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January 12, 2010

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Southwark concedes pre-Lakanal House risk assessments were inadequate

Southwark Council has said that prior to the Lakanal House fire last August, it had mistakenly relied on the training of its housing officers by London Fire Brigade to meet fire safety requirements for some of its tower blocks.

In an interview on last Thursday’s BBC Radio 4 Face the Facts programme, which investigated tower block fire safety, Kim Humphreys, deputy leader of Southwark Council, confirmed the council had changed its approach to conducting fire risk assessments.

"London Fire Brigade provided our housing officers with training which we presumed, erroneously, would meet the requirements. This has not been the case and that’s why we decided that we are going to have outside experts provide us with fire risk assessments for those complex blocks. We have identified that we want to go further than just the basic fire risk assessment and we will be carrying out intrusive inspections of those blocks."

Responding to questions about the relatively few fire risk assessments the council, along with other councils, had carried out prior to the Lakanal House fire compared to the number conducted afterwards, councillor Humphreys added: "I fully accept that as a council it would have been better if we were further advanced in terms of those fire risk assessments."

On a section of its website on the issues arising from the fire at Lakanal House, Southwark Council says:
"As we are London’s largest social landlord, with over 50,000 properties and over 300 high rise blocks, we take our responsibilities seriously. The responsibility to do a fire risk assessment (FRA) was transferred to local councils in 2006. We asked the London Fire Brigade (LFB) to train our staff to conduct fire risk assessments and they trained 132 Southwark housing officers.

"Following the training programme a number of follow-up sessions were run to support staff. Blocks over six storeys have had an FRA conducted by a council officer. Where we believe it is necessary we can escalate the fire risk assessment for further technical or intrusive work, carried out by external experts."

London Fire Brigade has confirmed that it provided 11 fire risk awareness training days for Southwark housing officers.

 

 

 

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