Fresh controversy over firefighters’ ‘stay-put’ advice at Grenfell

All fire authorities were officially advised to train key staff to determine when they should abandon the “stay-put” policy for residents in burning tower blocks three years before the Grenfell tragedy, it has emerged.

But the quality and scope of the London fire brigade (LFB)’s training – outsourced since 2012 to a private contractor, Babcock International – is now under scrutiny amid claims that senior firefighters were ill-prepared for what confronted them during last year’s blaze, which claimed 72 lives.

Guidelines for when incident commanders at major fires should switch from ordering residents in burning high-rises to stay put in their flats to evacuating them were issued to all fire authorities by the government in 2014. They were direct in response to recommendations by the coroner who led the inquest into the 2009 fire at Lakanal House, Southwark, in which six people died.

The stay-put policy is standard for all fire brigades when dealing with high-rise blazes. It is based on the premise that high-rise buildings can be expected to contain a fire in the apartment where it started, a principle known as compartmentation.

In her recent report into the Grenfell fire, chartered fire engineer Dr Barbara Lane questioned why the stay-put advice was maintained until 2:47am, given that compartmentation had begun to fail by 1:15am. The fire was first reported at 11.54pm.

The inquiry heard that the decision to withdraw the advice to stay put was taken in the control room by a commander watching the fire on Sky TV. An incident commander at the scene reached the same conclusion at around the same time.

In their submission to the inquiry, lawyers representing survivors and residents have said they want the inquiry to investigate “the failure to appreciate the futility of firefighting within the early window of opportunity for evacuation” and “the real-time appreciation by firefighters of various ranks (and staff in the control room) that stay-put advice was untenable”.

They suggest the training given to fire officers at the scene and in the control room may have been flawed: “The repeated view of firefighters was that this was a fire beyond their experience; but it is also clear that it was a fire beyond their training or indeed LFB’s strategic contemplation.”

After the Lakanal House tragedy, the coroner who conducted the inquest wrote to the Department of Communities and Local Government calling for a review to “provide consolidated national guidance in high-rise firefighting”. In response, in February 2014 the government published a generic risk assessment which said fire authorities should draw up “an operational evacuation plan … in the event that the stay-put policy becomes untenable”, and that “it should be noted that not all high-rise residential buildings are designed or have been maintained to have a ‘stay-put’ policy in place”.

It said incident commanders must be trained to “understand when a partial or full evacuation strategy might become necessary in a residential building where a ‘stay-put’ policy is normally in place”.

The coroner also wrote to the LFB recommending that incident commanders should be trained to identify seven key issues, including the need “to analyse a situation, and to recognise and react quickly to changing circumstances” and to anticipate “that a fire might behave in a manner inconsistent with the compartmentation principle”.

According to the November 2013 minutes of the strategy committee of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, outside contractor Babcock “confirmed that all seven issues are covered in the existing suite of command training albeit there may be opportunities to emphasise the Lakanal event during some inputs”.

But lawyers for the Grenfell victims appear dubious about the quality of the revised training. “No one from the LFB commissioner down appears to have trained or planned for this type of fire,” their submission contends. “This strongly suggests that Babcock did not properly place the issue on the training curriculum, but we are yet to see the training materials.”

Lawyers for the Fire Brigades Union have said the inquiry needs to consider whether firefighters were given adequate training and procedures for tackling cladding fires. “We submit on the evidence so far that there were no such procedures, nor had firefighters received any such training,” they told the inquiry.

A decision to privatise the LFB’s firefighting was controversial when it was first put forward in 2011 under then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. A report by the FBU, GMB and Unison warned that the plans “would compromise safety”.

Matt Wrack, FBU general secretary, said: “It seems to us that this is not just an issue for the London Fire Brigade but for the fire service across the UK – and indeed for central government who should be overseeing these things.”

A spokesman for Babcock referred questions to the LFB, which declined to comment.