The Home Office published high rise evacuation guidelines for fire and rescue services in February, four years after the Grenfell Tower inquiry recommended that the Westminster government produce guidance.
This was the only recommendation aimed at central government from the inquiry’s phase 1 report, issued in October 2019.
The FBU has written to home secretary James Cleverly, describing the guidance as “too little too late”.
Each of the nine guidelines summarise common sense or self-evident truisms about evacuation, all of which are already well known to firefighters.
This includes outlining that two staircases improve evacuation times; that vulnerable residents take longer to evacuate by themselves; and that evacuations are quicker with alert systems and door knocking.
It may only be a matter of time before we face another tragedy, unless there is a dramatic policy shift. Ministers must wake up and listen to the voices of firefighters and residents
The guidance is based on live tests of an evacuation conducted by the London Fire Brigade and the National Fire Chiefs’ Council.
This simulation was conducted over 10 floors of a tower block, with fewer than 80 volunteer “residents” and no smoke.
There were almost 300 residents in the 23- storey Grenfell Tower when the fire started at night. After 25 minutes, there were still almost 200 people in the building with only 30 firefighters on scene.
An hour after the fire began, when the stairwell was smoke-logged, 130 residents were still in the building.
The tests and guidelines do not address worst case scenarios, such as the Grenfell Tower fire, where the whole building failed, with only a single narrow stairwell, no alert system, no data on vulnerable residents, no evacuation lift, and failed fire doors.
Even with less than half the number of floors of the Grenfell Tower, in the daytime and with far fewer evacuees – all of whom where awake and knew what was happening – it took almost 29 minutes to fully evacuate.
In the letter to the Home Office, the FBU describes the guidelines as a “tick box exercise” providing little or no help to firefighters and control staff.
The government has failed to explain to incident commanders how to evacuate, and this publication offers no reassurance for residents.
Commenting on these failures, FBU general secretary Matt Wrack said: “It may only be a matter of time before we face another tragedy, unless there is a dramatic policy shift. Ministers must wake up and listen to the voices of firefighters and residents.”
