Fire Safety and Cladding

Jon Cruddas Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is getting to the fundamentals of the issues. Let me give an example. I met a bunch of laggers, who handed me a document about the combustible compounds contained in phenolic foam insulation, which is used in multiple buildings. That document was 15 years old, and it detailed the combustible properties of that foam, which is still used and passes Government tests. The whole industry has to put up its hands on its historic culpability and the way it has dodged the inspection regime. These are life and death issues for our constituents.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the important point that he has made. He has emphasised that this is not just about ACM cladding—there is a problem with wider fire safety regulations in the entire building sector—which we cannot allow, not just on residential blocks but on many different kinds of buildings. We need to understand properly those conflicts of financial interest if we are to understand what led Ministers to reject advice that they should have followed all that time ago.

I hope the Minister will put me right on this point, but I fear that subsequent Secretaries of State and Housing Ministers did not correct the mistakes made in the decision to ignore the Lakanal House findings because, if they recognised it as political failure, they would have to take political responsibility for the 72 deaths at Grenfell Tower after it went up, which they did not want to do. That is an extraordinary thing to have to say, but I believe it is true because I can think of no other reason why Minister after Minister failed to correct regulations and guidance that were so manifestly unacceptable, and that posed such a threat to life. That is not just supposition—we saw that it was a threat to life in the scale of the tragedy and the deaths that happened at Grenfell Tower. I would go so far as to say that, if the Government were a private company and acted as they have, Ministers could be in the dock for corporate manslaughter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter]

I find the Minister’s attitude astonishingly complacent. I am a member of the all-party group on fire safety rescue, which has done a lot of work on this, but it cannot possibly compete with the resources of the Government, so let us not be ridiculous about who should do the groundwork. I have taken part in a number of seminars with a number of experts. On those occasions I have heard a variety of views, but even now I still hear, from experts, manufacturers and others, special pleading for the acceptability of either leaving combustible materials—some of them more combustible than the materials used on Grenfell Tower—on blocks, or continuing to install them. That terrifies me, and I think that it ought to worry the Minister.

[Jon Cruddas]

When it comes to the question of complacency and how much confidence we have in the system, I should repeat what I said earlier today about the laggers who put in the insulation, and who are aware of health and safety reports that undermine confidence in the materials that the Government are standing by on behalf of their regulatory bodies. Something must be systemically wrong if the guys who put the stuff on these buildings—and they are guys—are aware of that, and have commissioned reports because they are being damaged by those materials. If they are aware of it, it should not be beyond our collective wit for the Government to be aware of it.

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend has made a telling point. We will not find things that are wrong unless we go and look for them, and I do not feel that the Government are going to go and look for them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

I was not going to speak, but given that we have more time than we anticipated, I shall make a few comments on the basis of the meeting—which I mentioned earlier—with members of the GMB heat and frost laggers’ branch in Dagenham. They are legendary in the sector for their knowledge of building materials and their compounds and properties, not least because they are the people who handle them. They also have a long-term legacy of dealing with the consequences—namely, an extraordinary profile of asbestos-related deaths and injuries—so it is in their interest to be acutely aware of the properties of the materials they are dealing with.

I am not a chemist, but given the nature of the debate and the brilliant speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), I think it is worth adding the contribution of those who deal with some these materials at the front end, including their introduction in high-rise properties such as Grenfell. Over the years, those people have briefed me on a number of the health and safety tests applied to installations and foams, and I want to address the question of foams specifically this afternoon. I will come to what they have told me in a minute, but it is worth reminding ourselves first of the consequences of Grenfell and what the Government are doing about them. They sought to commission an audit of buildings across England to establish what types of aluminium cladding were in use on which buildings. They also audited the types of insulation that lay underneath the cladding. They found, as I understand it, that three broad types of aluminium cladding are in use. The first is PE cladding—the type used at Grenfell—which is the least fire-resistant type of panelling. The second is the so-called FR or fire-resistant cladding, which is a bit better in a fire. The third is A2 cladding, which has a mineral core of limited combustibility.

