The Sunday Times Magazine • 21
Three years before the Grenfell fire,
Britain’s largest private building inspector,
the National House Building Council
(NHBC), called K15’s safety certificates
“garbage”. “It’s all an accident waiting to
happen,” its fire specialist wrote. When
NHBC threatened to tell housebuilders
about its concerns, Kingspan’s lawyers hit
back with a threat to sue for defamation.
The debacle finally reached the ears of
Brian Martin, the housing ministry’s fire
official. On July 2, 2014, he emailed NHBC
a “friendly warning” not to sign off
flammable insulation as safe for tall blocks,
adding that he had heard that several such
blocks of flats had “allegedly” been already
built. NHBC confirmed “confusion” around
Kingspan K15.
The same afternoon a meeting took
place in central London, set up by industry
experts concerned that confusion over
rules was allowing dangerous materials
onto buildings. Martin, the man who wrote
the rules, was in the room, as was the
BRE’s Sarah Colwell, who saw the ACM
fireball in 2001.
The meeting should have been a chance
for Martin to learn the truth, perhaps even
an opportunity for him to stop Grenfell’s
cladding and insulation, which was in the
process of being signed off. But he left early
to meet a minister. He did not hear when
they discussed how his ambiguous
guidance was clearing both ACM cladding
(which he knew went “Whoosh!” in a fire)
and flammable insulation for British
high-rises. Nor did he heed warnings in
the meeting minutes afterwards. Had he
stayed, he and Colwell “perhaps ... could
have done something to prevent” the
Grenfell tragedy, Martin testified.
That wasn’t all. When the industry diluted
rules further in 2014 by introducing
“desktop studies” as a way to avoid physical
fire tests, Martin did not stop them. Instead
of having to build a mock wall and set it on
fire (which cost about £30,000), the new
guidance meant you could run data from
other tests through a desktop computer to
approve your flammable cladding system.
A Kingspan manager claimed internally that
this change was a result of the multinational
“slowly educating” the NHBC.
By July 2016 it became even easier to
stick material likened by one expert to
“solid petrol” onto tall blocks. The NHBC
published a safe list of flammable cladding
and insulation for towers, which it would
accept without any tests. The list included
all three products used on Grenfell Tower.
“[This] is a direct result of our testing and
campaigning on this issue,” a Kingspan boss
wrote in an internal email. The manufacturer
had in effect rewritten the rules, lawyers
argued, with Martin’s “tacit support”.
By the time of the Grenfell fire, Martin
had been in charge of the official building
guidance on fire safety for almost 18 years.
It became “like my third child”, he said.
“this isn’t about deregulation”. Instead
“it comes down to the nameless, I think
it was 96 people, who were killed”. In fact
72 people died, all named.
Pickles apologised but Grenfell United,
a group for the tower’s families, said he had
shown “the same indifference to public
safety he’s always had”.
THE TERRIBLE AFTERMATH
Dawn was breaking when Samira Hamdan
arrived at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington,
where her three nieces had been born. She
thought she had glimpsed her sister, Farah,
leaving the tower on a stretcher with two
children. Eventually the receptionist came
back with news of a five-year-old girl in
paediatric intensive care. It was her niece,
covered in soot. Sedated but stable. “And
then it hit me — where was everyone else?”
They had no baby there but there was
another girl from Grenfell who looked
about ten, the nurse said. “I turned my face
and there Malak was,” Samira remembers.
She was very poorly. They moved the sisters
together, but Malak died the next day.
Meanwhile a thousand destitute people
huddled in community centres. Of 297
people in the tower, 227 had survived.
Hundreds more had to leave surrounding
blocks. Some initially slept rough.
Neighbours donated food and clothes
Martin has no formal fire safety or
engineering qualifications. A former council
buildings inspector, he joined BRE in 1999
and was quickly seconded to the housing
ministry to review building fire guidance.
He joined the ministry full time in this role
in 2008. Even after the Grenfell fire, he was
promoted to lead building regulations. Last
year, amid increasing media scrutiny, he
was “encouraged” to find a new role in the
planning division.
At the inquiry his voice cracked with
emotion at the end of a marathon seven-
and-a-half-day interrogation, longer than
any other witness. Amid David Cameron’s
deregulation, cuts that reduced his team
by two thirds and his own “entrenched”
mindset, Martin said he “ended up being
the single point of failure in the
department”. When he missed the risk,
“we failed to stop [Grenfell] happening.
For that is something I’m bitterly sorry.”
“Shame on you,” someone shouted at one
point as he left the witness box.
Eric Pickles, the housing secretary from
2010 to 2015 — and Martin’s ultimate boss
during this period — had repeatedly put off
a promised review of building regulations
after six deaths in a 2009 fire at Lakanal
House, south London. During the Grenfell
inquiry a defiant Pickles banged on the table
and said it should “never lose sight” that
From top: debris
rains down on
fire crews as they
bring residents
out; firefighters
lie exhausted from
their efforts to
save lives; Theresa
May drew criticism
for not meeting
survivors at the
scene the next day
LONDON NEWS PICTURES ➤
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