2. How red tape saves lives: the law on fire precautions in Britain since the 1970s

The beginnings of proactive regulation

A fire precautions act capable of regulating multiple social and economic risks was first mooted in 1962 when the Home Office established an inter-departmental committee ‘to consider the principles on which fire prevention legislation should be based and the objects to which it should be directed’. Its report, issued at the end of the year, criticised the inflexibility of existing legislation, which managed risks on a narrow sectoral basis.¹⁰ Legislation, recently passed, affected factories and licensed premises, while officials had drafted similar legislation governing offices, shops and railway premises. Each site was inspected by the fire brigade and a certificate issued, which contained details, marked on approved plans, of the available means of escape and the number of persons allowed on the premises at any given time. Such legislation responded to multiple-fatality fires in industrial workplaces (for example, at a Keighley mill in 1956, in which eight workers died), department stores (with prominent fires in Glasgow and Liverpool high street stores in 1949 and 1960, causing thirteen and eleven deaths, respectively) and places of public amusement (as with a Bolton nightclub fire in 1961, with nineteen deaths). These fatalities temporarily brought the issues to the forefront of the political agenda because of the media interest they generated, but they soon faded from memory.¹¹

A consolidatory bill was promoted – and withdrawn due to lack of parliamentary time – on three occasions during the 1960s. Eventually, in 1971 it reached the statute books with cross-party support. Officially, governments were awaiting the publication of the report of the Departmental Committee on the Fire Service, which had been appointed in 1967 to inquire into the organisation of the service. When that finally appeared in May 1970, the idea of consolidating existing fire prevention legislation into a single comprehensive act was rejected.¹²

In truth, the legislation had already been drafted and governments were playing for time, rarely regarding fire safety as a priority. The decision to begin with hotels was again a response to several multiple-fatality fires in the sector in the late 1960s and the result of joint pressure from government advisers and industry bodies to better protect the safety of staff and guests. This included a fire at a hotel in Stornoway, on the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands off the west coast of mainland Scotland, in 1966, caused by a carelessly discarded cigarette. The hotel’s outdated alarm system consisted of a bell which was not audible throughout the whole premises; five guests lost their lives. A further five fatalities occurred at a fire in a hotel in Church Stretton, Shropshire in 1968, where bedroom notices advised guests: ‘In case of fire shout “FIRE”’. A third fire at the Rose & Crown coaching inn in Saffron Walden, Essex, on Boxing Day in 1969 caused eleven deaths when a faulty television set caught alight overnight. All three fires occurred in old buildings, with combustible timber floors and staircases, which blocked escape and access points. Experts estimated that the average age of hotels was between 50 and 100 years, with some coaching inns over 200 years old, built before modern regulations were introduced, but full of historic charm. The Rose & Crown, for instance, was a sixteenth-century coaching inn with ‘old-world atmosphere’, but, lacking suitable precautions, firefighters found that fire-resisting doors failed during Christmas festivities.¹³

Shortly before the fire at the Rose & Crown, the Fire Protection Association (FPA), an industry body formed in 1946 by fire insurance companies, issued a stark warning about inadequate precautions in hotels, citing failings with the construction, equipment and training of staff in many of the estimated 200,000 premises across Britain. The British Hotels and Restaurants Association, a lobby group for the hospitality industry, dismissed the report as ‘unnecessarily alarmist’, but the number of fire disasters disproved its weak argument.¹⁴ That so few hotels contained up-to-date fire precautions was ridiculed by Fire magazine, which mocked up a fake advertisement for a hotel offering ‘Bed, Breakfast and Fire Risk’ for its readers, who were well versed in the use of gallows humour to cope with the grim realities of the profession:

HOTEL, facing beach. Excellent cuisine. All mod. con., comfortable beds. Children welcome. Highly combustible. Unenclosed staircases, limited means of escape.¹⁵

To remind Parliament of the importance of legislating change, a fire, causing the deaths of eight guests, occurred at the New Langham hotel in London in May 1971. Moving the second reading of the Fire Precautions Bill, Minister of State Richard Sharples argued that it was ‘a fact that all too often in the past before action has been taken, it has needed some major catastrophe to focus attention’ on lawmakers; the new bill offered the chance to deal proactively with hazards as they appeared or evolved.¹⁶

The bill, then, was based on years of applied learning but it took the trigger of the Rose & Crown blaze – cited by both Judith Hackitt and Sam Webb as a ‘milestone event’ in regulatory reform¹⁷ – to overcome delays with its drafting. An internal inquiry by Chief Inspector of Fire Services Henry Smith revealed multiple defects in the hotel and criticised the owners, Trust House Hotels, for failing to invite the local brigade to make a goodwill inspection of the premises. Given that Trust House Ltd. was in the process of merging with Forte Holdings to create the country’s largest hotel group, Smith recognised the urgency to impose a clear duty upon ‘hotel managements in ensuring that fire precautions are strictly observed’, as well as upon staff and guests in ‘avoiding thoughtless actions such as the failure to extinguish smoking materials properly or to close fire and smoke doors on landings or in passages’.¹⁸ What had once been deemed acceptable risks within the hotel industry – not least permitting smoking in bedrooms as well as public areas – had given way to a view that guest and staff safety was as much a priority as the provision of amenities for comfort.

