Three groups 'share blame' for Grenfell fire, says construction expert after report published

the report had a number of different groups that it has very clearly um criticized it includes the construction industry and uh construction firms involved do you think the criticism there was fair it's it's difficult to say I mean there's there's three main groups who are sort of a portion blame in the report there's the government officials in government ministers and the years leading up to the blaze which uh set the regulations for the building industry and Building Safety there's the product manufacturers which made the products which are used um on the clading system in the refurbishment of the Tower and there's also the Construction and design team which built that refurbishment I think all three of those groups um share blame and I you I don't think it would be fair to say that any one of those groups is entirely responsible or more respons more responsible than the others I think the sort of you know the broader picture of the report is that it is part of the um the fin was kind of the result of a of a culture in the industry leading up to uh up to that disaster in 2017 um well that's what I wanted to get at I mean the culture in the construction industry uh do do you think it is fair to criticize that in the way that it has and indeed at times it suggested some of the actions were deliberate some of the actions were were definitely deliberate um I mean there's I guess one of the sort of Muddy areas which the inquiry has been found to to um delve into is it's the regulatory environment leading up to the fire and there was a kind of policy of deregulation in the coalition government under David Cameron which made amending the building building regulations extremely complicated there was a similar cladding fire the lacal house fire in 2009 uh which killed six people and after that fire there were recommendations for the government to amend building safety regulations to include a warning about uh about risk of clading particularly ACM clading which is the typ use on grenfell but because of this deregulation policy which the government had in these years which um required officials to remove one regulation for every regulation HED it's called a onein one out policy which was Rel to strengthen to three uh one in three out policy because of that it made amending regulations extremely difficult because officials would have to figure out what regulations they were going to remove if they wanted to just add one regulation so so this review following the lacell house fire was sort of expanded into a wider review of the entire building regulations which is a process which would take years so because of that um the uh you know the the industry the firms construction product manufacturers were operating in this slightly confusing environment where there is no official regulatory warning about the use of ATM but beyond that the um enquiry has clearly found that the product manufacturers went to Great Lengths to ensure that their products were being sold on the market and the inquiries also found that the those manufacturers knew full well that those products were dangerous uh if used on highrise buildings during that time and thus the lack of Regulation does not absolve people from responsibility I don't think so no because uh there was several fire tests conducted um by those manufacturers of on those products and the is leading up to the uh leading up to the fire and they clearly showed those products were not safe for use in highr buildings some of those tests were also rigged so cotex which is one of the um manufactur the manufacturers which made the insulation products Us in the tower that had actually rigged the fire test used to Market their insulation product uh another firm arconic which made the ATM cling panels which been found to be the primary cause of the fire they had actually been marketing that product based on a test result of a different product so this isn't just about a confusing regat environment this is about manufacturers deliberately misleading the market in order to sell their products um on the flip side looking forward there's uh always the risk of an overreaction uh though that kind of seems pretty hard to do uh in light of all of this that said moving forward at a time when the country's wanting to build more houses is the industry fearful that new regulations new laws as in when they take effect and and and get introduced will make the industry prohibitively expensive or tricky to to get the necessary uh buildings and houses built or or is is there a sort of sense of understanding that that this new wave of Regulation will be needed well the industry broadly welcomed the report um obviously is a very long report nearly 1,700 pages long so a lot of the reaction that we've had so far from the industry sort of being in the line of well we need to digest the report fully um before we can properly comment on on its recommendations but having said that um you know if there's more regulation um then that could always increase costs if if there's a um restriction in the amount of uh Building Products which project teams can use when when building a scheme then that does have potential to increase costs it's worth noting that the grandel tower refurbishment used those um cladding and insallation products because they were cheaper um so the the client um deliberately value engineered that project and chose the ACM and insulation products to drive down costs so in future projects if those products are not available then they could drive up cost of course you know if um there's a benefit of increased Building Safety then lots of people say that's no bad thing there's also the risk that um you know project teams might have to spend more money hiring Consultants um fire Consultants build control surveyors so it does have the a risk to drive up Cent projects but but I think um as is always the case with the construction the most important thing is certainty and it has been quite an uncertain regulatory environment over the past few years since grandell so you know if there's going to be greater certainty around what the regulations are then that will always be a good thing Tom Lo thanks so much for joining us senior reporter at both building design and at building