Peter Apps

The dark heart of the cladding scandal has been exposed

Grenfell Tower, 2017 (Photo: Getty)

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry has exposed the dark heart of the building safety crisis in recent weeks, as it examined the role of cladding and insulation firms in causing the fire. We have learned that the products used in the tower’s cladding system were known to be severely flammable and that tests pointing this out were suppressed by the manufacturers as they chased lucrative contracts for high rise buildings.

There is no underplaying the size of what has been revealed by this section of the inquiry. This is a monstrous corporate scandal, enabled by failures of some of the construction sector’s most respected institutions. The effects reach far beyond Grenfell, with innocent flat owners currently facing bankruptcy to pay for the removal of these and other products from the walls of their homes.

The primary evidence has involved three companies: Kingspan, an Ireland-based multinational which turned over £2.4bn globally from selling insulated panels in 2020; Celotex, an arm of the French-multinational Saint Gobain and Arconic, an American giant which traces its routes right back to the historic Aluminium Company of America.

It was Arconic which provided the violently combustible cladding panels used on Grenfell Tower (under its Reynobond brand), while Celotex and Kingspan manufactured the plastic insulation fitted to the tower’s walls.

Arconic – we learned – discovered as early as 2004 that if its panels were bent in order to be hung to a building on rails (known as a cassette system) they performed horrendously in fire tests. Configured in this way, the panels burned ten times as fiercely as when they were fixed to a frame with rivets, and emitted seven times as much as heat.

But instead of warning its clients, Arconic said the bent panel test was a ‘rogue result’ and continued to market its product on the basis of the fire-safety grade achieved by the rivetted system.

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