Towards a fire service-led approach

Despite cross-sectoral support, the 1972 Designation Order attracted fierce criticism from hoteliers, trade bodies and Tory MPs that too many fire prevention officers (FPOs) were inflexible in their interpretation of the law, which is certainly hinted at in Basil Fawlty’s protest at having to hold a fire drill to satisfy the local brigade. Robert Adley, a Dorset MP and industry lobbyist (he was European marketing director for Commonwealth Holiday Inns), bemoaned the ‘too tough firemen’ whose overzealous attitudes towards safety were ‘cutting away at the grass roots of the industry’ by ‘hitting very hard’ small hotels struggling to fund expensive and unnecessary improvements. One such ‘small hotel’ of twenty-one bedrooms, owned by Exeter MP John Hannam, had been sent an ‘improvement notice’ containing works totalling £8,000. Meanwhile, an editorial in the Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine dismissed the regulations as ‘administratively mad’ and ‘fiscally stupid’.¹⁹ Complaints were twofold: first, that modern hotels were built to agreed international standards of safety that minimised the risk of fire; second, that the costs of modifying small hotels outweighed the risks as well as the benefits of keeping them open, but legislators had already recognised this by exempting premises that catered for fewer than six guests. Sir Fitzroy Maclean, MP for Bute and Northern Ayrshire who co-owned the historic Creggans Inn on the idyllic shore of Loch Fyne, claimed that the cost of updating safety in historic premises threatened to drive ‘run-of-the-mill’ hotels such as his out of business. More seriously, historian John Walton notes that many landladies in seaside resorts like Blackpool converted their guesthouses into flatlets partly to avoid the cost of installing fire precautions, as well as in response to the changing pattern of demand from tourists; this would return to haunt them a decade later, as we shall see in Chapter 4.²⁰

Multiple-fatality fires in hotels continued to occur, then, in the face of resistance to change. In April 1972, two women died in a fire that destroyed a 1920s Cambridge hotel with no audible alarm system; its management had failed to act on a list of requirements identified during a recent inspection.²¹ In July 1973, ten holidaymakers were killed in a devastating fire at the Esplanade Hotel in the Scottish resort town of Oban, started by a carelessly discarded cigarette. A fire brigade inspection the previous year had recommended improvements including smoke-stopping doors and an external escape. The hotel owner was aware of the risks but had postponed the remedial work because of a combination of costs and time, citing the excuse, ‘I just didn’t get round to it.’ Neither had he bothered to train his seasonal staff in fire evacuation because ‘[t]hey were here for six months only and were mostly girls’.²² In their coverage of the fire, newspapers demanded unsafe hotels be forced to close until they completed approved work, while industry groups and Tory MPs called upon government to offer low-interest loans to support remedial work.²³ As many as half of Britain’s hotels and boarding houses could be ‘potential death traps’ according to an investigation by the Daily Mirror, which claimed that up to a quarter of all proprietors flouted the law by not applying for safety certificates. Even then, fire brigades faced a considerable backlog in inspecting and reinspecting premises: in Blackpool, for instance, only 10 per cent of the 4,000 applications for certificates submitted to the local brigade had been completed by mid-1973.²⁴

The main problem with the application of the Act, then, concerned workload and resourcing, particularly in tourist areas with a denser concentration of hotels. On the eve of the Act, there were 1,248 full-time FPOs in post, performing between them some 650,000 surveys and inspections nationally. Duties ranged from routine surveys to on-site inspections, which varied from a few minutes for a low-risk premises like a public toilet to three days for large risks such as hospitals; a hotel survey could take anywhere between half a day and a full day, absorbing more person-hours per inspection than most other types of visit.²⁵

Civil servants calculated that, even with a phased introduction of the Act, it would still take a decade to extend to 442,000 ‘high-risk’ premises. In the short term, this would involve inspecting and certifying approximately 30,000 hotels and boarding houses. To do so, the fire service would require 350 additional staff, whose role would be limited to fire prevention work. At a modest annual cost of approximately £1 million (equivalent to £14 million in 2020) falling onto the taxpayer, the proposals were fiercely resisted by some local authority associations but welcomed by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and Trades Union Congress, which favoured the greater opportunities for career advancement that the Act promised firefighters.²⁶

Implementation was inevitably piecemeal, but not without success. By the close of 1974, fire authorities across England and Wales had issued certificates for 3,302 hotels and boarding houses. A further 13,202 premises had been issued with improvement notices, while 24,985 were awaiting inspection. An estimated 14,000 premises had yet to submit applications. Three years later, 20,000 premises had been certified, with 10,000 more outstanding applications or appeals in the system. Progress was slow but welcomed by many in the service, not least Chief Inspector of Fire Services Kenneth Holland, who, in addressing industry management in his annual reports, stressed that fire precautions ‘are an investment in keeping a business going’.²⁷ Despite the backlog, a survey by the FPA in 1978 concluded that the number of hotel fires involving fatalities had fallen significantly in the six years since the Order’s designation.²⁸ According to government data, proactive regulation was proven to save lives. In 1974 there were thirty-one deaths and eighty-one non-fatal casualties in hotel fires in Britain; six years later, nineteen fatalities were recorded in hotels, hostels and boarding houses (of which ten were accounted for in a single blaze at a London hostel – see Chapter 4) and one hundred and thirty-nine casualties. There was now a greater proportion of fire-related deaths in unregulated premises such as homes, nightclubs, public houses and restaurants.²⁹ Casualty rates in hotels and boarding houses continued to fall during the 1980s, despite the number of fires remaining fairly constant.³⁰ Inspection, certification and enforcement had been proven to succeed in raising awareness among staff and guests as well as in improving hotel management and housekeeping. By the end of the 1970s, consumer groups had even declared British hotels to be safer than many of their European counterparts and the Fire Precautions Act was adopted as a model of good practice by other countries.³¹

