The insurance industry warned the government of the dangers of flammable cladding on buildings a month before the Grenfell Tower fire killed at least 79 people.
The cladding on the 24-storey apartment building has been the focus of police investigations into the UK’s largest tower block disaster, after the June 14 fire spread rapidly across the outside of the building.
The Association of British Insurers told ministers in May that outdated building regulations should be reviewed because they had failed to keep pace with modern construction methods, including the installation of flammable surfaces.
“External cladding made from combustible material can often cause significant fire to spread upwards and between buildings, which is a particular concern for areas of high building density,” the group said in its response to a consultation on housing policy.
The ABI warned that installing “large quantities” of such flammable materials increased “the probability of fire and potential scale of loss”.
The insurers were the latest group to warn ministers that building regulations were failing to protect against fire risks. An inquest into a blaze at Lakanal House, another tower block, which killed six, recommended in 2013 a review of construction rules on fire safety that has yet to be concluded.
The ABI said that while the number of fires it recorded had fallen, the costs linked with each one had almost tripled in 10 years as fires became more severe due to changing construction methods. It said such trends were especially important given a government focus on technologies enabling faster construction of homes.
Grenfell Tower had been clad with flammable external tiles and insulation during a 2015-16 refurbishment, police said on Friday.
Since then, councils around the country have discovered flammable cladding in emergency testing and have begun work to remove the material. All 60 council and social housing blocks that have so far undergone mandatory checks have failed combustibility tests, the government said on Sunday evening.
In Camden, the council was on Sunday still trying to persuade the last of some 4,000 residents of four tower blocks on the Chalcots estate to leave after an evacuation began on Friday night due to fire safety problems.
A Camden council worker helps a resident leaving the Chalcots estate © AFP
“For everyone affected, we know that having to leave your home is distressing, and I understand that some residents are angry and upset, but the council must and will act to protect our residents,” said Georgia Gould, council leader.
She earlier said the council was looking at “various legal routes . . . to require people to leave their homes — however, we really don’t want to do this.” The council has so far committed £600,000 to the evacuation. Other councils have opted for additional fire safety measures, with Wandsworth saying it will install sprinkler systems in more than 100 high-rise blocks.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said on Sunday that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire were “murdered by political decisions”, saying politicians’ decisions over recent decades were important factors in the deaths of the residents.
Arnold Tarling, a surveyor who has advised the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group, warned that testing so far had been limited to one type of cladding — aluminium composite cladding — and to residential tower blocks.
“What about the shopping centres and offices that may be clad with it, what about the materials inside premises? This isn’t the only material that is highly dangerous,” he said.
Insurers had put paid to a 1990s trend of using cheap but flammable panels in warehouse construction by steeply increasing premiums, he added.
But the use of risky cladding has risen again in recent years in spite of warnings from Mr Tarling and other experts. Cladding has been implicated in at least three serious fires in Dubai in the past five years.
Additional reporting by Jim Pickard and Robert Wright