Over the past 30 years, at a rough estimate, if you live in a house or flat you are almost twice as likely to die in a fire as someone who lives in a tower block covered in combustible cladding. In addition, the fire will be more toxic than a cladding fire and will affect you more negatively.
On top of that, you will also be risking your health from the large volumes of flame retardant dust that wear off your furniture on a daily basis and get into you; something that is not a problem with cladding.
So, when people living in tower blocks covered in cladding say they cannot sleep soundly in their beds, it's actually their bed they should probably be more worried about. For a start, they've been told it's not flammable because it must comply with the UK's tough furniture fire safety laws. But as this website has revealed, those laws do not work. For a start, they do not take account of the fact that no one sleeps on a bare mattress upon which they may drop a lighted match (the basis of the ignition test that applies). Bedding catches fire first and the amount of flame it produces completely wipes out any resistance the match test provides (even if it worked) by the time it reaches the mattress.
Why then is there so much talk about removing cladding from buildings but none about removing furniture from people's homes?
Let's look at some fire statistics. In the year 2017/18 there were 334 fire deaths in England. Around 80% of these occurred in dwellings, making 267 deaths. This represented an increase of 71 on the previous year, which is roughly the same as the official Grenfell Tower death toll. In the same year there were just over 30,000 primary fires in homes in England. A 'primary' fire is one that involves fatalities, casualties, rescues or five or more pumps in attendance. While most of these did not result in deaths, the statistics do not record the damage done to health and the environment by the massive volumes of toxins produced in all those fires.
It seems, perhaps understandably, that a concentration of deaths in one place increases people's perception of risk. But there were nearly 200 fire deaths last year in dwellings other than Grenfell Tower. Yet they were spread out over the country, as were the deaths, and therefore received little if any attention other than local. But each death would have been totally devastating for the family concerned, and they would have been homeless too, everything lost in the fire.
And if you are concerned about firefighters' health, then clearly many more are affected by toxic fumes and smoke on a daily basis by house fires in general than were at the Grenfell Tower fire. While it is completely proper and understandable that the Grenfell fire should go through an official inquiry, where is the inquiry into the 200 deaths in fires in UK homes that same year?
In short, in my view, a major reason why so much attention remains on cladding and so little on toxic fumes from furniture and other products inside the Tower is that it suits government and business to keep the argument narrow rather than expand into all the associated, at least equally and in some cases more important issues. At the very least, there are costs comparisons that make the argument obvious. The cost of replacing all combustible cladding on tower blocks is clearly dwarfed by the cost of replacing virtually every sofa and mattress in 27 million homes, not to mention disposing of them safely too.
The obvious tactic, therefore, is to spend years debating about who's responsible for cladding replacement while in the meantime ignore the greater threat and, in the tried and tested British way, even if you end up paying for the one (and that is of course still open to debate - long, long debate), you will at least avoid paying anything at all towards the much bigger problem.
Another cost argument is that at present, the flame retardant industry does not make much money from cladding. However, its paid for puppets, like the Fire Protection Association, BRE, Sir Ken Knight, Dave Sibert, etc, are working hard to increases the market via 'non-combustible cladding' (they never argue for simply removing it altogether). So it'll either lose a bit or gain a lot from cladding. Meanwhile, it's working hard to keep attention off of upholstered furniture because if that massive fire and poison risk is sorted out, the chemical industry could lose around £300m a year, and the UK furniture industry its much-loved trade barrier. Not to mention the massive hand-outs enjoyed by the puppets.
On top of that, you will also be risking your health from the large volumes of flame retardant dust that wear off your furniture on a daily basis and get into you; something that is not a problem with cladding.
So, when people living in tower blocks covered in cladding say they cannot sleep soundly in their beds, it's actually their bed they should probably be more worried about. For a start, they've been told it's not flammable because it must comply with the UK's tough furniture fire safety laws. But as this website has revealed, those laws do not work. For a start, they do not take account of the fact that no one sleeps on a bare mattress upon which they may drop a lighted match (the basis of the ignition test that applies). Bedding catches fire first and the amount of flame it produces completely wipes out any resistance the match test provides (even if it worked) by the time it reaches the mattress.
Why then is there so much talk about removing cladding from buildings but none about removing furniture from people's homes?
Let's look at some fire statistics. In the year 2017/18 there were 334 fire deaths in England. Around 80% of these occurred in dwellings, making 267 deaths. This represented an increase of 71 on the previous year, which is roughly the same as the official Grenfell Tower death toll. In the same year there were just over 30,000 primary fires in homes in England. A 'primary' fire is one that involves fatalities, casualties, rescues or five or more pumps in attendance. While most of these did not result in deaths, the statistics do not record the damage done to health and the environment by the massive volumes of toxins produced in all those fires.
It seems, perhaps understandably, that a concentration of deaths in one place increases people's perception of risk. But there were nearly 200 fire deaths last year in dwellings other than Grenfell Tower. Yet they were spread out over the country, as were the deaths, and therefore received little if any attention other than local. But each death would have been totally devastating for the family concerned, and they would have been homeless too, everything lost in the fire.
And if you are concerned about firefighters' health, then clearly many more are affected by toxic fumes and smoke on a daily basis by house fires in general than were at the Grenfell Tower fire. While it is completely proper and understandable that the Grenfell fire should go through an official inquiry, where is the inquiry into the 200 deaths in fires in UK homes that same year?
In short, in my view, a major reason why so much attention remains on cladding and so little on toxic fumes from furniture and other products inside the Tower is that it suits government and business to keep the argument narrow rather than expand into all the associated, at least equally and in some cases more important issues. At the very least, there are costs comparisons that make the argument obvious. The cost of replacing all combustible cladding on tower blocks is clearly dwarfed by the cost of replacing virtually every sofa and mattress in 27 million homes, not to mention disposing of them safely too.
The obvious tactic, therefore, is to spend years debating about who's responsible for cladding replacement while in the meantime ignore the greater threat and, in the tried and tested British way, even if you end up paying for the one (and that is of course still open to debate - long, long debate), you will at least avoid paying anything at all towards the much bigger problem.
Another cost argument is that at present, the flame retardant industry does not make much money from cladding. However, its paid for puppets, like the Fire Protection Association, BRE, Sir Ken Knight, Dave Sibert, etc, are working hard to increases the market via 'non-combustible cladding' (they never argue for simply removing it altogether). So it'll either lose a bit or gain a lot from cladding. Meanwhile, it's working hard to keep attention off of upholstered furniture because if that massive fire and poison risk is sorted out, the chemical industry could lose around £300m a year, and the UK furniture industry its much-loved trade barrier. Not to mention the massive hand-outs enjoyed by the puppets.
RSS Feed