The fire that heralded Grenfell 26 years ago

A firefighter who tackled a blaze on a tower block façade 33 years ago said he ignored a chance to avoid a Grenfell disaster.

Les Skarratts fought a fire that broke out at the 11-storey Knowsley Heights block in Huyton, Merseyside, in 1991.

Although no one died when the “flammable” cladding caught fire, a public inquiry into Grenfell found that the Knowsley Heights fire “set the stage for the 2017 tragedy” in London, in which 72 people died.

Mr Skarratts said he and his colleagues had warned the Government of a “national scandal”.

“The water bounced back”

The fire at Knowsley Heights was started deliberately in a bin store at the base of one of the twin buildings in the complex.

When firefighters arrived, the entire 11-story exterior wall above the area where the dumpster was located was engulfed in flames, with flames shooting out of every window and from the roof.

Mr Skarratts, who has become the most senior Fire and Rescue Union (FBU) official in the north west of England, said the fire was “spreading upwards in the building and we were unable to put it out”.

The fire spread through a 90mm gap between the building’s exterior wall and new cladding that had been installed three years earlier.

Firefighters tried to extinguish the fire as water from hoses bounced off the facade.

Mr Skarratts said he and his colleagues were unaware of the new cladding or what effect it would have on extinguishing the flames.

“It was a very difficult fire for us and it was made worse by the cladding falling on us. We had to contain the fire and put it out on the floor,” he said.

The Grenfell Inquiry report describes the cladding installed on Knowsley Heights as “combustible polymeric material”.

The system was installed as part of a pilot of the Government’s Housing Management Estates Action programme, which aimed to improve the appearance of high-rise buildings, reduce energy consumption and prevent damp.

A report on Knowsley Heights by the government’s Building Research Establishment (BRE) laboratory concluded that there is “no reason to conclude that cladding poses a risk to life at all unless there are gaps large enough to allow vertical spread of fire”.

However, the Grenfell Inquiry report states that the topic of the flammability of the cladding panels themselves is “notably absent” from the BRE report.

The investigation found that the BRE report “was far from comprehensive” and “did not identify or assess important contributing factors.”

Mr Skarratts said that after the Knowsley Heights fire he and colleagues from the FBU “raised the issue in the House of Commons, we raised it in select committees, we lobbied the government, we told anyone who would listen that it was a national scandal”.

He said: “It is disheartening that 33 years later there are still buildings in this country with worse cladding than Knowsley Heights at the time, with even worse fires because of that cladding, and a government that should be protecting its citizens is allowing this kind of corporate greed to put us at risk.

“Sadly, this has been confirmed by the deaths of 72 people at Grenfell.”

The Knowsley fire led to a change to building regulations to tighten up the types of materials allowed, but the flammable cladding was not banned because it was already classed as meeting the British Standard for safety.

In the years leading up to the Knowsley incident, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government removed hundreds of pages of building regulations.

The Grenfell report criticised successive governments and said the way building safety was managed in England and Wales was “seriously flawed”.

It said the policy of regulatory cuts implemented by the coalition government between 2010 and 2015 had so “dominated” thinking in Whitehall that “even life safety issues were ignored, delayed or downplayed”.

“Absolute priority”

Knowsley Heights’ current owners, Livv Housing Group, told the BBC the building’s cladding was replaced in 2008 and is not the ACM cladding used on Grenfell Tower.

Group chief executive Tony Cahill said: “In recent years Livv has invested over £1.5m to improve fire safety across the building to further reduce the risk to our customers in the event of a fire.”

“Building safety is our absolute priority and we have implemented a programme of continuous improvements to ensure our high standards are maintained,” he added.

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