A review of Approved Document B (ADB) after the 2009 Lakanal House fire in which six people died “wasn’t immediately urgent” according to Lord Pickles, formerly Eric Pickles MP, as explained to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.
Pickles was secretary of state for communities and local government between 2010 and 2015.
After an inquest into the Lakanal House fire, a coroner recommended that the government reviewed ADB to make it easier to understand.
However, the review was delayed and only was only delivered in 2016/17. Pickles said he regretted that the review had not been delivered before then but that he accepted the coroner’s recommendation.
However, he admitted that he did not feel that the recommendation was not “immediately urgent” and “could wait for a comprehensive review”.
‘The most difficult document to use’
Pickles agreed that he treated the coroner’s assertion that “ADB is the most difficult document to use” with “some scepticism” after being told by officials that cross-examination during the inquiry had “confused matters”.
Brian Martin, the civil servant who had responsibility for Building Regulations, had sent a submission to ministers following the coroner’s recommendations, in which he claimed the expert witness at the inquest had given “confused and conflicting evidence on what was required by Building Regulations at the time”.
Pickles said he had read in two submissions from officials, one of which was from Martin, that “the coroner might have inadvertently been confused by the expert witness”. He added: “I think, though I can’t be sure, that certainly affected my judgement in terms of the importance of doing this”.
He added: “I wasn’t going to dismiss the coroner’s views…But it was said that I shouldn’t worry, there wasn’t any real issue in terms of safety, people know these kind of things and we will sort this out, because I did press quite hard back as to whether or not we could accelerate the process, rather than waiting for it in 2016.”
‘Completely false picture’ of fire safety
Earlier in the week (5 April) former housing minister Gavin Barwell told the inquiry that the government had a “completely false picture” of the level of fire safety at the time.
Barwell said: “It is a really important point of context to say that in the 10 months when I was the minister, I never got asked a question in Parliament about the Building Regulations…I did two long interviews with Inside Housing, sort of specialist media; not a single question about the Building Regulations or fire safety. So clearly, from the compelling evidence that this Inquiry has already received, the government had a completely false picture of the level of fire safety, but it wasn’t just the government. This wasn’t an issue being raised by the opposition. With the exception of the APPG [the All Party Fire Safety and Rescue Group], it wasn’t being raised by backbench peers. I wasn’t being asked about it in parliament. I wasn’t being asked about it by the media.”
Barwell added that there was a “very clear presumption” that a wider review of Building Regulations after Lakanal House was not “life safety critical”.
And Barwell said that during his time as minister he recalled being “comforted” by statistics that showed that the number of deaths from fires in dwellings had fallen significantly in the 30 years since 1979.
Red tape
Barwell said he would have been willing to exempt fire safety regulations from government attempts at deregulation and a drive to cut “red tape” had he been advised to do so.
He said: “If officials had come to me and made the case that they thought that certain things should be exempted from it, I would have been very willing to make that case to others in government. I think if you look at my record when I was housing minister on things like sale of high-value assets, supported housing, rent controls, I proved that I was willing to push back on policies that the May government had inherited from the Cameron government that I didn’t think were good policies. But I can’t say to you I considered it because it was never raised with me.”
The Inquiry continues.
