Extra £5,000 on cladding may have stopped disaster
Flame-retardant cladding could have been fitted to Grenfell Tower for just an extra £5,000, it emerged yesterday, as Kensington and Chelsea council was accused of carrying out a cut-price regeneration project.
The contract to improve insulation and replace heating and water systems in the block was supposed to be carried out by the building firm Leadbitter, but the contractor said it could not do the work for less than £11.27million, £1.6million more than the council’s budget.
The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which maintained the council’s housing stock, put the contract back out to tender and construction firm Rydon said it could do the work for £8.7 million, even though the plans did not change.
But throughout the regeneration work, residents at Grenfell complained about slapdash workmanship, posting images of exposed pipes laid across
‘The private sector have for-profit motives; they cut corners’
residents’ carpets and voicing concerns that boilers had been fitted in the middle of hallways, near fuse boxes.
They accused workmen of “cutting corners” and said damage to their flats had not been repaired while rubbish was allowed to pile up in communal corridors, blocking emergency exits.
Relations with Rydon broke down so completely that Grenfell residents pinned posters to their doors warning workmen not to enter their homes.
Yesterday Omnis Exteriors said it had been asked to supply cheaper cladding to installer Harley Facades which did not meet strict fire-retardant specifications. The safer sheets were just £2 a square metre more expensive, meaning that for an extra £5,000 the building could have been encased in a material that may have resisted the fire for longer. The cut-price version is banned from use in the United States and Germany for tall buildings. David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, whose friend Khadija Saye died in the blaze, said: “You can’t contract out everything to the private sector. The private sector do some wonderful things, but they have for-profit motives; they cut corners. We’ve all been up those tower blocks – they exist right across the country. Where are the fire extinguishers on every corridor? Where are the hoses? Are the fire doors really working? Where are the sprinklers?”
According to the British Sprinkler Association, it would have added just 2 per cent of the overall cost to add sprinklers throughout the building. In 2013 the Government wrote to every local authority to encourage them to retrofit sprinkler systems in older tower blocks following a fire in Camberwell, south London, in which six people died.
But only 100 older tower blocks in Britain have been retrofitted with sprinklers since 2013, meaning around 4,000 have yet to be.
Nick Paget-brown, the Tory leader of Kensington and Chelsea council, said there was not a “collective view” among residents in favour of sprinklers. He told the BBC’S Newsnight: “We are now talking retrospectively after the most enormous tragedy, but many residents felt that we needed to get on with the installation of new hot water systems, new boilers, and that trying to retrofit more would delay the building and that sprinklers aren’t the answer.”
However, the Grenfell Action Group said it had continually warned the council about fire safety problems in the block. Even before the work began, the group complained to the council that it seemed the contract had been “awarded to the cheapest bidder, regardless of the quality of works and the consequences to residents”.
An investigation by Construction Enquirer found 20 high-rise blocks in London have been fitted with the same cladding system as Grenfell Tower, including five on the Chalcot Estate, north London, where work was carried out by Rydon and Harley Facades. Rydon said it had met “all required building control, fire regulation and health and safety standards”. But Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, said tower block residents were “terrified the same thing could happen to them”.
Kensington and Chelsea council declined to comment.