Tall buildings in London “still exhibiting major safety risks” warns Fire Commissioner

Taking place at 10.00 am on 14 January, the meeting was convened in order to assess whether or not the new building safety regime is working effectively, how that regime is directly impacting the London Fire Brigade (LFB) and also whether enough is currently being done to accelerate cladding remediation projects in London.

In addition to Roe, the panel being questioned by Assembly members of the Fire Committee comprised of Charlie Pugsley (deputy London Fire Commissioner and operational director for prevention, protection and policy at the LFB), Tim Galloway (deputy director of the Building Safety Regulator at the Health and Safety Executive) and Roxanne Ohene (assistant director of building safety, housing and land for the Greater London Authority).

When it comes to the new building safety regime and its impact on London to date, the Commissioner informed the Fire Committee at the Greater London Authority: “The new regime is a positive step forward in terms of its principals, but implementing any new regime into a built environment that’s as complex as London’s has its challenges in terms of scale and dealing with new properties as well as legacy infrastructure.”

According to Roe, the complexity and the scale of risk present in London means that there’s a constant tension between the progress of the new regime and the need for society that more residential volume is realised. “Capacity and resourcing are probably the biggest challenges in terms of moving matters on,” asserted Roe in his opening statements.

Higher-risk buildings

On a positive footing, Roe believes there’s now a “real awareness” in the construction sector of the far higher level of scrutiny in place. Designs are being delivered that do consider fire safety at a much earlier stage in the construction chain. However, this is balanced by the fact that 40% of applications to the Building Safety Regulator are still being rejected on initial delivery.

Turning attentions towards cladding remediation in London, applications have been made on 510 buildings. Work has been completed at 205 premises, with remediation work yet to begin at 219 other locations (due to the fact that approvals have still to be granted, etc).

Roe quoted some interesting statistics. As of 13 December last year, the London Fire Brigade has calculated that 1,329 buildings are operating a simultaneous evacuation policy. Only 179 of those premises are clad with Aluminium Composite Material (ACM). A total of 696 structures don’t have ACM cladding. 315 have compartmentation issues which have required them to maintain simultaneous evacuation, 88 are lacking cavity barriers and seven have structural issues.

Major issues

The Fire Commissioner informed the Committee members that one of the initial inspections conducted jointly with the Building Safety Regulator under Gateway 3 of the regime brought in by the Building Safety Act 2022 had highlighted some major issues.

The 49.85 metres-tall structure stretching over 17 floors, itself designed and constructed before the London Plan came into force, houses a single staircase. There are no evacuation lifts at the premises. The sprinkler system wasn’t providing any water from the eleventh floor upwards. There were multiple different types of keys to access the firefighting lift (there’s only means to be one key) necessitating multiple levels of access.

It wasn’t possible to ascertain what material has been used to clad the structure as this detail hadn’t been supplied by the applicant to the Building Safety Regulator. Further, in the basement it was found to be the case that smoke control wasn’t provided for each compartment, which is something that the guidance recommends.

Worryingly, this building was about to enter the occupation phase. Structures in the capital, then, are clearly still exhibiting major safety risks. That’s just one building in London.

“If the building in question had been assessed and inspected competently at an earlier point,” assessed Roe, “we wouldn’t have had to pick up the pieces with a considerable amount of labour required from a limited resource.”

Applications for remediation

The Building Safety Regulator is prioritising Gateway 2 applications for remediation, but it’s well known that the approvals process struggled somewhat in 2024. Action was taken to alleviate that situation and, according to Tim Galloway, improvements are now beginning to be seen.

“We don’t want to send through remediation applications through Gateway 2 if those applications don’t demonstrate that the Building Regulations are going to be met,” asserted Tim Galloway. “There are examples of where applications didn’t discuss whether the structures involved could take the weight of the replacement cladding.”

One of Galloway’s concerns is that, at times, it seems as though the whole conversation around applications is about the applications themselves rather than whether the proposed building works will itself meet the requirements of the Building Regulations.