Fire Sprinklers Week

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Brady, to serve under your chairmanship. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) for securing this debate.

I pay particular tribute to my friend and colleague back in Wales, the Welsh Assembly Member for Vale of Clwyd, Ann Jones, who has led the way on sprinklers. She steered through the Assembly the Domestic Fire Safety (Wales) Measure 2011, which requires all new and converted homes to be fitted with fire sprinkler systems. That is a tremendous achievement not just for fire safety, but in legislative terms. Ann is the only Assembly Member to have steered a private Member’s Bill through the burdensome, legislative competence order process and to have her Bill passed by the Assembly. Mercifully, that provision of the Government of Wales Act 2006 was removed as a result of the 2011 devolution referendum. It was a long and arduous process, and I am pleased that Ann was able to do something bold with it.

That achievement was remarkable, but it is right to focus on the forthcoming advances in fire safety policy. I was amazed at the comments of the Secretary of State for Wales about the legislation—“bizarre” is not a word I would associate with that particular achievement. Fire sprinklers are 24/7 firefighters. The tenacity shown by Ann Jones and the Welsh Government’s Housing Minister, Carl Sargeant, means that Wales has taken the bold step to require all new homes to have those 24/7 firefighters by 2016.

[Lyn Brown]

(West Ham) (Lab): I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning Ann Jones. I had the pleasure of meeting her and she briefed me on the subject just a few weeks ago. The word to describe her is “formidable”.

[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely. I agree with my hon. Friend and I will relay my hon. Friend’s comment to Ann when I see her tonight.

I want to examine the comments made by the Secretary of State for Wales. In a parliamentary question, I asked what estimate his Department had made of the cost of installing fire sprinklers. The response was:

“Wales’s largest independent house builder Redrow has estimated that Welsh specific building regulations, including the requirement for all new homes to be fitted with a sprinkler, is estimated to impose an additional £13,000 to the unit building cost in Wales. I have written to the Welsh Government urging them to give further consideration”.—[Official Report, 20 May 2013; Vol. 563, c. 451W.]

That is deliberate obfuscation and muddying of the water. The cost is not £13,000. The commercial director Redrow Homes in Wales said yesterday that the Home Builders Federation

“and indeed the whole industry agrees the cost of building a standard three-bedroom home in Wales will be circa £11,000 more than building the same home in England if the Welsh Government makes sprinklers compulsory… Both the HBF and independent studies have concluded that the sprinklers alone would add around £5,000”

to the unit cost. I do not know why the Secretary of State bandied around the figure of £13,000, or perhaps I do know. The true cost is nowhere near £13,000. The company said it is only £11,000, and £5,000 for the sprinklers. The hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) suggested that the cost would be 1% or 2%, which would be around £5,000. The matter should be looked at.

The Secretary of State for Wales was not the only person to criticise Ann Jones. The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government also criticised her strongly. She responded by saying:

“Mr Pickles has repeatedly cited fire sprinklers as excessive ‘red tape’ which is holding back the construction industry in Wales. However”

the Secretary of State has previously

“backed sprinklers in his home constituency of Brentwood and Ongar, saying: ‘The facts show that here in Essex people are most likely to lose their lives in a fire in their own home or in their car than at work and that many of the deaths that occur in residential fires could be prevented if a domestic sprinkler system was in operation.’”

The Secretary of State also said:

“The cost of these units is relatively low but time after time it has been proved that domestic sprinkler systems can save lives and that is a price worth paying.”

I hope it is not unparliamentary, Mr Brady, to say that I think he speaks with forked tongue. He says one thing in his constituency and another in Westminster.

There is criticism within the Government of Ann Jones’s bold move, but others have supported her. Frances Kirkham, CBE, assistant deputy coroner, wrote to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government with her findings in the inquest into the fire at Lakanal house in July 2009. One of her six recommendations was the retrofitting of sprinklers, thought to have become cost-effective with the development of new technology.

There is cross-party support in this Chamber, and coroners have called for the fitting of sprinklers, as has the fire service—the true professionals. The Government must take their views on board. The professionals are the people who go into the houses where there are fires and rescue people. Ronnie King, former chief fire officer of Mid and West Wales fire and rescue service said:

“The first duty of a Government is surely to protect its citizens and we can only look on in envy at what the Welsh Government has achieved, after some 4 years of extensive scrutiny and intense interrogation of such a wide ranging cross section of organisations”.