The deregulatory impulse

The success of the 1972 Designation Order in raising standards of safety within hotels inevitably led to calls from stakeholder groups to extend its provisions to undesignated sectors. Successive home secretaries faced pressure to issue designation orders governing public sector premises including psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes, hostels, student halls of residence, schools and high-rise residential buildings.³² Reformist voices grew louder in the wake of disasters in institutions where ‘at-risk’ people were cared for, not least because they frequently exposed underlying stigma towards vulnerable groups. First, in July 1972 a devastating fire at the Coldharbour Hospital in Dorset, used as a home for people with learning disabilities, killed thirty residents. The committee of inquiry’s investigation found understaffing, while serious safety defects were discovered following a renovation. When the contractors proposed to use fire-resistant plasterboard partitions in wards, they were advised against this by the consulting architect on the grounds that plasterboard ‘might be vulnerable to kicking and other behaviour from the patients’; subsequently, contractors installed a more flammable hardboard which gave it the highest fire risk rating possible.³³

Such derogatory remarks reveal the prevalence of prejudice in cases where some of the most disadvantaged people who demand improvements in building safety are stigmatised either as ‘troublemakers’ – as was the case with several residents of Grenfell Tower in the months and years leading up to the fire – or as undeserving of the extra expense.³⁴ Yet the government shied away from challenging such blatant instances of ‘stigma power’, with its social services secretary, Keith Joseph, describing the calamitous decision to use hessian to cover hardboard partitions as ‘misguided enthusiasm’ before committing his government to strengthening the enforcing powers of fire authorities. In truth, little changed and Joseph warned that ‘[w]ith the best will in the world it is not possible to guarantee that such appalling accidents as that at Coldharbour will never occur again’.³⁵

Two years later, in December 1974, eighteen residents, aged between sixty-seven and ninety-one years, died in a fire at an old people’s home in Nottinghamshire caused by a resident smoking in bed. Staff shortages were again cited as a failure in evacuating those residents with physical impairments. The home, a prefabricated single-storey building comprising houses connected to a dining hall, was designed by the architect Donald Gibson and was part of the Consortium of Local Authorities Programme (CLASP) system of industrialised building. Initially bringing together local authorities to meet the problem of building schools on land subject to mining subsidence, using bulk purchasing methods as well as on-site assembly of factory-made parts, CLASP was used to construct residential accommodation, hospitals and universities during the 1960s.³⁶

Concerns were repeatedly raised about the safety of such buildings, specifically in their use of false ceilings, which created a flue with the wooden and felt roofs, and a spate of fires in CLASP schools during the 1970s caused experts to dismiss the system as unsafe.³⁷ Although a 1971 amendment to the Building Regulations included a stipulation that fireproof partitions should be inserted behind ceiling panels, fire investigators found that remediation work had yet to begin. Following a campaign by the National Corporation for the Care of Old People, the newly elected Labour Government promised to extend regulations to residential homes. Draft regulations were drawn up to strengthen precautions, but because of a change in government in 1979 these were never issued.³⁸

The failure to extend the provisions of the 1971 Act to protect ‘at-risk’ groups reveals a hardening attitude within government towards the value of regulation. It also reflects a preference for individuals to take greater responsibility for themselves regardless of whether they are able to do so and assumes that people will behave rationally or with urgency in an emergency, which is not guaranteed, as several empirical studies have shown.³⁹ While advisory bodies attempted to shape a more proactive approach to policymaking, ministers largely interpreted their responsibility for protecting public safety as an administrative and financial exercise rather than a moral one. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is a view that has been recently reinforced by the government’s decision not to implement the recommendation in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 Report that all disabled residents be given Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (PEEPs) on the grounds that their costs would be disproportionate to the number of lives likely to be saved.

The limitations to the regulatory approach should be understood in the context of an escalating economic crisis during the 1970s, as well as growing distrust of local authorities from within central government.⁴⁰ Labour ministers regularly cited public expenditure restrictions as obstacles to enforcement, while industry bodies resisted proposals to extend regulatory provisions to the hospitality sector, citing a large proportion of its membership ‘struggling for survival in the face of the present economic depression’.⁴¹ Successive governments were therefore committed to permitting a greater degree of self-compliance within business in assessing their own workplace hazards free from state restrictions.

The influence of neoliberal ideas over the limits of the regulatory state became more strident from 1979 with the election of a Conservative government openly committed to diminishing the role of the state, cutting public expenditure, slashing regulations, curbing trade union powers and restricting interference in individual enterprise. The model of inspection and certification established by the Fire Precautions Act was regarded as out of kilter with the Thatcher Government’s embrace of a ‘neoliberal revolution’.⁴² Yet the continued occurrence of fires – including one at an old people’s home outside Hull, which killed six residents and injured another twenty-one in 1977 – amplified warnings for stricter regulation of care homes.⁴³ Although Labour’s draft regulations designating residential accommodation were at an advanced stage of preparation by April 1979, they attracted considerable resistance from within the care sector. In particular, concerns about inflexibility and costs of compliance were raised by the Personal Social Services Council (PSSC), a non-governmental advisory body established in 1971. The PSSC issued a report arguing that ‘the quality of life in residential homes suffers as a result of fire precautions’, citing difficulties caused to resident mobility by self-closing doors as well as the likely impact of the costs of remedial work resulting in ‘a cut-back’ in care. Rather than a one-size-fits-all certification process, the PSSC recommended a compromise approach ‘more carefully tailored to the needs of individual homes’.⁴⁴

