the adequacy of fire safety measures in complex buildings such as tower blocks might never happen unless the buildings are deemed to pose a significant risk and it may take the death of innocent people to alert the owners to them. Missed the programme? Read the transcript. Read BWF Chief Executive Richard Lambert’s blogpost on this issue.