He amplifies not just the monetary cost of deaths, but the emotional cost and said:

“I myself am a former Chief Fire Officer in Wales where I served as a Chief for twenty years…and during my tenure of office I failed to prevent 150 people from dying in fires in Mid & West Wales with another 6,000 from being burned or injured in fires. Some of those have been receiving continuous surgery for their injuries for over twenty five years, with a huge cost to the Health service. During my career myself and my fellow firefighters have brought out lifeless bodies of children (sometimes as many as five or six), who needn't have died in this horrific way, had sprinklers been installed.”

I visited a family in my constituency where there were multiple deaths, including children, and sat with the family, witnessing first hand what they had gone through. We are talking about people’s lives or, dare I say, people’s deaths, as well as the financial cost, which also needs to be weighed up. Actuaries have said that the cost of a fire death of a working person is £1.65 million: in 2011-12, there were 380 fire deaths, so there is a financial cost. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse said that the cost of damage to buildings over five years was £1 billion. The financial cost alone makes it sensible to install sprinklers, and if the emotional cost is added, it is definitely sensible.

Fire sprinklers are valuable for many reasons. They stop the spread of fire, limit the amount of damage, and often contain the fire to one room, instead of allowing it to rip through a house or engulf a room. They are good for the environment because they use far less water. On average, when a fire is put out by a fire brigade, 20 times more water is used than in a sprinkler system and there is no drenching of the house. A sprinkler system works at the source of the fire and is far more targeted, so that a fire is often put out by the activation of one sprinkler.

We have heard that the current regulations requiring smoke detectors should be sufficient. Many fire detection and alarm systems in both domestic and commercial premises produce many unwanted false alarms. That is usually because their design and installation do not comply with the requirements of the Chief Fire Officers Association’s policy on the reduction of false alarms. As a result, many fire brigades will not attend premises that have had many false alarms until a responsible person has confirmed that the premises are under threat from a real fire, but that cannot always be verified, and valuable time may be lost that could make the difference between premises and lives being saved or lost. By comparison, false alarms created by sprinkler systems are so rare that the CFOA has not even considered the need to implement a similar policy for the sprinkler industry.

Personally, I would introduce sprinklers tomorrow. I realise that Ministers and shadow Ministers have to be more cautious, but I ask them to keep an open mind. We have an ongoing experiment in Wales. We have to look at that and at the Welsh experience—perhaps we need a Welsh solution to a British problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and the hon. Members for Waveney (Peter Aldous), for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and for Southend West (Mr Amess) on securing this timely debate, and I commend the promoters of this, the first fire sprinkler week. I applaud the promoters’ aims of widening awareness and knowledge of sprinklers and, as the hon. Member for Waveney and my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse have done so well, debunking the myths and misconceptions about sprinklers.

It is welcome that the trend in the incidence of fire fatalities has been downward and has now been stable for some time. I congratulate the current and previous Governments on that trend, as well as the fire and rescue authorities that provide vital services. It ought to go without saying, although I am pleased to say it, that it is the commitment and courage of firefighters on the front line that save lives, minimise harm, protect property and promote safety in our communities on a daily basis. As other Members have done, I pay sincere and grateful tribute to them for their work.

The facts about the incidence of fire deaths and injuries and damage to property resulting from fire are well documented and have been thoroughly referenced by hon. Members in this debate. I will touch briefly on some facts that I see as particularly relevant to fire sprinkler week. I thank the Chief Fire Officers Association and others for drawing them to my attention. In 2011-12, 380 people lost their lives in fire-related incidents in Great Britain, 287 of them in dwelling fires. It strikes me as apposite to remark that no lives were lost in the UK due to fire in homes fitted with domestic sprinklers, that fire injuries were 80% lower in sprinklered premises, and that there is a more than 90% chance that a sprinkler system that is correctly designed, installed, maintained and supplied with water will control or extinguish a fire.

How many of those 380 lives lost in 2011-12 could have been saved? How much of the trauma of bereavement and tragedy we have discussed today could have been avoided if sprinklers had been fitted? Without wanting to be mercenary when talking about people’s lives, I am conscious of the economic impact of lives lost, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) highlighted exceptionally well. The cost of each fatality in a road traffic accident is estimated at £1.65 million and each serious injury at £185,000. As the hon. Member for Waveney pointed out, the cost of fire-related deaths and injuries cannot be that dissimilar.

