I suppose I'm getting away with using Pickles' official job title of "communities secretary"

Pyrotechnics in nightclubs are never a good idea. In fact, they are a recipe for an utterly nightmarish fire which we should have stamped out long ago. There's a good report on they here: www.cross-safety.org/uk/safety-in...

Long read here: www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/from...

News report here:
www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/spectru...

- The building also had combustible polystyrene panels beneath windows
- Fire risk assessments had identified internal defects serious enough to result in an LFB enforcement notice. These included 'break glass' alarm points which weren't actually connected to any alarm system.

- Scaffolding carried the blaze up the building to the top floors - which were timber framed, added when the former office was converted to residential. There was a timber decked roof garden and solar PV array. The fire penetrated this structure and was hard to extinguish

- The wind then drove this fire to the scaffolding, and it was fierce enough to ignite the dense timber boards, which were very dry after weeks of sunny weather

- A very fierce fire started in a nursery playground on the ground floor. Like all buildings with commercial and residential - they had separate fire risk assessments

Reliance is placed on “an unsuitable and insufficient fire risk assessment prepared by a scaffold contractor”. Obviously not saying a Hong Kong style incident is possible or likely - I simply don't know. But worth asking how safe we are and what we could do to remove the risk

The whistle-blower warned of “numerous residential buildings operating 'stay put' procedures undergoing works that have scaffolding formed of timber boards with plastic wrapping which could present a medium for fire spread” and warned that the guidance on this issue was “not fit for purpose”.

I'm getting the figures from the link below, using the midrange estimate.

The entire thrust of the interview is how the BSR might fix its structural issues and become an effective regulator doing a good job.

www.gov.uk/government/p...

There are more than 4,000 buildings in the 11m to 18m basket which need expensive remediation. The question should be how to get the BSR timescales down (which Roe addresses at length) not saying "ooh, isn't regulation silly, why do we need it" in midst of a pretty unprecedented build quality crisis

And while the BSR process has not worked brilliantly, that change was always going to be some version of "sort out design and compliance before you start building". Which was always going to result in delay, but may moves us forward to a point where we don't botch more than half the blocks we build

Given the scale of failure in terms of badly built blocks in the 2000s and 2010s, surely some change was needed though? Leaving aside the human cost, the bill for fixing them is £16.6bn, and the economic consequences have been vast (from flat sales falling through, diverted funds from new build etc)

Full interview in IH here: www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/the-...