These materials were made and sold by companies which are huge global players. The cladding came from the French arm of Arconic, a Pennsylvania-based giant with £5.4 billion in global turnover and roots which trace back to the historic Aluminium Company of America. The insulation was sold by Celotex, a medium-sized UK company which is part of the French multinational Saint Gobain, and Kingspan, an Irish giant with more than £3 billion in annual turnover and almost 14,000 employees.
What has emerged is evidence which suggests each of these firms were aware their products posed serious fire risks, but this was concealed from both regulators and the market so they could be sold for use on high rises.
Arconic realised its polyethylene-cored cladding had a horrendous reaction to fire following French tests in 2005, where it burned fiercely and obtained a basement ranking of Class E. Despite this, Arconic continued to market it as the much safer Class B (based on an earlier certification obtained using limited test data which had persuaded a respected British certification body, the British Board of Agrément, to produce the certificate apparently confirming this).
In a string of internal emails, technical members of its staff agonised about the morality of continuing to sell the ‘dangerous’ product. ‘It’s hard to make a note about this because we are not clean,’ said one in 2010. In 2015, Claude Wehrle, a senior member of Arconic’s technical team, wrote: ‘PE is dangerous on facades, and everything should be transferred to [a more fire-resistant panel] as a matter of urgency…This opinion is technical and anti-commercial, it seems.’
Nonetheless, internal emails record the firm resolving to continue to sell in countries with ‘national regulations [which] are not as restrictive.’ One of these countries was the UK, which had failed to tighten rules covering cladding on high rises following two previous fires in 1999 and 2009.
The story for the insulation is a similarly miserable tale. In 2006, a UK ban on the use of combustible insulation on high rises was rescinded, as long as it had passed a large-scale fire test (a loophole the industry trade body lobbied for).
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Behind the scenes, the picture was even worse. After the test was passed in 2005, Kingspan altered the chemical composition of the insulation so that it was no longer the same product, according to one former employee.
When retested in 2007 as part of a different system it failed combustion tests dramatically. Kingspan has argued this was not a consequence of its product, but the firm's own internal report warned the new insulation had performed ‘very differently’ — burning on its own and continuing after the test fire was put out.
But the market was not told of these findings, nor that the product had changed. In fact, when the country’s largest private building control firm, the National House Building Council (NHBC) threatened to reject the product due to fears over its combustibility in the mid 2010s, Kingspan called in the lawyers and threatened it with defamation. The NHBC backed down.
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Celotex, a smaller firm, was envious of Kingspan’s monopoly of the high-rise market and sought to catch up in the early 2010s. By May 2014, its insulation had also passed a test, also using a non-combustible cladding panel, and it too began to market its product as safe for use on high rises. But the test was not as it seemed: fire resisting boards were used around the temperature monitors that record the pass or fail, distorting the result.
The report of the test from the independent Building Research Establishment (a national building science facility dating back to world war one, but privatised in 1997) made no reference to these boards. The evidence from Celotex witnesses so far suggests the BRE staff member who wrote the report may have known about the boards, which were visible in one photograph that Celotex sought to remove, but did not mention them.
Jon Roper, the 22-year-old graduate who was in charge of Celotex's effort to break into the market for tall buildings, told the inquiry of his regret that he acted so dishonestly, but said he had no one to turn to, with the firm’s senior management united behind this course of action.
He was able to secure a certificate from another independent body, the Local Authority Building Control (LABC) which said the insulation was suitable for use on high rises. The LABC appears to have written its certificate simply by copy and pasting an email written by Celotex's Jon Roper, even including the same typo on the certificate.