Seizing on the criticism, the reforms were put on hold with the Conservative’s election victory before the PSSC was itself disbanded following public spending cuts.⁴⁵ Moreover, rather than advocating a flexible approach towards fire precautions, the new government tightened restrictions on expenditure, which compelled local authorities to make cuts to social care and firefighting.⁴⁶ Mandatory fire precautions were viewed suspiciously by ministers who preferred to issue advisory guidance to service providers rather than insist upon ‘excessive expenditure’ and ‘stringent requirements’ at a time of ‘scarce public, private and charitable funds’.⁴⁷ As Home Secretary Leon Brittan put it in response to a Commons motion about care homes, ‘In many cases in both public and private sectors there is no doubt that steps have already been taken to achieve an acceptable standard of fire precautions’ without resorting to enforcement. ‘This is what is desired, whether it is done by certification or without certification.’ The Home Office thus rejected proposals from its own advisory body, the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council (CFBAC), to phase in the designation of old people’s homes, preferring to encourage care providers to take advantage of the available voluntary guidance.⁴⁸

Politicians and civil servants repeatedly cited the Fire Precautions Act as an example of excessive regulation in a political atmosphere that was keen to redefine the boundaries between the public and private sectors. In 1980, the Home Office published a green paper criticising both the escalating costs of enforcing the legislation (at approximately £16.25 million a year) and the costs of compliance for designated premises, which it estimated at about £70 million per year. Stopping short of recommending the dismantling of the existing regulatory framework, the authors proposed ‘a modified system’, awarding powers to fire authorities to selectively focus on class A risks (premises in larger industrial and commercial cities) rather than ‘premises presenting a low risk’.⁴⁹ Greater flexibility resonates with what Michael Moran calls the ‘hyper-innovative approach’ towards the operation of the British regulatory state that emerged from the late 1970s, as a response by the British political system to a policy crisis that eroded confidence in the post-war social and political consensus as well as a crisis of belief in the ability of government to govern in an accountable fashion. The ‘new regulatory state’ that emerged involved standardising and formalising the practices of government through the provision of systematic information and uniform reporting and control mechanisms.⁵⁰ In relation to fire precautions, government thus accepted its general duty to provide a reasonable standard of safety towards property and human life, but left it to others – not least the fire protection industry and fire brigades – to establish what this meant in practice. Whereas the Fire Precautions Act had ushered in a new era of standardised control within government, this discernible shift towards greater selectivity was designed to disrupt and disperse its own regulatory powers while enabling more independent enterprise.

In 1985, a second review of fire precautions advocated even greater selectivity in the law’s application. While this was influenced by the growing number of European Council directives concerning health and safety, which extended the principle of employer self-compliance beyond the limits permitted under British legislation, it was ostensibly driven by central government’s crusade against ‘burdens on business’, as explored in the previous chapter.⁵¹ The deregulation of administrative and legislative regulations imposed upon business had emerged as a flagship element in British government policy by the mid-1980s and was part of a wider transnational deregulatory moment in Western societies; the state was committed to ‘rolling back’ on its micro-management of the economy through a variety of methods including privatising public utilities and cutting ‘red tape’, as business regulations were derogatorily described by ministers. Fire precautions were identified as one of the most ‘complicated’ and inconsistently applied requirements for firms to adhere to in Lord Young’s Burdens of Business report, published in the same year. ‘Fire precautions should be made more flexible for premises with a minimal fire risk’, argued Young, recommending ‘a new system of control’ with greater flexibility in order to avoid ‘unnecessarily severe requirements on low risk premises but consistently catching and improving high risk premises’.⁵²

In their jointly authored foreword to the Home Office’s review, Leon Britten and Lord Young cited the recent fire at Bradford City Football Club’s Valley Parade Stadium, which fatally injured fifty-six supporters in ‘horrific scenes’ that ‘brought home to everyone the devastating effects of fire and the need for adequate fire precautions’.⁵³ What they failed to mention was the fact that years of flammable waste – old newspapers, cigarette packets, polystyrene cups and other discarded items were found by forensic investigators – had been allowed to accumulate underneath the wooden stand, which provided fuel for a discarded light (either a dropped match or a cigarette) when it fell through the gaps in the dilapidated stand. Left to smoulder under the feet of spectators gathered to celebrate the club’s championship winning season, once alight the fire quickly spread up the embankment and ignited the pitch roof, causing a flashover that cut off escape for many and led to one survivor describing the fire’s ferocious spread as ‘Four Minutes to Hell’. The club chairman’s decision to remove fire extinguishers from stands, on the spurious grounds that they would be misused by spectators, further reveals the ways that regulatory failures can quickly escalate, in this instance by delaying assistance from arriving. The government’s review, reinforced by the accompanying public inquiry, therefore used the opportunity to censure the club owners’ failure towards their supporters, while introducing stricter safety rules for sporting stadiums, thereby introducing a necessary regulatory ‘burden’ to protect public safety.⁵⁴

