Wales Residential Sprinkler Law Not Cost-Effective

The Chief Fire Officers Association has issue an acerbic critique of the Department for Communities and Local Government’s opposition of new laws to ensure sprinklers are installed in all new properties in Wales, saying the government is more interested in house builders’ profits than saving lives.

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DCLG commissioned a report from BRE Global, which concluded that the sprinkler policy would cost GB pound 6.7 million per life saved over the next decade. The BBC reports that ministers say sprinklers will save 36 lives and prevent around 800 injuries between 2013 and 2022. BRE Global concluded that this was not cost-effective.

The Welsh Assembly passed a law last year to introduce an amendment to Part B of building regulations that would require sprinklers to be fitted in all new and converted residential buildings in Wales. Environment minister John Griffiths told the BBC that the proposals were important in taking forward fire safety. He continued:

Wales will be at the forefront of reducing fire risk and cutting the number of avoidable deaths and injuries caused by fires in residential premises.

Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government secretary who represents DCLG, also attacked the policy, saying that it placed an unnecessary burden of red tape on house-building in Wales. He wrote in a letter to Ann Jones, the Welsh Assembly member who introduced the Domestic Fire Safety measure that led to the new Welsh regulations being introduced, that “the growing distance in relative building costs between England and Wales will place Welsh at a competitive disadvantage, diverting housing investment away from Wales.”

This prompted an angry reaction from CFOA and representatives of the National Fire Sprinkler Network.

CFOA president Vij Randeniya said they were “extremely disappointed” with the negative response of DCLG to the Welsh policy, saying that sprinklers save lives and when taken as a long term cost represent 1 to 2 percent of the total cost of construction.

He said:

We would urge the UK government to reconsider its negative stance to the Welsh approach and its short sighted attitude to the installation of sprinklers. Fire and rescue services see first hand the devastating consequences fire can have and we are repeatedly warning DCLG they are not doing enough to prevent people dying or being injured in their own homes. It appears they want to support the profits of house builders more than they want to protect people’s lives.

Enough is enough
Meanwhile, vice president of the National Fire Sprinkler Network, and former Mid & West Wales chief fire officer, Ronnie King, has urged the government to rethink its stance on sprinklers in residential properties. He said, “let’s stop killing people when we have a solution.”

He made a deeply personal plea in his letter to Eric Pickles, writing:

During my career myself and my fellow firefighters have brought out lifeless bodies of children (sometimes as many as five or six), who needn’t have died in this horrific way, had sprinklers been installed.

Enough is enough, and my colleagues in the service, are ‘fed up’ of it, so we implore you to listen to what the professionals in the service are telling you. In seven recent fires in Great Britain, 36 lives were lost, 31 of them were children. Mention has been made that the Coalition Government is not likely to legislate for sprinklers in the next twenty five years, during which time 8,000 more lives will be lost in fires and hundreds of thousands of people burned or injured in Britain.

Ann Jones had a simple reply to Pickles’s stance on the new regulations: “Don’t play politics with people’s lives.”