3. The mixed economy of ‘scientific governance’ in twentieth-century Britain

The emergence of fire testing

The earliest improvements to standards of fire resistance drew together organisations from across the public and private sectors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Various attempts were made by private and commercial bodies to generate public interest in fire safety and to increase standards of protection. Notable examples included the Fire Offices Committee (FOC), founded in 1868 to represent the insurance industry, and the British Fire Prevention Committee (BFPC), a subscription association established in 1897. They conducted investigations independently of each other – the BFPC at its London testing station and the FOC at premises in Manchester – and lobbied for greater synchronicity in standards of fire prevention at a time when their work was of growing national significance. This was especially true towards the end of the First World War when the Ministry of Reconstruction, headed by the progressive politician Dr Christopher Addison, advocated directing additional resources towards reducing national fire losses, which he estimated at £10 million annually. As head of what is described as ‘a laboratory of new ideas and of social experiment’, Addison was particularly anxious about the coalition government’s emergency housing programme, commissioning the BFPC to run fire-endurance tests involving concrete slabs, the results of which underpinned housing policy well into the 1920s.⁸

Of greatest significance in the emerging state patronage of scientific governance was the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), formed in 1916. The DSIR provided infrastructural support and funding for programmes of ‘public science’ recognised as being in the national interest and falling outside the purview of the armed services. Staffed by scientific civil servants, the DSIR’s chief focus for the bulk of its existence was to ensure an adequate supply of resources for industry and to coordinate the efficient expenditure of money, time and effort on what Sabine Clarke calls ‘fundamental research’; that is, research into issues of society and the economy which affected ‘a range of interests wider than a single trade’ while also having a ‘direct bearing on the health, well-being, or the safety of the whole population’. Fire was inevitably included in this remit, initially as part of the DSIR’s Building Research Station (BRS), which was formed in 1921 to lead research into construction and materials.⁹

A coordinated approach to fire research developed from the mid-1920s with the opening of new testing stations, with capacity for conducting large-scale tests according to agreed standards. The BRS, which started its work at a small premises bequeathed by the Ministry of Health in West London (Addison had since become the first minister of health), soon moved to larger premises at Garston, outside London, to reflect its growing responsibilities. The FOC opened negotiations with the DSIR in 1933 to relocate to Garston so as to benefit from government support and avoid the unnecessary expense of converting its Manchester premises to conform to the British Standard on Fire Resistance (BS 476/1932), published in 1932, which specified rigorous measures that placed British testing on a par with that of leading foreign laboratories. Calls for greater uniformity and rigour were demanded by a number of bodies, including the London County Council and Royal Institute of British Architects.¹⁰

Later amended, BS 476/1932 was a foundational document in British fire engineering because it established the principles of functionality and classification that dominated the next half-century and more. That it was also cited in expert testimony presented to the Grenfell Inquiry illustrates the longer ‘path to Grenfell’ through regulatory testing and its subsequent deregulation.¹¹ Materials would only be accepted as fire resistant if their use permitted the structure as a whole to continue functioning for a specified period while on fire. In practice, this meant that a room had to withstand flames to allow its occupants to exit safely and for the fire brigade to access the building. To enable this, BS 476/1932 appended tests for structures and materials as well as a sliding scale of fire resistance, ranging from Grade A, which provided protection for six hours, to E, which only provided 30 minutes’ protection. From 1935, a testing station, jointly funded by the FOC and DSIR, was opened in the up-and-coming town of Borehamwood in outer-north London, emblematic of the growing significance of the southeast to the country’s economic prosperity. Testing would henceforth occur in purpose-built temperature-controlled furnaces in order to ascertain the fire behaviour of life-size replica models of buildings, and was based on models developed in North America and Scandinavia, demonstrating the growing internationalisation of fire research as well as the British government’s lag.¹²

The ascendancy of jointly funded fire research

Wartime fire research passed to the Ministry of Home Security after it became apparent that the main threat to Britain’s defence came from incendiary bombs dropped from the air.¹³ Much was learned from the Blitz about radiant heat and the residual strength of structures damaged by fire, while the DSIR’s Chemical Research Laboratory developed foams for fighting deadly oil fires. The Fire Grading Committee’s (FGC’s) research into structural fire resistance, which started in 1935 but was suspended in 1939, resumed in 1942 to prepare for the mammoth task of post-war reconstruction.¹⁴