The resultant Fire Safety and Safety of Places of Sport Act 1987 required fire authorities to take an interventionist approach in certifying outdoor stadiums as well as indoor sporting premises. To offset the increased workload this entailed, the 1971 Act was amended, granting local authorities powers to exempt low-risk premises from certification. This hierarchy of risks was further refined following the devastating fire at London King’s Cross Underground Station in November 1987, which killed thirty-one people including London Fire Brigade station officer Colin Townsley. As a result, sub-surface railway stations were designated as class A risks following the relaxation of rules for low-risk premises. ‘This is the speediest means to introduce enforceable standards without uncertainty’, claimed Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, recognising that there were occasions when ‘the regulatory system can evolve’ in order to deal with new or emerging risks.⁵⁵

‘Rolling back the state’ and deregulation continued as twin pillars of government policy into the 1990s and beyond and, in the relative absence of high-profile fires, they met with greater success. Michael Heseltine’s Deregulation and Contracting Out Bill in 1994 clumsily promised ‘the biggest bonfire of controls that has taken place in modern times in this country’, although it failed to deliver the forecasted savings, while, from 1997, New Labour promised to accelerate the removal of ‘unnecessarily burdensome’ regulations, with fire precautions identified as ‘a priority target’ for its Better Regulation Task Force.⁵⁶ A variety of voices – in particular newspapers and policy ‘think tanks’ – spoke out against fire precautions and health and safety rules using negative rhetorical tropes such as ‘red tape’ and advocated relaxing policy around risk regulation.⁵⁷ This coincided with the emergence of a managerialist approach within government, which translated into using deregulation to enable greater private and voluntary sector involvement in the provision of public services through multi-agency partnerships. The state was shifting from a traditional service delivery role to one where it contracted out public services to private or voluntary bodies. Just like public utilities or building control, fire precautions were no longer regarded as natural monopolies of the state but would be passed back to the individual to determine the appropriateness of controls. From 1997, fire risk assessments were introduced into workplaces to satisfy European Commission directives. Two years later, amended regulations set a requirement for premises designated under the 1971 Act to also conduct fire risk assessments; this applied to all workplaces, including hotels, boarding houses and care homes. The duplication of administrative effort strengthened criticism that the European Commission unnecessarily tied British firms up in red tape and reinforced an increasingly hostile media attitude towards ‘Brussels bureaucrats’.⁵⁸ While this culminated most notoriously with the British government’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016, it was also cited by several witnesses at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry as justification for the ‘one-in, one-out’ strategy for reducing regulations pursued by successive governments during the 2010s.⁵⁹

Eventually and perhaps inevitably, an overhaul of the law came at the turn of the twenty-first century, thereby establishing the regulatory regime under which the fire at Grenfell Tower occurred. From 1997 to 2007, the New Labour Government, with Tony Blair as prime minister, continued the move to deregulate fire precautions while also championing the modernisation of public services. In practice, this meant greater hollowing out of the public sector and a more active role for private enterprise in delivering services. Blair’s ‘modernisation agenda’ was intended to distance ‘New’ from ‘Old’ Labour by demonstrating the party’s ability to govern after years in opposition. It was justified as a means to de-align the Labour Party from its traditional supporters, in particular trade unions, and open up public services to a wider variety of influences.⁶⁰ The fire service and the law on fire precautions were not immune to this, as seen in the controversial recommendations made by an independent review chaired by the university administrator George Bain in 2002 and a white paper issued the following year. Deaths and injuries from fire had declined during the second half of the 1990s, yet the number of fires had risen since 1998, which led the review to recommend the service take a risk-based approach towards safety, focusing on the ‘most vulnerable’ people in society – lower socio-economic groups, single-parent households, people with disabilities, the elderly, renters in houses in multiple occupancy (HMOs) and households with heavy smokers and/or drinkers – who suffered disproportionately from fire and its effects. Bain contended that the fire service’s advisory bodies were resistant to modernisation and overly focused on ‘stakeholder business to the detriment of progressing national strategic issues’, reportedly blocking reforms.⁶¹ The Home Office had, according to some insiders, actively treated the fire service with ‘benign neglect’ compared to its core matters of crime and immigration. New Labour transferred responsibility for fire service policy to the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions in 2001 and, from 2002, to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), believing that ‘new sets of eyes’ would bring ‘new perspectives’ and help to elevate the service’s low status within government.⁶²

The Bain Review exacerbated deteriorating industrial relations within the service, witnessed in a national firefighters’ strike in 2002 and the FBU’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 2004. Unperturbed by criticism of its ‘lack of vision and … contempt of Britain’s Fire Service’, the ODPM, headed by John Prescott, a former official in the National Union of Seamen, pushed ahead with radical reforms to the service, introduced in 2004 and 2005.⁶³ As minister for local government, Nick Raynsford, described it, ‘The Bain Report was a clarion call for reform in a service that had been left in a time warp, approaching its duties and conducting its industrial relations in ways that smacked of the attitudes of a bygone era.’ ⁶⁴ Much historic legislation was rescinded, abandoning national standards of fire cover introduced after the Second World War in favour of local Integrated Risk Management Plans, reducing limits on the number of operational firefighters required to crew appliances and rashly abolishing its own policy advisory body, the CFBAC. Less contentious was the logical decision to rename the service the Fire and Rescue Service to reflect firefighters’ increasing role in non-fire emergency work, which included responding to terrorism, flooding, chemical spillages and road traffic collisions, though successive governments have since shown unwillingness to properly fund these new responsibilities.⁶⁵

