Professor John Robertson OBA

I’ve been constructing this ‘tower of knowledge‘ for years now and virtually nobody, including the Scottish Government, seems be even aware of it.

Based on the expert advice of a reader of TuS and a retired architect, as I understand it, flammable cladding is not dangerous enough, on its own, to cause a towering inferno and the deaths of hundreds, IF you have cavity fire barriers preventing the fire from spread from floor to floor, due to a chimney effect as happened in Grenfell.

This fact is proven by four recent tower block fires in Scotland where the fire has been contained on one floor and only one life has been lost, across all four incidents.

IF I’M WRONG PLEASE TELL ME WHY

Here is the detailed evidence of why the costly insertion of fire cavity barriers has and will prevent any Grenfell-like incidents in Scotland ever occurring.

I’m four-sevenths of an architect. From 1970 to 1974, I passed 4 years of the part-time Certificate course in Architecture at Glasgow School of Art before getting sacked for (guess). I could calculate how much reinforcing steel you’d need in a concrete beam, but it’s all gone now, except one thing. Everyone moaned about the local authority building control officers telling us our airy dreams were unsafe. Looking back, thank goodness they did.

Anecdotally, I’ve often heard about stricter building control regulations in Scotland, going back for decades but maintained by the SNP these 18 years, as Tory erosion of standards in England led to Grenfell and as New Labour PFI schemes in Scotland, where building control inspection responsibilities were handed to the contractor, to ‘mark their own homework’ so to speak, led to Edinburgh school walls collapsing.

Last night in Aberdeen:

Seven people have been treated by ambulance crews after a fire broke out in an Aberdeen tower block. The alarm was raised on the 12th floor of Aulton Court, a 19-storey building on Seaton Crescent, at about 20:00 on Monday. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) said seven people had been “passed into the care” of the Scottish Ambulance Service but no condition details were available. The blaze was put out after a couple of hours. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cde9236ggy0o

No towering inferno, no deaths, ‘a couple of hours’ to putout a fire that clearly did not spread to other floors.

On the 4th September, 2024 in Edinburgh a fire in a block of flats was contained on two floors and there were no reports of any injuries.

In 2021 and in 2022, Glasgow tower block fires were contained on one floor, one man was taken to hospital.

All of these blocks had flammable cladding so why did the fire not spread?

Cavity fire barriers, adding of course to the cost of construction.

Reader Gordon Darge wrote for us in January 2020:

As a chartered architect in Scotland for 40 years I can confirm that the Building Regulations Technical Standards Scotland have for two decades required cavity fire barriers

2.4 Cavities
Mandatory Standard
Standard 2.4
Every building must be designed and constructed in such a way that in the event of an outbreak of fire within the building, the spread of fire and smoke within cavities in its structure and fabric is inhibited.

This includes for example, around the head, jambs and sill of an external door or window opening, at all floor levels and building corners etc. to prevent the spread of fire in building cavities. This would have prevented the spread of the fire at Grenfell Tower.

This is difficult and expensive to achieve and I can only guess that in England they did not follow the Scottish model because Westminster, the Tories and New Labour were led by the vested interests of big business, property developers and large construction firms.

For anyone wanting more info see: https://www.gov.scot/publications/building-standards-technical-handbook-2019-domestic/2-fire/2-4-cavities

Finally, from statistics around the time of Grenfell

In Scotland 2015/16, 9 827 safety audits were carried out. England has 10 times the population and so, all things being equal, might have been expected to have seen 98 270 fire safety audits. However, in 2017/18, England saw only 49 423 fire safety audits, just over half the number. Fire safety audits in Scotland were thus almost twice as common, per head of population, in Scotland as in England.

Why? Cost-cutting Tory local authorities? Cost-cutting Tory central government?