Hackitt calls on industry to show greater responsibility

The author of the government’s review of fire safety regulations says the industry should not expect the government to rethink its combustibles ban until it has shown that it has reformed working practices in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

Dame Judith Hackitt, who has also just been chosen to lead the board creating a new building safety regulator, made the comments despite just delivering a speech in which she said prescriptive building regulations simply encouraged an unthinking box-ticking mentality to fire safety.

Last year the government brought in a ban on the use of any combustible material in the external walls of buildings over 18m. It is currently consulting on reducing the height at which that ban takes effect to 11m.

While this has been welcomed in many quarters, it has caused a number of housebuilders to move away from using structural timber products in buildings, even though these are seen as much more environmentally sustainable than concrete, steel and masonry.

Asked about whether the government needed to rethink the ban, in part because of the impact on the use of sustainable materials such as timber, Hackitt told Housing Today: “The freedom to innovate and the freedom to do is accompanied by expecting that responsible behaviour.”

She said she thought the government would only consider change when “we start to see that culture change in the industry that rebuilds the trust that people are behaving responsibly, and a regulator which is holding people to account for doing that.

“When industry demonstrates more and more [responsible behaviour] and is held to account by a regulator that is responsible, we’ll see is a backing off of levels of prescription.”

Hackitt told the NBS’s construction leaders’ conference in Birmingham last week that prescriptive regulations – of which the combustibles ban is an example – encouraged a culture in which people attempted to get around rules which they perceived as simply a cost.

In contrast, she said that non-prescriptive regulations, which set out performance levels that have to be achieved, encourage firms to properly understand and manage risks in proposed buildings.

Her comments come in the wake of decisions by developers Legal and General and Swan Housing Group to drop the use of cross laminated timber (CLT) in their modular flat products in large part because of the stipulations of the combustibles ban. This is despite the fact that Swan said it regarded CLT as an “inherently safe material”.

Individual materials themselves, such as cladding or timber, should not be “demonised”, Hackitt added.

“Used in the right way, in the right place, with the right design criteria and parameters there’s nothing wrong with timber,” she said.

“Just as there’s nothing wrong with cladding used in the right way on the right applications.

“It’s only when you take the system [as a whole] that you can decide whether it’s the right thing to do or not.”