The 2005 Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order repealed over seventy separate pieces of legislation including the Fire Precautions Act, introducing a single fire safety regime that applied to all workplaces and non-domestic premises from 2006 in England, Wales and Scotland (from 2010 in Northern Ireland). It also covered premises where the main use is to provide sleeping accommodation, such as hotels, boarding houses, hostels, holiday accommodation and the common areas of higher-risk residential buildings (HRRBs) and HMOs. The Order requires every premises to employ a ‘responsible person’ to undertake a fire risk assessment (FRA) and decide how to address the risks. It thus signalled a move from a prescriptive regime to a risk-assessment-based approach, removing the responsibility for certification from fire and rescue authorities. This led some commentators to question whether the changes were being driven more by ‘economic factors than a need to maintain the current levels of public and employee safety from fire beyond their homes’.⁶⁶

In the years that followed, the number of FRAs undertaken by operational staff fell considerably and fire authorities cut the numbers of fire prevention officers until the Grenfell Tower fire triggered a reversal in the policy. Decades of accumulated knowledge of building risks by operational crews had been degraded; the era of regulation by the fire service had ended. The ODPM issued eleven guidance documents containing practical advice for ‘responsible persons’ about how to comply with the legislation, although a 2006 poll found that 35 per cent of businesses in England and Wales were unaware of how the legal changes affected them while almost half of respondents were uncertain as to whether they even complied.⁶⁷ Given the relatively low level of compliance, experts were sceptical of the benefits of the change to public safety, especially given the existence of ‘a vocal minority’ of businesses ‘who will do absolutely nothing at all unless threatened with legal action’.⁶⁸ As Philip Heath, the technical manager for Kingspan Insulation Limited – the firm that provided rainscreen boards used in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, which were catastrophically revealed to be combustible – described it in an early assessment of the order’s effectiveness at dealing with building insulation products and cladding, ‘[l]ack of understanding about any material’s true performance in a fire situation could at best prove expensive and at worst fatal’.⁶⁹ Firefighters and the residents of tower blocks would find out this fact for themselves soon enough, while shocking evidence submitted to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (in which, after having the safety of the rainscreen cladding questioned by builders, Heath replied in an internal email that they should ‘go f*ck themselves’) exposed serious defects in the system of self-compliance that successive governments had actively encouraged since the 1980s.⁷⁰

Conclusion

This chapter has traced the shifting attitude and approach of the state towards fire precautions in hotels and other premises. With the exception of the privately owned home, where responsibility for fire safety has been left to the homeowner or landlord, central government begrudgingly accepted its responsibility for regulating fire precautions from 1970. This heel-dragging attitude towards safety manifested itself in a variety of approaches, ranging from reluctant acceptance of the requirement to regulate a greater number and variety of premises during the 1970s to hostility towards the supposed imposition of ‘red tape’ on private enterprise during the 1980s. Where regulations were rolled out successfully, these were historically reactive to large multiple-fatality fires, which briefly opened policy windows for reform. Scope for more widespread systematic reform was more possible during the Thatcher and Blair years, where there was greater policy continuity across three terms (albeit subject to considerable ‘machinery of government’ changes). Even then the deregulatory impulses of both governments co-existed alongside the requirement for new regulations that were triggered by crises; in the first instance, by a ‘decade of disasters’ in the 1980s and, in the second, the firefighters’ pay dispute and strike of 2002–3, which presented, according to one of the government ministers involved, ‘an opportunity’ to achieve ‘real change’ in modernising the service.⁷¹

Where regulations were properly introduced, they reduced the number of casualties from fire by improving the provision of fire precautions and raising individual and public awareness of safety, as seen most clearly in the case of hotels and boarding houses. Collaboration between the state, industry and service stakeholders, as well as individual proprietors and guests – in familiarising themselves with the location of fire exits, not obstructing corridors and acting promptly when the fire alarm is activated – reduced the number of fatalities in hotel fires between the 1970s and 1990s and independent studies consequently highlighted the relative safety of British hotels compared to their European counterparts. Yet the number and severity of hotel fires rose in England and Wales between 2011 and 2019, with a proportionately greater number of people killed or injured in hotel fires than in flats and apartments over the same period.⁷² Even then, the greater life risk has continued to reside in institutional buildings such as hospitals, prisons, hostels and care homes where there are specific challenges with evacuation caused by residents with restricted mobility, cognitive disabilities and other social and medical problems – as has been documented in this chapter.⁷³

These worrying facts raise serious questions about the effectiveness of deregulated fire precautions. The inspection and certification of hotels and other public buildings may have been a cumbersome job for under-resourced fire brigades, but it was effective in improving public safety. Moreover, as recent studies have suggested, there are conflicting interpretations over who should be recognised as ‘the responsible person’ in hotel chains, which has been exposed by the widespread installation of combustible cladding on the frontages of tall buildings across the country. A 2019 cladding fire, fortunately with no fatalities, at the Brentford branch of Travelodge – at which I have stayed while researching for this book – reveals the tension between the deregulatory impulses of the state and micro-level regulatory practices to protect public safety. In his incident report, London Fire Brigade’s Assistant Commissioner Graham Ellis reported that the incident was ‘an excellent example of multi-agencies working together to bring a challenging incident under control with no injuries’, yet it also reveals how much we entrust our personal safety to the responsibility of people who put profit above individual safety. As one fire safety expert puts it, ‘You know your home and your way around it, but in a hotel, you probably used the lift, and don’t even know where the stairs are’, which demands extra care to take responsibility for the safety of ourselves and our families.⁷⁴

