Fire Sprinklers Week

Annette Brooke Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

Thank you, Mr Brady; I will be fairly brief. I congratulate the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) on securing the debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to it. I was extremely impressed when I attended last week’s event, where I learned a great deal. I should perhaps also mention that Ben Ansell, the Chief Fire Officers Association lead for fire sprinklers and a Dorset fire officer, is one of my constituents.

I had not really thought in great depth about warehouses, but to me, it was absolutely astounding that the cost to the United Kingdom economy—£1 billion over five years—and the emotional cost could all be saved, perhaps not with more regulation, but with better and more appropriate regulation. My constituent, Ben, points out that we have had a number of

“successful ‘sprinkler saves’ (where fires were controlled or extinguished by sprinklers)”,

such as at Makro—just a mile away from where I live actually—in October 2013. He says:

“Here the sprinklers did their job in the early hours of the night shift and the store was trading by 9am the same day.”

What an enormous difference those sprinklers made.

Ben is concerned because one council in the area I represent has had some local Acts repealed, including one from 1986, and he fears unintended consequences, because that Act required sprinklers in certain large buildings. That has been repealed and we now have similar-sized buildings where sprinklers are not a requirement. That seems to be another argument for looking at the issue on a national level to get some consistency.

I want to touch briefly on schools, where there have been some very bad fires in my constituency. I support the comments that have been made on care homes, but as time is limited, I shall concentrate on schools. About 13 years ago, there was a very large fire at a school in my constituency and we ended up with 40 temporary classrooms. It took a long time for replacements to be built and—would you believe it, Mr Brady?—sprinklers were not installed. There was another fire at the school in 2012. It was caused by lightning, so people could not say, “I told you so,” but even after that second fire, sprinklers were resisted for the new buildings. It is absolutely incredible.

There was a fire in another school 17 years ago. I was council chairman of education and was on hand to witness the trauma to the head teacher, the staff, and to the pupils, who lost coursework, and particularly such things as artwork, which cannot be replaced. That school was rebuilt, again without sprinklers. It has just had a massive investment and I found that council members were being presented with some of the myths that my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) outlined, which is incredible. They were told that sprinklers could be set off and that having them could be more expensive. Those reasons were reported to council members to encourage them not to support the extra cost of sprinklers. I understand that the school was finally designated as low risk, so it does not have sprinklers.

Dorset fire service wants some consistency. It is absolutely delighted that a flagship school in my constituency has sprinklers—the school had about £50 million spent on it, and was a Building Schools for the Future project, so I am very pleased with Lord Knight’s recommendation—but this situation is not very helpful to the fire service. It is important that people listen to specialist advice from fire officers, and I make a plea to the Minister that we clearly need much more awareness-raising, because the myths we have discussed today are just being perpetuated. At the end of the day, that means an enormous cost in money and, at times, a cost in lives.