Fire service warned councils on cladding

Every London council was warned by the fire service that cladding on high-rise buildings could be dangerous just weeks before the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

In a letter sent to all 33 local authorities and housing providers in the capital in May, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) urged them to consider if panels could be flammable.

The safety advice came in the wake of a fire at Shepherd’s Court in Hammersmith, west London, in August 2016, where cladding was found to have aided its spread.

The letter said: “In the case of this fire, we believe such panels were a contributory factor to the external fire spread.”

Flammable cladding is suspected to have accelerated the scale of the west London blaze on June 14, which killed around 80 people.

In the correspondence, a “number of cases” were said to be found where fire protection on external facades “did not comply” with building regulations.

Suggestions were made in the letter that contractors might have believed wrongly that safety certificates for glazing also extended to cladding.

The borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where Grenfell Tower is located, would have received a copy of the letter, LFB said.