Grenfell Fire Inquiry Finds U.K. Construction Rules ‘Not Fit for Purpose’

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LONDON — An independent review prompted by one of Britain’s deadliest fires in modern times condemned British construction regulations on Monday as “not fit for purpose,” saying they allowed dangerous latitude for cutting corners in a culture of “doing things cheaply.”

The June 14 fire that consumed Grenfell Tower in West London killed 71 people and raised alarms about gaps in British fire regulations. The flames raced in minutes up the sides of the 24-story building, and in its aftermath similarly flammable exterior cladding was found and removed from many other high-rises around Britain.

The review was conducted by Judith Hackitt, a chemical engineer who heads a manufacturers trade group and previously served as a top health and safety regulator. “I have been shocked by some of the practices I have heard about,” Ms. Hackitt wrote in a preliminary report to Parliament released on Monday, and she called for an overhaul of the regulatory system so it would “hold to account those who try to cut corners.”

Critics, though, noted that previous inquests have issued similar calls for reform without significant changes, arguing that her report failed to examine how the influence of the building industry might have weakened enforcement of existing regulations.

The Construction Industry Council, the main trade group for builders, praised the report and said Ms. Hackitt’s review had followed the industry’s recommendation. An expert at the Fire Brigades Union complained that the report did not address years of spending cutbacks that had crippled enforcement of existing safety standards.

The 121-page report briefly but explicitly addressed a key weakness in the British regulatory system that many experts said had played a major role in the Grenfell fire: a failure to require tests of building materials such as exterior cladding in real-world conditions rather than in laboratory or desktop experiments. The United States and other jurisdictions that require real-world testing banned the use of such cladding around high-rise buildings years earlier.

“Many expressed concern that test conditions do not necessarily reflect real-world conditions,” the report noted.

But the preliminary report nonetheless stopped short of calling for an end to reliance on desktop studies, as in other jurisdictions. Ms. Hackitt called only for new limits, not a ban. “The government should significantly restrict the use of desktop studies to approve changes to cladding and other systems to ensure that they are only used where appropriate and with sufficient, relevant test evidence,” her report recommended. “Those undertaking desktop studies must be able to demonstrate suitable competence.”

Other recommendations called for streamlining and clarifying the voluminous guidance issued by regulators about how to apply the building statutes. Some clauses in the regulatory guidance had appeared to prohibit the use of exteriors as potentially combustible as the cladding used on Grenfell Tower, which contained flammable insulation between sheets of aluminum. But other clauses appeared to allow the material because the aluminum sheets did not catch fire immediately, and some builders heeded those less stringent clauses.

The report also called for an accreditation system for people working in the construction or inspection of high-rise buildings, for closer consultation with fire services, for more frequent risk assessments, and for penalties for fire safety violations that would be severe enough to outweigh the savings from cutting corners.

But David Sibert, a safety expert at the Fire Brigades Union, argued that even tougher penalties would fail to deter violations to cut costs if more resources were not allocated to enforcement. “There are not enough fire officers to implement the broken system we have now,” he said. “The system is doomed to break again if the strains that broke the existing system are still there.”