Category: Grenfell Tower disaster

[continued from part 3]

The dangers of desktop studies

Kingspan give summary details of seven tests to BS 8414 of systems incorporating Kooltherm K15. In five cases, the outermost layer is formed from a material of limited combustibility. Of the two build-ups with combustible outer cladding, one had CAREA® Acantha panels, whose Reaction to Fire rating is EN 13501-1 Class B-s1, d0. The manufacturer states that their composition is 90% minerals and 10% binding resin.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower: the road to ambiguity (part 4)

[continued from part 2]

bba certificate 08/4582 (2008) for kooltherm K15

In October 2008, the BBA issued Agrément 08/4582 (Product Sheet 1) for Kingspan’s Kooltherm K15, a phenolic insulation board designed for rainscreen applications:

Continue reading Grenfell Tower: the road to ambiguity (part 3)

[Continued from part 1]

In part 1, I said that I would look in turn at three remarkable features of the BCA’s Technical Guidance Note 18. The third of these is that it purports to introduce an alternative whole system route to compliance, based on a Desktop Study rather than a real life fire test.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower: the road to ambiguity (part 2)

In my last post, I took issue with the Government’s claim that the building regulations require all elements of the cladding system of high buildings to be of limited combustibility. Table A7 of Approved Document B2 indicates clearly that it is insulation material that is covered by the requirement of paragraph 12.7. Also, if ‘all elements’ were meant, then would it not have been said, in simple terms?

Further confirmation that the Government position is insupportable comes from the two leading commentaries on the building regulations. Both seem to take it for granted that AD B2 12.7 applies to insulation products and material only, as I outline later in this post.

First, however, I examine the origins of the Government’s position. Some time this year, the Centre for Window Cladding and Technology (CWCT) published Technical Note 98 on the ‘Fire Performance of Facades – Guide to the requirements of UK Building Regulations’. They comment that while 12.7 ‘specifically’ refers to ‘insulation materials and filler materials’, the paragraph:

is now being interpreted more generally

For this more general interpretation, the CWCT make reference to the BCA’s (Building Control Alliance’s) Technical Guidance Note (TGN) 18 on the ‘Use of Combustible Cladding Materials on Residential Buildings’, whose first edition was published in June 2014. It has three remarkable features:

1. It recommends that under the individual components’ route to compliance, ‘all elements of the cladding system’ should be of limited combustibility (as defined in Table A7 of AD B2).
2. It claims that this is also what the Approved Document recommends.
3. For the alternative whole system route to compliance, it purports to introduce Desktop Studies in lieu of actual fire tests. It also gives the impression that the Approved Document allows for ‘assessments’ rather than actual tests.

I take each of these in turn.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower: the road to ambiguity (part 1)

The Government testing program

The Grenfell Tower calamity highlighted the possible danger of employing combustible cladding on high rise buildings. Of the two main cladding components, the aluminium polyethylene (PE) composite rainscreen outer cladding panels, and the polyisocyanurate (PIR) insulation boards, it was the ACM panels that have generally been thought – probably rightly in my view, as I have argued previously –  to have been the primary cause of the disastrous rapid spread of the fire over the external surface of the building.

The Government acted with commendable speed and efficiency by requiring Local Authorities and Housing Associations to identify by end of day 19 June any ACM panels in use on their high rise buildings, and to send in samples for testing.

In its letter to the Chief Executives, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) claimed that to be compliant with ‘Building Regulations guidance’, the core of the panels should be composed of a material of ‘limited combustibility’, as defined in Approved Document B2 at Table A7, or be Euro Class A2 or better:

I outlined the Approved Document guidance for cladding systems in an earlier post. In brief, in AD B2 at 12.5, two routes to compliance are offered:

i) through adherence to the requirements of sub-sections 12.6-9 or;

ii) through large-scale system testing to BS 8414.

The DCLG, in its letter, was in effect assuming that the second route had not been taken, so that it was the requirements of 12.6 to 12.9 that were to be satisfied. In summary, 12.6 specifies that:

external surfaces over 18m should be national Class 0 or Euro Class B or better;

while 12.7 requires that for buildings over 18m:

insulation products, filler material etc should be of ‘limited combustibility’ as defined in the Table A7 mentioned in the DCLG’s letter. A material or product must either be 99% or more inorganic, or pass a 750° C furnace test (BS 476 part 11 or part 4), or have an incombustible core, or be Euro Class A2 or better.

I concluded in an earlier post that of the two main components of the Grenfell Tower system, only the Celotex RS5000 insulation boards were in breach of the Approved Document guidance, since it was only these that were covered by 12.7. The Reynobond PE cladding panels, not being an insulation product, and having a Class B rating, were in compliance with the relevant section, which is 12.6.

It is easy to see the difficulty for the government of admitting that the polyethylene cored cladding panels were compliant with the Approved Document guidance. It had been their responsibility to ensure that the regulations were fit for purpose and did not permit dangerous products to be used. These panels were certainly dangerous, in the use to which they were put. If a way could be found to assert that the regulations did not in fact permit the panels to be used, then this could potentially allow them to escape culpability in this regard.

