Firs House blaze - there was no fire risk assessment

Homes for Haringey had not done a fire risk assessment at Firs House, where 70 firefighters attended with breathing apparatus and rescued 20 people from a major fire last month.

There are at least 28 Haringey Council blocks with the type of defective roof compartmentation which caused rapid fire transmission at Firs House on 29 April.

Sean McLaughlin, Managing Director of Homes for Haringey, answered questions at a special Council overview and scrutiny meeting last Tuesday.  

This was a shambolic and alarming performance. Please scroll down for a full transcript of his remarks.

Three years after Grenfell, fire risk assessments which are a legal obligation dating from 2005, are still not being done.

The reasons given were Homes for Haringey's "ability [meaning inability] to recruit people who are qualified and competent to do those assessments”

AND the difficulty of intrusive tests where “you are going in through people’s ceilings to see what’s up there" and "you have to pull apart the structure of the property".

We say, this is untrue. Usually, you can get into the roofs via a hatch, although it might be inside a resident's flat. You just need to arrange access. Here is the the roof hatch at Erica House, which is next to Firs House and of the same design.

In further confusing responses to questions, Sean could not say how many homes are affected by these problems, although moments later he mentioned an external report on 28 blocks with compartmentation issues where a proposal for safety works is coming to Haringey’s Cabinet shortly.  So who knows what the truth is.

Bizarrely, Sean claimed that "As far as I understand it the regulatory regime is that if the roof construction meets the regulations that were in force at the time of the construction then that roof is a legal roof, however much it may not be to our liking".

Three years after Grenfell and there is no urgency or effective strategy. They are not taking basic steps to ensure the safety of residents.

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Link to Webcast of meeting:

https://haringey.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/489044

Transcript of Sean McLaughlin’s remarks

Starts at 1:29:20.

>>The cause of the fire is being investigated by the emergency services.  As is normal in a situation like this I have been in communication with the borough fire commander Ian Thompson and he has promised that as soon as he can he will share that information with us. 

The two key points I would say by way of reassurance, one was that the fire was contained within one dwelling and so from that point of view the building did do its job.

The second point is about this business of roof spaces that don’t have fire breaks between them and this is quite an unusual building and I need to wait for the investigation to report and comment on this, in the sense that it has had the roof added on, but we are aware of the potential fire risk where fire can travel between roof spaces and like every other landlord we are conducting a programme of fire risk assessments, and the particular sort of  fire risk assessment you need in this instance is a very intrusive one and we had a programme which was due to complete at the end of this calendar year where we were trying to identify those roof spaces where fire breaks needed to be installed, and following that there would be a programme of installing those fire breaks.

That programme has been delayed obviously, because of our ability do those fire risk assessments, and that’s partly to do with the ability to recruit people who are qualified and competent to do those assessments, but mainly it’s because they are so intrusive, even without the lockdown you are talking about going in many cases up through people’s ceilings to see what’s up there. I don’t think that was necessarily the case at Firs House, but it is part of that same programme and could be delayed by those issues.

But that’s where we were on the programme, we will have to see as we come out of lockdown how rapidly we can back on track with that, and that will depend to some extent on our ability to recruit competent people to carry out those assessments.

Cllr Pippa Connor asked:

Q 1: How many properties have compartmentation as an issue?

Q 2: And from the fire service perspective I am assuming there must be some guidance what risk that would be, to have that non-compartmentation in the roof space in a block?

Sean comes in at 2.00.45 to respond:

>>First Question, compartmentation of roof spaces.  I’m really sorry, that I haven’t been able to look up and give you chapter and verse on the names of blocks where we have identified compartmentation issues in roof spaces and either fixed them or have a programme of action in hand but there were nine packages of works issued in 2018 by the council for us to deliver on fire safety works, and a good deal of those did involve compartmentation issues, whether of roof spaces, or between floors in buildings, or between dwellings laterally.

More recently we have identified compartmentation issues in timber framed and similar construction buildings.  What you have to remember about compartmentation issues is that it’s much easier to identify than it is to fix. So in the timber framed buildings there is a three stage process to fixing it, one is to put in temporary mitigation when you realise that there is a problem so temporary alarms, temporary advice to residents about what to do in the case of a fire, temporary additional checks to make sure the means of escape are clear, the next stage is to make those more permanent, and that’s for example what Cabinet did in February when it agreed the automated fire detection system for the Headcorn and Tenterden estate and associated mitigation works.

And the third stage which is much more difficult when you have got fundamental construction issues, which a lot of the buildings with roof space problems will have, is to specify the works that are needed to put it right because that is more technical, difficult work, and we have recently had a report on 28 of those blocks which was discussed with council officers and we have agreed that we will bring those forward to get Cabinet approval to release the money from capital funds to finance the improvements that are needed and procure those works.  That is going on all the time, the particular focus on roof spaces is an issue for me because the worst fire that ever happened on my watch was one that spread through roof spaces.

Response to Second Question, the fire brigade guidance on the risk. The Fire Brigade is particularly keen to enforce any breaches of compartmentation in buildings, they have a separate division within the London Fire Brigade to do the inspections of buildings. They do find it difficult as we do to do these intrusive fire risk assessments where you have to pull apart the structure of the property.

As far as I understand it the regulatory regime is that if the roof construction meets the regulations that were in force at the time of the construction then that roof is a legal roof however much it may not be to our liking, But at Homes for Haringey we proceed on the basis that we want to identify these gaps, and we come up with a plan to ensure they get fixed along with whatever other fire risks exist in these properties and so far we have been proceeding on that basis and we will continue to do so.

[ends]