Reflecting its newfound significance to the nation and the urgency of developing cross-government fire policy, the FGC recruited its members from multiple departments. Its 1946 report recommended a radical departure from existing practice in determining the fire risks of different types of building structures and materials. This achieved two broad outcomes: firstly, greater precision in assessing structural risk; secondly, in laying the groundwork for greater standardisation in building across the country (as seen in Chapter 1). In its appendix, the FGC also published a new test for measuring the speed of flame spread across a surface, after recognising the threat posed by the growing use of combustible wall and ceiling linings, which were being deployed in the government’s emergency housing programme to bypass shortages in skilled labour and materials.¹⁵

The new test, an updated version of BS 476/1932, specified that materials were to be placed at right angles to a purpose-built furnace in order to simulate conditions in a corridor or staircase. Following exposure to heat from a gas burner, materials were classified into four groups according to the distance of flame travel: class I included materials with lowest flame spread, while class IV covered those with the greatest spread in the shortest period of time. While class III materials could be used in living rooms and bedrooms under certain conditions, they were never to be permitted for use in staircases or corridors; class IV materials – which included all untreated timbers and building boards – were subject to stricter limits and required treating with flame-retardant paints before use.¹⁶

The FGC thus established the principle that the most important part of a building’s passive defence was the corridor and staircase, and that compartmentation was crucial in minimising the risk of flame spread; this principle governed the subsequent development of HRRBs across Britain from the mid-1950s, which were commonly fitted with a single staircase. To supplement this, fire alarms, extinguishers and dry risers would be fitted in public areas. This eventually evolved into the ‘stay put’ policy, published as a British Standard Code of Practice in 1962 and revised in 1971 following the collapse of Ronan Point. The code of practice informed residents that ‘You will normally be safe to stay within your flat’ so long as windows and doors were closed. Residents should only leave the premises ‘in the unlikely event of smoke or heat entering the flat’. ‘Stay put’, then, was predicated on the view that evacuation was no longer necessary because of ‘the high degree of compartmentation provided in dwellings in modern blocks’. Yet, while this once meant that ‘the spread of fire and smoke from one dwelling to another and the need to evacuate the occupants of adjoining dwellings are unusual’, the policy’s catastrophic failure in 2017 proved that public faith in its ability to protect residents of tower blocks had been fatally undermined.¹⁷

Securing a balance between safety and cost was left to the Joint Fire Research Organisation (JFRO), funded by the DSIR and FOC. As ‘a novel experiment in administration’, JFRO had two goals: to devise a national programme of research into fire defence and to collect and publish statistics of fires attended by fire brigades on behalf of the Home Office. JFRO was designed from the outset to pool the available expertise in managing public science, with a board composed of architects, physicists, chemists and firefighters. Day-to-day management of its Fire Research Station (FRS) was devolved to a director of research, who was required to combine technical expertise with administrative acumen. Successive directors, all male, were considered to be safe pairs of hands with experience in line managing staff within the scientific civil service; as members of the scientific class, they were highly qualified graduates, with ‘the right sort of active, enquiring and constructive mind’ and the ability to direct innovative projects.¹⁸

The station’s inaugural director was S.H. Clarke, who arrived from the Ministry of Home Security along with Viscount Falmouth, the first chairman of the board. Clarke developed the FRS’s testing facilities before leaving a decade later to manage the DSIR’s fuel laboratory. His successor, Dennis Lawson, lectured in physics at Woolwich Polytechnic before his appointment in 1948 as a principal scientific officer. As director, Lawson oversaw the continued expansion and diversification of the FRS’s research, particularly into consumer protection, and co-authored forty technical papers published between 1953 and 1972. During its first twenty-five years, the FRS’s most senior research staff shaped the nascent discipline of fire engineering and solidified the elastic links between the public and private sectors. Two examples stand out: first, Dr David Rasbash, who, having first joined the station in 1948, was appointed professor of fire engineering at the University of Edinburgh in 1973 in a move recently described as ‘the first time that technical knowledge, need, and experiential learning converged’.¹⁹ Second, Margaret Law, a graduate in physics and mathematics from the University of London, joined the FRS in 1952 and became a specialist in fire dynamics before moving into consultancy work for Ove Arup Partnership in the 1970s. A recipient of several professional accolades, including a stint as visiting professor in fire safety engineering at the University of Greenwich, Law was instrumental in bringing fire science into the everyday practice of the design engineer and inspiring other female fire engineers like Dr Barbara Lane, who gave expert testimony to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, to enter what was predominantly (and indeed still remains) a male-dominated field. That Law features on the cover of the FRS’s 1952 annual report indicates the novelty of appointing a female scientist a few years after the civil service had removed the marriage bar.²⁰