Far from being stale, the regulatory system established in the 1960s and early 1970s improved safety standards in designated premises and demonstrably saved lives. The failure to extend the law to unregulated sectors was the result of political apathy and instability within successive governments, as well as a conscious effort to deregulate fire precautions from 1979. Political and media interest in matters of safety – which were frequently derided as unwelcome and burdensome within public discourse by right-wing politicians, journalists and fictionalised hotel proprietors alike – only really piqued following high-profile multiple-fatality fires, as has been the case yet again in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy. Local authorities were actively encouraged to avoid a prescriptive approach towards enforcement, using persuasion or administrative sanctions in the majority of cases. The ‘paradox of regulation’, as Majone describes it, has meant that the deregulation of public services in the 1980s and 1990s involved a cultural shift from a relatively rigid but effective fire service-led approach to a more or less self-regulated regime subject to ‘less burdensome methods’ such as goodwill safety inspections and the issuing of improvement notices.⁷⁵ One can only hope that, to return to our opening example, Basil Fawlty’s wife, Sybil, would have taken it upon herself to be ‘the responsible person’, rather than leave matters to her incompetent husband, otherwise Fawlty Towers would probably have long burned to the ground.

1. 1  Rama Mäkhä, ‘Basil Fawlty as a “Pre-Thatcherite” Conservative in Fawlty Towers’, Journal of European Popular Culture 8, no. 2 (2017): 109–23.

2. 2  John Cleese and Connie Booth, ‘The Germans’, Fawlty Towers, Series 1, Episode 6 (BBC, first broadcast 24 October 1975).

3. 3  Cleese and Booth, ‘The Germans’.

4. 4  Home Office, Guide to the Fire Precautions Act 1971. 1 Hotels and Boarding Houses (London: HMSO, 1972).

5. 5  Act Quickly! Seconds Count! (London: Hotel and Catering Industry Board, 1984).

6. 6  S.E. Chandler, ‘Fires in Hotels’, Fire Research Note (London: HMSO, 1969).

7. 7  See, eg, GTI, BSR00000095/50, Michael Mansfield QC et al., ‘Module 6 Opening Submissions: Central Government and Testing & Certification. On Behalf of the Bereaved, Survivors and Residents Represented by Team 2’, 19 November 2021, 11.

8. 8  GTI, Testimony of Dame Melanie Dawes, 16 March 2022, 229.

9. 9  Majone, ‘Paradoxes’, 53.

10. 10  TNA HO/346/98, ‘Fire Prevention Legislation: Memorandum’, January 1965.

11. 11  Shane Ewen, Fighting Fires: Creating the British Fire Service, c.1800–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 157–8.

12. 12  TNA HO/346/97-99; Report of the Departmental Committee on the Fire Service, Cmd. 4371 (London: HMSO, 1970), 163–4.

13. 13  The Times, 3 April 1968, 1; Daily Mirror, 27 December 1969, 1–2.

14. 14  Fire Protection Association Journal, 83 (1969), 325–31.

15. 15  Fire, June 1974, 7.

16. 16  Quoted in Firefighter, November/December 1970, 1.

17. 17  Hackitt, Interim Report, 31–2; GTI, SWE00000001/30, Witness Statement, Sam Webb, 8 July 2022, 30.

18. 18  TNA HO/346/97, ‘Fire at Rose and Crown Hotel, Saffron Walden’, 29 December 1969; Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Fire Services for the Year 1969, Cmd. 4397 (London: HMSO, 1970), 11.

19. 19  Fire, July 1974, 72; Hansard (Commons), 17 December 1974, 1503–41.

20. 20  Hansard (Commons), 20 February 1973, 429–30; John Walton, The Blackpool Landlady: A Social History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 198–9.

21. 21  Daily Mail, 25 April 1972, 9.

22. 22  Daily Mail, 25 July 1973, 1, 16.

23. 23  Hansard (Lords), 25 February 1975, 644.

24. 24  Daily Mirror, 25 July 1973, 1–2.

25. 25  Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Fire Services for the Year 1970, Cmd. 4700 (London: HMSO, 1971), 12.

26. 26  TNA HO/346/98, ‘Note on the Implementation of the Bill’, undated, 9; Firefighter, October 1971, 1.

27. 27  Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Fire Services for the Year 1973, Cmd. 5674 (London: HMSO, 1974), 34; A.R. Everton and Gordon Cooke, ‘The Legislation’, in Jane Taylor and Gordon Cooke, eds., The Fire Precautions Act in Practice (London: Architectural Press, 1978), 28.

28. 28  Fire Protection Association, ‘Fire Problems in Hotels’, in Taylor and Cooke, Fire Precautions, 29.

29. 29  Department of the Environment and Fire Offices’ Committee, UK Fire Statistics (London: HMSO, 1975), 24–5; Home Office, Fire Statistics United Kingdom (London: HMSO, 1981), 19.

30. 30  The number of fires in the sector fluctuated between 1,600 and 1,800 from 1972 to 1987 and rose to 2,000 in 1988; see UK Fire Statistics, 1972–88.

31. 31  Holiday Which?, Fire in Hotels: An Investigation (London: Consumers’ Association, 1979).

32. 32  Fire Brigades Union, Grenfell Tower Fire, 12–13.

