Month: January 2018

Grenfell Tower: does the Approved Document guidance require all elements of a high rise cladding system to be of limited combustibility?

I continue with my examination of the three alternative rationales offered by the DCLG for their claim that the core of ACM panels is covered by paragraph 12.7 of Approved Document B2:

1. The ACM core is an insulation material or product;

2. The ACM core is a filler material;

3. All elements of the cladding system are covered, and so the ACM core is covered.

I am taking the third of these in second place, as it is less technical than the ‘filler material’ rationale, and can be refuted all the more easily. The first I dealt with summarily in my last post, demonstrating it I believe to be completely untenable.

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Grenfell Tower: the Government’s denial of responsibility

I argued in my last post that the Government bears the primary responsibility for the Grenfell Tower fire because:

i) the polyethylene-cored ACM panels were the primary cause of the inferno;

ii) they had been known by the Government to be dangerous since 1999, if not before;

iii) they were nevertheless permitted to be used on high rise residential buildings, under the official Approved Document guidance.

I also made reference to my father’s observation that in the aftermath of terrible accidents, all the parties concerned seek to avoid liability and culpability for what has happened. If he was right, then we might expect the Government to evade their responsibility for the Grenfell fire.

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Grenfell Tower: the Government’s responsibility for the fire

In my first post on the Grenfell Tower disaster I recalled my father’s distress while serving as an expert witness in the court case that followed the 1994 Ramsgate Walkway collapse, in which six people died and others were seriously injured. He told me that the parties involved were in general interested neither in truth nor in preventing future failures and loss of life, but only in the avoidance of liability for themselves.

In this post I explain why I believe that the Government bears the main responsibility for the fire. That responsibility is shared between successive administrations from around the year 2000 onwards. If the pattern of behaviour that my father observed is a general one, then we might expect the present Government to try to deny culpability, and the Opposition to avoid drawing attention to the failures of past Labour Governments. In following posts, I will demonstrate that the Government is indeed currently engaged in just such an attempt to evade its responsibility for what is a national tragedy. In brief, it is rewriting history by claiming that the cladding panels were installed illegally on Grenfell Tower, when in reality they were permitted under the official guidance.

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