Ignoring building regulations can kill

The inquest into the fire at Lakanal House in South London that killed six people in July 2009 has exposed a shocking disregard for the Building Regulations.

Firefighters have told the ongoing inquest that partitions in the flats where the victims died had just four and a half minutes of fire resistance instead of the one hour minimum required.  Ironically, the partitions were installed as part of a refurbishment that had been prompted by a need to replace asbestos.

The nine-week inquest, which is due to conclude later this month, heard that the surveyor hired by the refurbishment contractor was “not familiar with building regulations which relate to fire spreading”. What! So why was he employed… and by whom?

The surveyor has actually admitted that the contractor installed “materials that were less fire resistant than what was there before”. He added that the tower block’s landlord Southwark Council did not instruct him to make sure the refit met building regulations and had told him the responsibility lay with the contractor.

John Hendy QC, the lawyer for the bereaved families, described it as "a fundamental breach of building regulations… a lamentable failure of the contractor…".

It seems that the compartmentalisation that usually contains a fire for 60 minutes failed hideously in this incident – the victims were not in the flat where the fire was started by a faulty TV. It also appears that the fire walls collapsed and the ventilation system also did a great job of spreading the fire and smoke.

That old cliché about accidents waiting to happen applies here. Building Regulations are treated with utter contempt by far too many clients, contractors and landlords – it is a miracle there haven’t been far more incidents like this one. The landlord is ultimately responsible for ensuring work complies with the regulations, but that does not make it right for the contractor to simply install the cheapest material he can find.

It is easy to draw a parallel with the horsemeat saga. There is a control system in place and certificates are produced, but is anyone looking at the detail?  The label on a piece of meat is just a piece of paper in the end; and so is a certificate if the person who produces it doesn’t know what they are doing and, even worse, doesn’t care.