Primark and Grenfell Tower fires: are risk managers taking their eyes off the ball with fire risk?

In the spring of 2017, a survey of Airmic members found that attitudes to fire risk in the profession were overwhelmingly relaxed. At that time, fire was rated a top risk by as few as 10% of risk and insurance managers, and just 7% anticipated that fire would be a high-level risk in the coming three years. The months that followed changed that thinking, as heart-breaking scenes unfolded at Grenfell Tower high-rise housing block in North Kensington, London, in June. That fire took 72 lives, and scarred hundreds more. 

Since Grenfell, blazes in buildings have continued to dog the UK; (and across the globe, a different kind of first risk played out during the summer of 2018 — see box). The Glasgow School of Art was engulfed by fire in June 2018 for the second time in four years: The category A listed building, designed by Scottish architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh and completed in 1909, had gone up in flames four years earlier, in May 2014, amid a high-profile renovation project, and subsequently had not been fitted with a sprinkler system. Two months later, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1,500 staff and shoppers were evacuated safely from a large Primark clothing store situated in the grade B1 listed Bank Buildings, part of which property was undergoing a €33.5 million redevelopment to add 30,000 square foot of new space. In fact, the news headlines of 2018 have been punctuated by fire stories (see box), many linked to building renovation projects.

Did we, as a profession, take our eye off the ball? I don’t know… but it’s important to remember that these type of events do happen, and not only fire. When you look at the collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa, Italy, in August, you see that, much like Grenfell, people had said, ‘something’s not right here’, and they were not listened to - Colin Campbell

Have risk managers taken their eye of the ball?

What’s going on? After 10 or 15 years of declining incidence of fires, has the risk and insurance community taken its eye off the ball on fire risk? “Fifteen, 20, or 30 years ago, fire was considered much more of a risk,” says Colin Campbell, head of risk and compliance at Arcadia Group, which operates 2,805 stores in 37 countries across high street brands including Top Man and Top Shop, Burton, Miss Selfridge, and Dorothy Perkins. “Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, everyone was really fed up with fires causing loss of life, and property damage,” says Campbell. “It was business, insurers, the regulators, and government, and the Fire Bridge had a big part to play and was an important driver in wanting to get it right. It was all of us working together.” The shared ambition to reduce the number and severity of fires was realised during the coming decades, helped along by better building regulations, new technology such as sprinkler systems, and heat and smoke detectors, the ban on smoking in public places introduced in 2007, and improved risk management practices. In November 2013, The Times (in a piece related to strike action over pensions by the Fire Brigades Union), reported that firefighters had attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall, and 39 per cent fewer in buildings, in 2011 compared to a decade earlier.

“Did we, as a profession, take our eye off the ball? I don’t know… but it’s important to remember that these type of events do happen, and not only fire. When you look at the collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa, Italy, in August, you see that, much like Grenfell, people had said, ‘something’s not right here’, and they were not listened to,” says Campbell. Grenfell Tower was refurbished with new cladding and windows in 2016. The ongoing Grenfell Tower Inquiry has heard evidence that residents at that time raised concerns about safety with Kensington and Chelsea Council tenant management board, but were not listened to.

Failure to listen

As well as a failure to listen to residents’ concerns, research after Grenfell has suggested that there was “limited interaction”, between fire safety engineers and risk and insurance professionals, believes Hugh Forster, managing consultant at Marsh Risk Consulting. The Hackitt Report, an independent review of building regulations and fire safety that was commissioned in the aftermath of the fire, and published in May 2018, highlighted weaknesses in the Building Regulations 2010, including particularly Approved Document B, which covers the requirement for testing or assessing the fire safeness of external cladding systems.

“It has become obvious that the building regulations, particularly Document B, are extremely difficult to use, and that there has been a disconnect between the fire safety engineers designing the buildings, using Document B, and the insurance side of the business,” says Forster, who is a member of the Institute of Fire Engineers. Forster adds that among the 20,000 people in the UK who conduct fire safety assessments, only around 800, or 4%, are registered competent.

It has become obvious that the building regulations, particularly Document B, are extremely difficult to use, and that there has been a disconnect between the fire safety engineers designing the buildings, using Document B, and the insurance side of the business - Hugh Forster

The shortage of skilled assessors became clear as companies wanted to review their estates post-Grenfell. “What Grenfell did was to really bring home to everyone the fire and health and safety risk,” says Asif Bhatti, director of audit and risk at Whitbread, the hospitality company which operates 785 Premier Inn hotels and 2,400 Costa coffee shops. “The worry is, what broke down in the process? There appear to have been multiple failures. How do you test your product and know that it’s fit for purpose? When you get ambiguities in the regulation, which is what people are saying now — that’s it’s not fit for purpose… the example of fire doors is a good one: are the regulations fit for purpose?”

After the disaster, Whitbread completed a comprehensive review of the cladding on all of its buildings, as well as other fire safety components such as doors and stairwells, in what Bhatti describes as a “complex process, working for a year, and taking a hell of a lot of resource. Our response was very, very thorough.” Echoing Forster’s comment about a shortage of service providers to support such activity, Bhatti says: “Suppliers of cladding and retrofit have a waiting list of years, because there are only a handful of them. And the fire testing facilities are now fully booked.” Arcadia and Whitbread, among many others, both also reviewed evacuation procedures after the fire. Says Bhatti: “If anything, we were very reassured. What we have in place is really robust.”

Bhatti, who also chairs Gloucester City Homes, a housing association which manages 4,862 homes of various kinds in Gloucester, including one tower block, believes that, post-Grenfell, it’s imperative for risk professionals to review the balance of time and energy given over to managing conventional risks such as fire, compared to “more complex and sexier risks — like the risk of being attacked by a Russian hacker. ”I wouldn’t say that the profession was neglecting fire risk, just not focusing on it as much as we used to. Those of us managing risk day-to-day are inundated by cyber, data breach, GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation which came into force in May 2018). These risks are potential brand-killers, and it’s a lot on the horizon to keep your eyes on.”

Too much focus on emerging risks?

He says that the danger in focusing overmuch on emerging risks such as cyber, is that familiar risks like fire may be downplayed. “Most car accidents occur within a mile of the home, because drivers are familiar with the conditions and become over-confident. It’s easy to become distracted by the brand-killers, and to forget that there are people-killers out there,” he says.

“There was an immediacy to the response, and that is now settling down,” concludes Campbell. “All of the research and investigation that is going on post-Grenfell, whether it’s understanding the dynamics of fire, smoke and smoke venting … it’s all continuous learning. We hadn’t taken our eye off the ball, but is there any room for complacency? The answer is no.”