Grenfell insulation firm given permission to challenge Kensington and Chelsea Council ban in court

Insulation firm Siderise has won the chance to appeal a decision by Kensington and Chelsea council to ban it from working for the local authority because of its involvement with the Grenfell Tower refurbishment.

Siderise Insulation Ltd manufactured some of the cavity barriers used on Grenfell Tower’s refurbishment in 2015-16.

It was banned from working for the council at the end of last year after several other firms who worked on the refurbishment, including Rydon and Kingspan, were prohibited in 2021. The blaze claimed 72 lives when the tower caught fire eight years ago.

But Siderise has now been told it can appeal the decision with a hearing expected in the High Court next month. It has previously said the council’s decision is “without foundation or justification”.

Both Siderise and the council declined to comment.

The final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry, published last year, said: “Although there is no evidence to suggest that, unlike Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex, Siderise set out in its marketing literature deliberately to mislead, it was suggested that its datasheet was in fact misleading because it suggested that its cavity barriers were effective when used in rainscreen cladding systems of all kinds, when the tests it had carried out did not support that claim.

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“We think that the datasheet should have described more fully the nature of the tests it had carried out. The unqualified statement that the horizontal cavity barrier ‘fully closes the ventilated air gap in the event of a fire’ tended to suggest that it would do so regardless of the nature of the rainscreen panel against which it was to form a seal. On the face of it, that was misleading, because no test had been carried out in conjunction with any recognised form of rainscreen panel.

“However, it is unlikely that any competent designer reading the datasheet would have been misled about the suitability of the product for particular rainscreen applications.”