The Sunday Times Magazine • 17inferno” that nearly set fire to BRE’s
laboratory in Watford, a Kingspan report
shows. This remained secret.
When a façade firm questioned K15’s
safety, Kingspan’s technical manager, Philip
Heath, wrote internally that the challenger
“can go f*** themselves and if they are not
careful we will sue the arse of [sic] them”. He
emailed a friend: “I think [they] are getting
me confused with someone who gives a dam
[sic].” Heath, who has worked for Kingspan
since 1992 and has since been promoted,
apologised to the inquiry for what he said
was “a bit of frustration ... on a Friday”.
Kingspan obtained certificates from two
privatised regulators, the British Board of
Agrément (BBA) and the Local Authority
Building Control (LABC), to support the
K15 insulation as safe for tall blocks.
“Fanbloodytastic,” Heath wrote in an
internal email when the LABC certificate
arrived in 2009 with what inquiry lawyers
called “plainly misleading” claims. The
BBA amended its wording in 2013, but K
was fitted at Grenfell as a last-minute
substitute without scrutiny and without
Kingspan’s knowledge.
Kingspan also used what staff called “a bit
of a cheat” to bolster the marketability of K
with a Class 0 fire rating. It tested only the
thin foil surface attached to the insulation,
not the foam insulation itself. Technically
rules allowed this. Practically it meant “you
could staple the foil facer to dynamite and
put it on a building above 18m and call it
Class 0”, the inquiry’s lawyer suggested.
Two technical team members joked on
WhatsApp in 2008: “Doesn’t actually get
class 0 when we test the whole product
tho. LOL.”
“WHAT. We lied? Honest opinion now.”
“Yeahhhh ...” and later, “All lies, mate ...
Alls we do is lie here.”
The multinational apologised to the
inquiry for “process shortcomings”.
Kingspan denied that the emails and
WhatsApp messages reflected its culture
and said it “had no role” in Grenfell’s
noncompliant refurbishment, blaming
the fire spread on the cladding alone.
Kingspan’s billionaire founder, Eugene
Murtagh, and his chief executive son,
Gene, sold £98 million in shares weeks
before the inquiry got its teeth into the
saga. Only then did Kingspan withdraw its
invalid K15 test reports. However, it said
new tests with similar cladding systems
show that K15 is safe.F
resh out of university with a business
studies degree, Jonathan Roper, then
22, started his first job at Kingspan’s
rival Celotex in 2012. The Suffolk
company wanted to break into the
lucrative high-rise market. It took an
older insulation product, renamed it
RS5000 and got Roper to push it through
testing for tall blocks. He worked out how
Kingspan had found such a large market forits K15 insulation: most of the industry
simply didn’t understand that the product
had a test pass that approved only one
specific configuration.
“Contractors ... do not know enough
about the fire test to challenge,” Roper
emailed his boss. Like Kingspan, Celotex
could get a fire test pass and then an LABC
certificate to boost sales for general use
over 18m, Roper suggested. Or, he added,
they could back out. Three days later Roper
put this in a slideshow to the senior
management team. They pushed ahead.
Yet in 2014 the first test with the RS
insulation dramatically failed. Celotex
tried again — this time adding a row offire-resistant magnesium oxide boards near
the top of BRE’s mock wall. They “stopped
the flames dead in their tracks”, a lawyer for
Grenfell families said. Celotex got the pass
it craved. Then it marketed RS5000 with no
mention of the need for magnesium oxide
boards. When another Celotex product
manager found out about the boards, she
was so shocked that she wrote “WTF?”
next to the photo in the test report. (BRE
denied knowing about the boards and
said it did not test or classify Grenfell’s
cladding combinations.)
Roper testified: “I recall going home ...
I still lived with my parents at the time
and mentioned that to them, and I felt
incredibly uncomfortable with what I was
being asked to do.” He left Celotex in 2015,
partly because he said he “would have to lie
for commercial gain again ... I’m sorry for
my part in it.”
According to Roper, Celotex then took
advantage of LABC’s confusion over the
Class 0 fire spread rating to certify the
insulation. LABC pasted Roper’s suggested
wording that it is generally “acceptable for
use ... above 18m” verbatim into its
certificate, including a space typo. Celotex
emailed this certificate to Harley Facades,
the contractor that fitted the insulation on
Grenfell Tower. The certificate was also
sent to the council building control officer
who approved the work. LABC accepted its
mistakes but said it corrected its Celotex
and Kingspan certificates in late 2014, but
that was already too late for Grenfell.
Celotex said a retest supported its claims
about its RS5000 insulation. Misleading
statements did not impact the product’s
use at Grenfell, Celotex added — blaming
designers, builders, the council and Arconic
for the tower’s noncompliance.A
rconic, which made Grenfell’s
cladding, also had a “deadly secret”,
the inquiry heard. In March 2006
Arconic sales bosses met in Luton,
keen to target flats in Britain
(“50% of the market...!”, an internal
memo noted) with the company’s
Reynobond 55 PE cladding. For this they
needed the BBA, Britain’s trusted product
regulator, to certify the panels as equivalent
to having Class 0 fire spread and therefore
safe for tall blocks.
The BBA did so in 2008 on a “false
premise”, the inquiry heard. It was based
on a European test pass for a panel bolted
onto walls with rivets. But the certificate
also cleared cassette panels (hung from
hidden rails), which Arconic failed to tell
the BBA burnt ten times faster. Claude
Schmidt, Arconic’s head in France,
accepted at the inquiry that this was
a “misleading half-truth”.
Twice more, in 2011 and 2013, the
cassette panels performed catastrophically
in European tests. “Oops,” Claude Wehrle,
a senior technical manager, wrote inTHE CLADDING
PERFORMED
CATASTROPHICALLY
IN TESTS. “OOPS,”
A TECHNICAL
MANAGER WROTE IN
AN INTERNAL EMAIL
The scale of the cladding scandalPotentially
unsellable
1.5 million flatsTotal affected
2.3 million flatsStill dangerous
345,000 flats Fixed
21,000 flatsEight per cent of people in England have
been caught up in the fallout of nationwide
fire risks exposed by the Grenfell fire= 20,000 flats