The owner of the specialist cladding company which wrapped Grenfell Tower in flammable panels has said he did not know the material could burn and accused the producers of the combustible insulation of “misleading” his firm.
Speaking during the second phase of the public inquiry into the Grenfell disaster, Ray Bailey, director of Harley Facades, which oversaw the re-cladding of the 24-storey tower in North Kensington, London, claimed his company was not “ultimately” responsible for making sure the works met building regulations despite a letter spelling out terms for the main contractor stating it was responsible for design and “compliances”.
Bailey said his firm was convinced by Celotex, an insulation brand owned by the firm Saint Gobain, that the combustible foam complied with building regulations. The firm had met a Celotex sales executive, and Bailey said he assumed the “new super-duper insulation products” were safe.
The insulation materials burned and released a toxic gas during the fire on 14 June 2017 and 72 people were killed.
Bailey told the inquiry: “Celotex was produced by Saint Gobain, a huge multinational company. We didn’t believe for one second they would attempt to mislead us on this … they signed off on it, so as far as we were concerned the products were safe.”
Referring to a measure of fire spread on panels, he said Celotex described the product as class 0 throughout rather than referring, more precisely, to its surface protection qualities. This, he said, was “very misleading now looking back”.
He also said he knew nothing about serious cladding fires in Dubai in 2015 at the Address hotel and Torch residential building.
“I don’t think they were widely reported at the time,” he said. The fires were in fact reported by the BBC.
Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry, asked Bailey: “Is it fair to say that as Harley was holding itself out as a specialist cladding contractor that you and your team should have been aware of the dangers with ACM panels that those fires illustrated?”
“No, I don’t,” he responded. “The fires that happened abroad were not reported. We weren’t aware of those.”
Bailey told the inquiry that Harley did not cross-check key concept drawings with the building regulations and that he last read “approved document B” of the building regulations, which relates to fire safety, 10 years ago. While the Grenfell project was underway Harley did not have anyone on its staff with a qualification in facade engineering.
Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry, asked if Bailey accepted that as a specialist subcontractor responsible for the design, supply and fix of the facade on the Grenfell Tower “the buck stops with Harley on products and design?”
He replied: “No, because there is a raft of layers with the architect, with the fire consultants, with building control, to ensure the design is compliant.”
“Are you saying you were reliant on building control to ensure the products were compliant?” said Millett.
“Ultimately yes … We are not statutory compliance experts. Building control are the experts on compliance,” said Bailey.
The inquiry also learned how after a cladding fire devastated a Dubai tower wrapped in aluminium composite panels in May 2013, Arconic, the company which made the cladding panels used on Grenfell, decided to continue marketing its own similar panels. Its UK sales director, Deborah French, emailed fabricators who would later work on Grenfell, confirming that after the Dubai fire it would still offer both its polyethylene core product and fire retardant version. The polyethylene version was used at Grenfell.
“I’m shocked,” said Bailey. “They are talking about the fire and the cause and telling CEP, but none of this has been fed back down to us.”
In November 2013 Harley told the Grenfell architects that “from a Harley selfish point of view our preference would be to use ACM [aluminium composite material panels]”, and at the time, Bailey agreed that “price and aesthetics were the dominant factor”.
The following April, Harley was pushing Arconic’s version of the product. Mark Harris, Harley’s commercial manager, told Rydon, the main contractor: “I would prefer to stick to Reynobond [Arconic’s aluminium composite panels] if poss, nothing wrong with Alucobond of course, but I’m not sure we can manage the costs so well if we go that route!!”
The evidence came after Labour tried to ensure that the government implemented recommendations made by the first phase of the Grenfell inquiry in October 2019.
The party wanted a clause in the fire safety bill requiring owners or managers of flats to share information with their local fire service about the design and materials of the external walls; and a requirement to do regular inspections of lifts and entrance doors to flats, with evacuation and fire safety instructions shared with building residents. However, Labour’s amendment to the fire safety bill was defeated by 318 votes to 188 on 7 September 2020.
There was anger in the community that the Conservative MP for Kensington, Felicity Buchan, voted against the amendment. Sarah Jones MP, the shadow minister for policing and the fire services, said the vote was a breach of the promise to implement the recommendations from phase one of the Grenfell inquiry. “While the government continues to delay action, tens of thousands of people are still living in unsafe blocks.”
However Buchan said on Tuesday that Labour had wrongly sought to politicise the issue and that the government remained committed to implementing the inquiry’s recommendations so far. She said that for procedural reasons the amendment would have delayed implementation.