Oversight and accountability of safety experts brought into question
The chain of companies involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, site of the fire disaster in London on Wednesday, has raised concerns about the oversight and accountability of safety experts. The Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation hired UK construction firm Rydon as its lead contractor, but at least eight other firms, including Artelia, Arconic, Celotex, Fan Systems, Harley Facades, Max Fordham, Studio E, were involved in some capacity. Partial privatisation of building inspections could also be contributing to lower safety standards, said Ben Bradford, a fire safety expert at consultancy BB7.
A long chain of companies was responsible for refurbishing Grenfell Tower, raising concerns among architectural and fire safety experts about the quality of oversight and accountability on the £10m project of 2015-16.

Grenfell Tower is also absent from the websites of several companies involved, many of which list the other projects they have worked on as case studies intended to demonstrate excellence.

The Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) hired the construction firm Rydon as the lead contractor on the project, which included re-cladding the building with material that commentators allege could have been a factor in the fire’s rapid spread.

At least eight other contractors and sub-contractors were involved in separate elements of the refurbishment and materials used for the work.

Experts said this raised concerns about the supervision of such schemes, in part because local authorities no longer had full oversight as they did in the past.

Thomas Lane, editor of Building Design, said: “There was a time when local authorities had their own architecture departments, some of them quite famous. Nowadays it’s all done externally. You’ve got disparate people, design teams, surveyors, project managers, a whole army of people.”

Ben Bradford, a fire safety expert who is managing director of the risk consultancy BB7, said the multiple links in the chain of contractors could cause safety problems. “There’s probably multiple failings that have occurred in this particular case,” he said. “The work, in terms of fire stopping, often falls to a sub-contractor. They don’t always realise the critical nature of the components they’re installing in the overall system.”

He also claimed that the partial privatisation of the building inspection regime sometimes led to a “race to the bottom” to reduce fees and limit the number of safety inspections carried out.

Planning documents and local authority reports revealed a long list of companies that won lucrative contracts to work on Grenfell Tower.

KCTMO commissioned the French-owned firm Artelia to manage the project, according to a report written by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.

Grenfell Tower appeared among the case studies listed on a section of Artelia’s website headed “cost management” on Thursday morning but had disappeared by the end of the day.

The building services engineering firm Max Fordham was also commissioned as a specialist consultant, according to the report. Planning documents published in 2012 show the company suggested temporarily removing “fire stopping” between floors of the building so as to install new heating pipework. It is unclear whether this happened and the company did not return requests for comment, while its website does not mention Grenfell.

The London-based firm Studio E was commissioned by KCTMO to be the architect but its website was not working on Thursday and a receptionist said the company had no comment except to express its “sadness”.

Several firms were commissioned to work on the tower by the lead contractor Rydon, including Harley Facades, which installed the tower block’s Reynobond cladding.

A spokesperson said Harley would “fully support and cooperate with the investigations into this fire” but added that it was “not aware of any link between the fire and the exterior cladding”.

Harley Facades said it had bought the insulation – charred pieces of which are now littering the ground around Grenfell Tower – from Celotex, based in Ipswich. Celotex said its thoughts were with those affected, adding that it would “assist with enquiries from the relevant authorities”.

Rydon also sub-contracted ventilation systems to Fan Systems, the UK division of a German firm called Witt & Sohn. A case study of Grenfell Tower was not available on that company’s website Wednesday but reappeared on Thursday.

Witt said it was “extremely saddened” by the tragedy adding that it had not been “the company’s intention to advertise in such tragic circumstances”.

Witt said it had contracted a Birmingham-based firm, JS Wright & Sons. to work on ventilation systems.

And it also emerged that Reynobond PE, an aluminium panel used in the Grenfell Tower cladding, was designed by the multinational firm Arconic, formerly part of the multinational metals group Alcoa.

Arconic also makes a less flammable version of the product called Reynobond FR, which stands for “fire resistant”.