33. 33  Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Fire at Coldharbour Hospital, Sherborne on 5 July 1972, Cmd. 5170, 8–9, 41–2.

34. 34  GTI, IWS00002109/1, Second Witness Statement of Edward Daffarn, 6 May 2020, 2–3.

35. 35  Daily Telegraph, 11 January 1973, 19; TNA CAB/129/166/28, Keith Joseph, ‘Report on the Fire at Coldharbour Hospital’, 12 December 1972; Tracy Shildrick, ‘Lessons from Grenfell: Poverty Propaganda, Stigma and Class Power’, The Sociological Review Monographs 66, no. 4 (2018): 783–98.

36. 36  Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Fire at Fairfield Home, Edwalton, Nottinghamshire, on 15 December 1974, Cmd. 6149, July 1975; TNA MH/160/1047-8, Committee of Inquiry; Andrew Saint, Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School Building in Post-War England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

37. 37  Daily Mail, 17 December 1974, 11.

38. 38  TNA MH/154/834, ‘Fire Precautions in Old People’s Homes’; Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Fire Services for the Year 1978, Cmd. 7605, 22.

39. 39  David Canter, ed., Fires and Human Behaviour, 2nd edition (London: Fulton, 1990).

40. 40  Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 2001).

41. 41  Hansard (Commons), 27 November 1975, 1035.

42. 42  Jeremy Green, ‘Anglo-American Development, the Euromarkets, and the Deeper Origins of Neoliberal Deregulation’, Review of International Studies 42 (2016): 443.

43. 43  Hansard (Commons), 14 January 1977, 603–4.

44. 44  Diana Seabright, Fire and Care: An Enquiry into Fire Precautions in Residential Homes (London: Personal Social Services Council, 1979).

45. 45  TNA MH/154/834, 28 April 1979, 15 June 1981.

46. 46  Hansard (Lords), 24 October 1979, 91–2.

47. 47  Hansard (Commons), 28 January 1980, 1094.

48. 48  Hansard (Commons), 28 January 1980, 1096.

49. 49  Home Office, Future Fire Policy: A Consultative Document (London: HMSO, 1980), 7, 27–8.

50. 50  Moran, British Regulatory State, 6–7.

51. 51  Home Office, A Review of the Fire Precautions Act 1971: A Consultative Document (London: HMSO, 1985).

52. 52  Lifting the Burden, 27–8.

53. 53  Home Office, A Review of the Fire Precautions Act 1971, foreword.

54. 54  Oliver Popplewell, Committee of Inquiry into Crowd Safety and Control at Sports Grounds: Interim Report, Cmd. 9585 (London: HMSO, 1985); Paul Firth, Four Minutes to Hell: The Story of the Bradford City Fire (Manchester: Parrs Wood Press, 2005); Shane Ewen and Aaron Andrews, ‘The Media, Affect, and Community in a Decade of Disasters: Reporting the 1985 Bradford City Stadium Fire’, Contemporary British History 35, no. 2 (2021): 258–83.

55. 55  The Times, 10 November 1988, 16; Hackitt, Interim Report, 32.

56. 56  Financial Times, 7 December 2000, 5.

57. 57  Financial Times, 1 July 1992, 9; Almond and Esbester, ‘Legitimate Risks?’, 277–8.

58. 58  Prosser and Taylor, Grenfell Tower Fire, 75.

59. 59  GTI, INQ00014583/1, Department for Communities and Local Government, ‘Strategy for Reducing Regulation’ (2011), submitted 23 February 2022.

60. 60  Alan Finlayson, Making Sense of New Labour (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2003).

61. 61  The Independent Review of the Fire Service, The Future of the Fire Service: Reducing Risk, Saving Lives (London: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2002), 12–15, 36, 46; Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Our Fire and Rescue Service, Cmd. 5808 (London: HMSO, 2003).

62. 62  Nick Raynsford, Substance Not Spin: An Insider’s View of Success and Failure in Government (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016), 145–6, 151.

63. 63  Fire, December 2002, 7.

64. 64  Raynsford, Substance, 153.

65. 65  Raynsford, Substance, 152–6.

66. 66  Fire, March 2005, 19.

67. 67  Financial Times, 10 June 2006, 20.

68. 68  Fire, March 2005, 19–20.

69. 69  RICS Building Control Journal, October 2007, 22–3.

70. 70  Inside Housing, 30 November 2020; GTI, Testimony of Philip Heath, 30 November 2020, 122–3.

71. 71  Ewen and Andrews, ‘Media’, 259–60; Raynsford, Substance, 153–4.

72. 72  Construction News, 18 May 2020.

73. 73  Stuart Hodkinson and Phil Murphy, ‘The Fire Risks of Purpose-Built Blocks of Flats: An Exploration of Official Fire Incident Data in England – Interim Research Findings’, July 2021, <https://www.bafsa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/2021/07/Fire-Risks-of-Purpose-Built-Blocks-of-Flats-An-exploration-of-Official-Fire-Incident-Data-in-England.pdf>, accessed 7 March 2023.

74. 74  London Fire Brigade, Incident Report, 4 December 2019, <https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/incidents/2019/december/hotel-fire-brentford>; Construction News, 18 May 2020, <https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/agenda/hotels-uncovered-the-contractors-locked-in-multi-million-pound-cladding-disputes-18-05-2020/>.

75. 75  Majone, ‘Paradoxes’, 53.