Playing with Fire
Regulations governing building safety were steadily built over the course of the past century… and then dismantled. It’s a story of lost decades, but one that may, however, have a more positive next chapter
If the NHS is a political football, social housing is the game whose rules we’ve hurriedly had to rewrite after decades of neglect. New legislation is at last on the way, driven by the tragic events of Grenfell to ensure “that the buildings that we create, that we own and that we manage are safe for those who use them”, in the words of building safety expert Paul Nash. No doubt many of you are getting to grips with these regulations right now. But it didn’t have to be this way.
We often think of those red-brick and stone edifices during the Victorian and Edwardian periods as being the iconic form of social housing, Boundary Estate in Shoreditch is the UK’s oldest, opening in 1900. Its steep blocks of neo-Dutch Gable and tall chimneys reach high into the sky in this part of east London, offering people of the time an escape from the homelessness and deprivation all around them.
These pioneering buildings came hot on the heels of the Houses for the Working Classes Act in 1885, which gave local authorities the power to condemn slum housing. But this was a public health intervention, not a housing act. So there was no provision given to allow the purchase of land or financing of new housing on the part of councils.
Thus it was the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 that instigated new building. And boom time came after the Second World War. In the next 35 years that followed, 80% of the UK’s social housing stock went up, totalling 4.4m homes. Alex Whitwell, in his fascinating long essay on social housing in south London explains why: “World War II brought unprecedented structural devastation to Britain. With swathes of the country’s housing destroyed, a bold new attitude was needed to rebuild the nation and its capital”.
The rise of the high-rise
But safety regulation of the period had to catch up, especially as a new kind of housing was emerging: high-rise tower blocks. A Parliamentary committee report at the time concluded that current legislation was “too narrow both in the classes of premises to which they apply and in the precautions which they impose”. From a very basic approach to multi-occupancy, the government needed an advanced code of conduct to deal with these new glass-and-metal edifices.
The British Standard Code of Practice in 1962 appeared as a result. It was the first national standard for tall residential buildings, requiring residents not to move around the building during fire. This is a guidance known as ‘stay put’, and is still in place today. “In the majority of fires in blocks of flats, residents of other flats never need to leave their flats”, according to the Code. It also required each dwelling to have a hazard-free entrance hall. Bedrooms had to open directly on to the hall and be built close to the front door. And the living room, dining room and kitchen doors should be resistant and self-closing.
However, while that was a step forward, for many it wasn’t enough. Writing in the The Times, commentator Bernard Levin, insisted that ‘the fire regulations in Britain make Americans go pale and shudder. In all sorts of areas, the British are shockingly ill-protected.” Many shared his view, and The Fire Precautions Act in 1971 was given particular impetus by a fire at the Rose and Crown pub in Saffron Walden in which 11 people died. As a result of the Act, fire authorities were given the power to apply to the court to forbid occupation of premises if they believed a risk was present.
We can see where this is going: ever tighter legislation with increasingly stringent requirements on construction companies. But then as the political mood of the country changed, so did housing policy. The Right to buy scheme in 1980 gave people the ability to own their own local authority home, along with a depletion of local authority housing stock. And more was to follow.
De-regulation kicks in
The Building Regulations of 1985 removed the use of combustible materials such as aluminium composite material in housing, as part of a new law that swept away 300 pages of building regulation. Yet just a year later The Department of the Environment warned that: “Laboratory tests have shown that a fire within the cavity can melt the aluminium and burn through to the surface several storeys above the fire. These emergent flames could re-enter the block via windows.”
The response from leading members of the government was not to act. Instead the patent for aluminium composite material expired and during the 1990s other companies began production. As prices fell, the use of aluminium composite material became widespread. In 2005 the 1971 Act was repealed. And we all know what happened next.
One of the earliest findings of the Grenfell Inquiry was that cladding included a highly combustible core. It had been added to the building in 2016, long after the original construction. But the builders and housing teams were not in any breach of regulation – aluminium composite material was fully compliant with the standard requiring limited combustibility. “It was the principal reason why the flames spread so rapidly up, down and around the building,” according to the inquiry report in 2019.
The Building Safety Act 2022 is therefore a necessary next step, and what Allan Binns, Safety Director at Ryder Architecture calls “a seismic change for the industry”.
New regulations make safety the central criterion of whether a residential building may be legally occupied. The Building Safety Regulator won’t even ask if a building is compliant, nor if it meets functional requirements – because these have been mandated. Further, the building owner must be able to demonstrate that safety, and they must be able to provide evidence of the safety of the building to the satisfaction of the Building Safety Regulator.
It’s a long way from where governments of the past 40 years have taken us – but it heralds the kind of future in social housing that we need to embrace.