Moreover, it was no doubt felt to be imperative to get any similar panels off the nations high rise buildings as soon as possible. It would probably be easier to force immediate action if the panels could be deemed to be non-compliant with the official guidance, than if it were admitted that they had been designed and installed in accord with it.

It is not particularly surprising, therefore, that the DCLG is currently pretending (if I may be so bold) that combustible ACM panels are in breach of the Approved Document guidance. In this post, I critically analyse the ways in which the Department has attempted to justify their position.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower: Why the ACM panels were in compliance with the building regulations

(continued from Part 2)

As a recap, I will try to summarise the position put forward by North and Booker in a number of articles and blog posts:

1. During 1999-2000 the MPs of the EFRA Committee wanted to replace the existing fire standard EN 13501-1 with one based on a more realistic large-scale test (now BS 8414);
2. They were unable to do so because as EU members we were obliged to adopt the European standard EN 13501-1;
3. EN 13501-1 is based on the small-scale surface test EN 13823;
4. This surface test is quite inadequate to test products with good surface ratings but combustible cores;
5. If we had been able to make BS 8414 mandatory, then the Grenfell Tower fire would never have happened, since the system employed there would have failed the test;
6. The EU was laggardly in developing a large-scale test which could then have been made compulsory;
7. Because of point 2 and point 6, the EU bears a measure of responsibility for the fire.

I pointed out in my last post that in 1999-2000 the cladding regulations were based on four British standards BS 476 parts 7, 6, 11 and 4, and not on any European standard. Nevertheless the European standard was introduced in 2002 and its adoption was indeed compulsory. So the prospect of its adoption could conceivably still have influenced decision-making at an earlier date.

I also showed that the EFRA Committee recommended two routes to compliance:

a) through use of non-combustible materials, or

b) through a large-scale system test.

I then observed that in 2005 Scotland adopted a regulatory approach almost identical to that recommended by the Committee.

Since England and Wales are in the EU as much as Scotland is, it follows that we were also free to adopt this approach.

According to North, EN 13501-1 is based on a surface test only. The question then arises as to how Scotland has implemented their approach, with one route to compliance being through the use of non-combustible materials, if the only test available is a surface test?

The answer, very simply, is that North is mistaken and that EN 13501-1 is a classification standard which ranks construction products according to their performance in two or more of four tests, of which two are surface tests, and two combustibility tests. We are therefore free to raise our regulatory requirements at any time, simply by specifying a higher Euro Class.

I will begin by showing that this has been North’s understanding of EN 13501-1, and then explain the real situation.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower and the EU: a North-Booker red herring (part 3)

(continued from part 1)

Booker and North’s main argument, as I understand it, is that:

1. The 1999 ETRA Committee recommended that the BS 8414 large-scale system test should have been made mandatory for cladding systems.
2. Our membership of the EU prevented this being done.
3. If it had been done, the Grenfell Tower fire would not have happened.

In this post, I demonstrate that the ETRA Committee did not in fact recommend making the BS 8414 test mandatory. Instead they proposed two alternative routes to compliance:

a) through the use of non-combustible materials;

b) through the BS 8414 test.

I also show that Scotland did adopt a regulatory system of this type in 2005. Since Scotland is in the EU as much as England and Wales are, this in itself rather proves that membership of the EU presented no obstacle to the Westminster government adopting a similar system.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower and the EU: a North-Booker red herring (part 2)

Christopher Booker has argued (1 July 2017, also here)  that our EU membership has been a contributory factor to the Grenfell Tower disaster. He claims that a Commons committee, set up to investigate the fire risks of cladding on multi-storey blocks, had wanted to replace the European standard EN 13501-1 with the British standard BS 8414, but had been unable to, because of the former standard’s mandatory status in the EU:

Again, as his conclusion, he argues that:

if only full compliance with the BS 8414 standard could have been made mandatory  … that fearful conflagration would never have happened.

This is putting a great deal of responsibility for the Grenfell disaster on our EU membership, an assignment of blame which I believe is entirely misplaced.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower and the EU: a North-Booker red herring (part 1)

In my previous two posts (part 1, part 2) I have outlined the two routes offered by the Building Regulations 2010 Approved Document B (Vol. 2) at B4 (‘External Fire Spread’) to meet the statutory requirement that:

The external walls of the building shall adequately resist the spread of fire over the walls…

The first route, also sometimes called Option 1, or the ‘linear option’, is to satisfy the requirements of paragraphs 12.6 to 12.9. With regard to the fire properties of materials used in cladding systems for buildings over 18m in height, the requirements are in brief:

a) 12.6. External surfaces should be UK Class 0 OR European Class B or better. The relevant UK tests are BS 476-7 and BS 476-6. The European tests are EN ISO 11925-2 and EN 13823. All four tests are surface tests.

b) 12.7 Insulation products should be of ‘limited combustibility’. They should pass EITHER the BS 476-11 750º C furnace test OR the EN ISO 1182 750º C furnace test OR the EN ISO 1716 calorific test. These are combustibility tests.

The second route, also sometimes called Option 2, is for the entire cladding system to pass a large-scale test to BS 8414.

I will now describe the fire properties of the main two components used in the cladding system at Grenfell Tower, and discuss whether they could satisfy the Approved Document B4 requirements, through either of these two routes.

Continue reading Grenfell Tower: was the cladding legal or not? (part 3)