FOCUS
Cladding focus
can protect you in the event of an impact. It just doesn’t make sense; the airbag is a backup in the event that you fail to prevent the impact; the FRS is a backup in the event that you fail to prevent the fire (or contain it).
HPL and timber cladding
The more we learn, the more we find out we don’t know. It required me to arrange the BS 8414 test myself to convince MHCLG that standard HPL was much more dangerous than they were hoping. Its performance was worse than expected and only marginally better in some respects than the ACM that clad Grenfell. The Barking fire in east London last June that destroyed 20 flats and damaged ten others has also been very significant. Not only did it call into question the 18m rule, but it also highlighted two other important issues. ADB still allows the use of timber cladding on
the lower 18m of a tower block that is used as a hotel or office block. The expert report after Barking concluded that such materials pose a threat to life on buildings of any height. It also showed that the timber was much more combustible than generally thought, as it failed to achieve the standard required even for Class E, whereas untreated timber is generally considered to be Class D. Given that until recently we had a nationalised fire research facility, it’s depressing that our knowledge is being built at the expense of peoples’ homes being destroyed. The Worcester park fire in south west London in September 2019 resulted in the destruction
50 JUNE 2020
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of a timber frame (but clad in non combustible materials) building without a storey over 11m, so it would not even be affected if the threshold drops. I had argued in November 2017 that a ‘building height’ of 12m was the sensible threshold and this would have just caught the five-storey Worcester Park building (the proposed replacement building would rather insensitively be the same method of construction).
ACM cladding
The BRE report into non ACM cladding materials was finally published in April, roughly two years after the project began and just a few days after the results of my BS 8414 HPL test were revealed in the media. The main aim of my test was to highlight the dangers of non ACM materials, so that they would be covered by the cladding remediation fund. I said at the time that if the Cube in Bolton had been covered in PE ACM, the whole building would have been destroyed. MHCLG stole the thunder of my test by announcing the week before it took place that non ACM materials such as ACM would be covered by the remediation fund. However, the way MHCLG presented the BRE
non ACM report was to justify its view that PE ACM was uniquely dangerous. In doing so, it highlighted its own failure that, three years on, we still have hundreds of buildings clad in it, threatening and ruining the lives of the many thousands of people who live in them.
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