The Government subsequently commissioned six large-scale tests that sought to establish which types of insulation could be used with each type of cladding, which relates back to the combination issues mentioned earlier. One type of combustible insulation identified was polyisocyanurate or PIR foam—the type of insulation used at Grenfell—and the other was traditional mineral wool insulation. However, I was informed this morning that the Government also commissioned a seventh test, the rationale being that not all plastic foams are alike. The original tests used only PIR foam insulation, but there is another popular type of combustible plastic foam known as phenolic foam, which is held to have quite different fire performance.

I want to focus on the consequences of that seventh test, because phenolic foam did indeed perform a little better than PIR foam, but it still failed the test. Phenolic foam was deemed to have failed the test after 28 minutes, compared with PIR’s 25 minutes. Altogether, that test means that the Government know of over 200 buildings with cladding that is of a configuration that failed the test post-Grenfell. However, it is my understanding, following this morning’s meeting, that the National House Building Council, which has the authority to sign off buildings, still appears prepared to sign off a variety of combustible insulation boards combined with cladding with a combustible core, having stated in 2017 that

“this is on the basis of...having reviewed a significant quantity of data”.

Therefore, as far as I am aware—this relates back to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter)—building inspectors still appear to believe that phenolic insulation could be used safely with FR-grade aluminium panels.

I know that sounds pretty complicated. I am not an expert on building regulations. Nevertheless, the devil really is in the detail. It appears that, with the Government test results and industry guidelines, phenolic insulation in combination with safer claddings is still deemed safe today; but that is not the point I really wished to raise this evening. My point is that tests are still coming to light that actually undermine some of the assumptions that were made, even post-Grenfell, as to the satisfactory status of some materials. That is why I had a meeting this morning with several laggers to hear about their concerns, because my lagger friends have known for many years of the problems with phenolic foam. I am simply using that as an example to demonstrate some of the systemic problems and the lack of confidence in the system and its regulation, and to point to the need for the industry to put its hands up about what it has known for years and years—even decades—predating Grenfell, predating earlier fires.

For example, this morning I was given confidential technical report 41772 into the volatiles of phenolic foam, dated 18 September 2003—some 16 years ago. The tests found

“a wide range of organic compounds varying in chemical nature and volatility”

contained in the foam. It was found that such products could release a

“series of compounds toxic by inhalation, in contact with the skin and if swallowed, that can cause burns and have possible carcinogenic effects”.

That, of course, is bad enough, particularly for the laggers who administer such materials. However, the laggers came to see me and handed me that report because they are aware of details of some of these materials that have never come to light. If they are aware of them, that shows that they have no confidence in the system of regulation and the working knowledge in the Department of the properties of some of these materials.

The report goes on to state that compounds that are flammable, highly flammable or extremely flammable, such as acetaldehyde, can be released from the foam. I am not a chemist, but the compound that interested me most was methyl dioxolane, which “may form explosive peroxides”. A number of questions follow from that that have implications for our confidence in the system as whole. How long have we known about the possibility of extremely flammable and explosive properties in phenolic foam, which is widely used in signed-off cladding systems across the country? We should remember that these tests took place 14 years before the Grenfell fire. Given what we know, how is that foam still deemed safe, even after the post-Grenfell test results called that into question? Do the Government still assume that phenolic foam is safe? Is this foam still being administered? Given that—and I have had the report—will the Government investigate what we know, and what we have historically known, about this specific foam, as an example of the compounds administered in these buildings, and their explosive properties?

Generally, the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North demonstrate the need to know more—way more—about these cladding systems, including the foams. Unless we get satisfactory answers to some of the questions he has asked, and that have been raised by the discovery of confidential reports on the compounds released by materials such as phenolic foam, how can we expect our residents to feel reassured? I am more than prepared to hand the Minister this report as an example of some the combustible properties of the materials that are signed off in the present building regulations.