Further, sprinklers fitted in commercial and industrial premises can save British business, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon) pointed out when she mentioned Findus Foods. I must admit that I remember those pancakes. I am not saying I ate many, but I remember them well. Sprinklers fitted in commercial and industrial premises can save British businesses and the British economy millions of pounds of losses from entirely preventable fires. Research undertaken by the Centre for Economics and Business Research states that fires cause a direct financial loss to businesses of £230 million per year. If that is combined with the job and tax losses that follow a fire, we must clearly look seriously at the business case for sprinklers.

The figures put a practical slant on any financial deliberations we make about introducing precautions such as sprinkler systems. As a relatively new holder of the shadow fire brief, I am still learning my way around the job, so I have been travelling the country meeting councillors, fire officers and firefighters, who have been universally keen to share their views and enthusiasms with me. I have seen more fire engines in the last couple of months than in my entire life previously. Sprinklers have been on almost every agenda prepared for me, regardless of whether I have visited a county, combined or metropolitan authority.

That there is a case for sprinklers is undeniable, given the evidence about reducing deaths and business losses from fire. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd said, there were strong objections and opposition to the regulations introduced by the Welsh Government requiring the installation of sprinklers in a wide range of dwellings. The Home Builders Federation, the Federation of Master Builders and the Residential Landlords Association have all expressed concerns about the cost of installation and the impact that it will have on development.

Clearly, we need a dialogue. My purpose today is to suggest that we take a considered and intelligent approach to that dialogue, seeking cross-party consensus and aiming to build a broad coalition of interested groups with the clear intent of reducing fire deaths and injuries while achieving sensible regulation and balancing cost and benefit.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I apologise, Mr Brady, for not being able to be present at the start of the debate. My hon. Friend is making a very constructive and helpful point. Does she agree that there will be practical difficulties—the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) referred to one—but with good will and through negotiation, they can be overcome, and will she join me in urging the Minister to take up that suggestion?

[Lyn Brown]

I am certainly hoping to be constructive in my contribution today and not to make party political points or to take an easy option. I, too, suggest that we work together to see whether we can overcome the obstacles and objections that are being placed in our way. We need to talk about whether we need to ensure that sprinklers are provided in all care homes, in children’s homes, in new schools, in new and purpose-built student accommodation and, perhaps, in all new social rented accommodation.

Let us talk about the role of sprinklers in the domestic setting—whether we should expect in the future that more homes will be built with sprinklers and they will become commonplace and expected. Let us talk about whether the costs to builders and developers could hold back the building of much-needed homes. Let us learn from the experiences of other countries in introducing new requirements. The starting point for that dialogue should be risk.

We know what the risk factors are and we have figures for fire fatalities that illustrate the impact of that risk most graphically. For example, those over the age of 65 accounted for 40% of fire fatalities in 2011-12—a period when that age group accounted for 16.6% of the population. The figure of 40% for 2011-12 is up from the 2005-06 figure of 35.6%, showing perhaps the impact of an ageing population, as well as being a side effect of more people being able to live longer in their own homes. We know who the vulnerable groups who are more at risk of death, injury and loss from fire are: they are in homes, in the lower income bands and in more deprived areas.

We can implement our response to risk differentially, which may be one way of achieving the balance between cost and benefit and getting the best outcomes for the money spent. Requiring sprinkler systems in some categories of new build may well be part of an answer, especially where the installation of sprinklers allows cost savings elsewhere—for example, through less costly conventional fire precautions and insurance.

I thought that it was important today to press this point, despite the fact that I could not easily find a place to put it in my speech. There are already very interesting and imaginative solutions to keep high-risk individuals safe. When I visited Lincolnshire fire and rescue service on Monday, I learnt how local partners are working together to provide vulnerable adults with appropriate fire suppression devices, such as portable misting devices. They told me about the success in Humberside, where misting devices had saved lives—more than once, a misting device had extinguished a fire for a vulnerable older person.

As a Parliament, we may not wish to make an assumption that the answer is sprinklers always and everywhere, but I cannot conceive of a holder of this brief, whether in opposition or in government, who would not advocate practices that would save lives, save businesses and protect economic capacity. In my closing remarks, I want to offer the Minister cross-party co-operation and, indeed, cross-party talks to try to get consensus on the way forward on sprinklers and to consider the Government action necessary for both domestic and business properties, because I think that lives can be saved, injuries minimised, damage to property avoided and money saved if we have the will to co-operate and the motivation to succeed.