Last month a leaked report revealed a catalogue of construction failures at Grenfell Tower that contributed to the spread of the fire and hindered escape by residents. Prepared for the Metropolitan Police by BRE Global, failings included cavity barriers too small to seal the ventilation gap within the cladding system and gaps between the window frames and concrete columns of the building filled with flammable materials; both would have contributed to the fire spread. The report also found that nearly half the fire door closers above the fourth floor were either missing or not working, allowing smoke to spread from the flats into the stairwell, the only means of escape for residents.

Kensington and Chelsea council’s building control department carried out 16 inspections during the 2016 refurbishment to ensure that the works were complying with regulations. For reasons unknown they did not pick up on these building regulation breaches. 

Concerns over the way that building control functions prompted Dame Judith Hackitt to identify a range of problems in her interim report into the disaster, released in December 2017. These include work starting on projects before the designs have been signed off as compliant by building control, inadequate documentation detailing the as-built status of projects, and the need for greater liaison with fire and rescue services. Hackitt also identified a perception that private approved inspectors are less independent than local authority building control officers,

Hackitt also questioned the use of desktop studies, in which variations in the cladding specification from a full-scale fire test are modelled and signed off as safe by building control without laboratory testing. 

So is the building control system broken and how can it be fixed?

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