The contested nature of fire research

The FRS’s annual reports reveal both its growing workload during the 1950s and 1960s and its tangible contribution to society. Its scientists contributed materially to improved public health and graded the combustibility of building materials. They also investigated the conditions in which a growing variety of domestic consumer goods (including heaters, kitchen appliances and television sets) were operated, occasionally with disastrous effects, thereby acting as a precursor to the emergence of consumer protection. Its physicists also modelled the likely fire damage caused to British cities by an atomic bomb, which influenced emergency preparedness planning into the late 1960s.²¹

In 1964 the FRS was transferred to the new Ministry of Technology following the election of a Labour Government committed to harnessing ‘the white heat’ of a ‘scientific revolution’. While Prime Minister Harold Wilson was sensitive to complaints that his government restricted innovation through new building controls, he famously warned in an earlier speech of the danger of ‘an unregulated private enterprise economy’, which would lead Britain to become ‘a stagnant backwater, pitied and condemned by the rest of the world’. A highly educated workforce was a flagship element of his government’s industrial policy, while an expanded scientific civil service was ‘part of our national planning’ in balancing innovation and wealth creation with greater equality of opportunity and improved health and safety.²² Fire research was a small but significant feature of Wilson’s vision for greater precision and skill in building a stronger economy. Investment in university-trained physicists, chemists and statisticians was important if record fire losses, which exceeded £66 million in 1963 (approximately £1.4 billion in 2022) and were predicted to rise in 1964, were to be brought under greater control. Estimated losses for January 1964 alone were nearly £7.75 million, one of the highest monthly totals since records began. As one insurance official described it, fire damage was ‘a grossly expensive bonfire and one the nation cannot afford for long’.²³

Although scientists would tackle the fire problem by subjecting it to greater precision and measurement, scientific governance remained a contested arena throughout the post-war period, especially where it was seen to challenge commercial interests. Criticism was most trenchant from manufacturers, commonly centring on the costs of compliance. The FRS, they complained, took a narrow view on fire safety, defining it through a purely scientific lens at the expense of its economic costs, which stifled product innovation. This was a particular complaint, as we saw in Chapter 1, in the building industry where ‘deemed to satisfy’ regulations specified restrictions on the use of flammable materials in certain parts of buildings. But given fire research was managed by a joint board of public and private sector actors working in the national interest, it is difficult to sympathise with industry complaints.

There were stinging criticisms from construction product manufacturers of the surface-spread-of-flame test. While it remained the most reliable testing method into the 1960s, it produced an incomplete measure of the effect of a single material on the growth of fire. Problems were first encountered in the 1940s with the poor fire performance of internal lining materials, specifically wooden fibre building boards. These materials had emerged as a cheap mass-produced alternative to plaster and, with low thermal conductivity and high sound absorption, were widely used for lining post-war council houses, schools and factories. Marian Bowley recorded an ‘extraordinarily rapid’ growth of fibreboard in building in the decade after 1945, with rates of growth ranging between 48 and 175 per cent. However, alarm bells sounded as early as 1947 following several fires in council-built bungalows lined with combustible building boards, which caused problems for tenants to escape. One such fire, involving the death of an infant, culminated with the coroner complaining that he had ‘never been in any building in my life which has had the appearance of being more ready to be burned than this’.²⁴

The FRS responded by conducting surface-flame tests and, in 1949, large-scale fire-endurance experiments involving houses of post-war design, one of which was lined with exposed fibreboard while the other contained fibreboard plastered over. The results revealed wide disparities in the flashover times: in the house with exposed linings a safe exit was impossible within 6.5 minutes of the fire starting, while this extended to more than 26 minutes in the plasterboard-lined house. Regulations stipulated that internal partitions separating rooms from the stairs, landings and floors should give 30 minutes’ protection against fire. Low-density fibre building boards were subsequently rated as class IV, one of the worst-performing materials, and excluded from the list of materials suitable for use in council housing.²⁵

The building-board industry, which had hitherto shown little interest in improving the safety of its products, unsurprisingly mobilised in defence of what had become a multi-million-pound industry since the end of the war. The Fibre Building Board Development Organisation (FIDOR) counteracted the FRS’s data through publicity and lobbying. Sympathetic articles appeared in newspapers emphasising the industry’s contribution to economic recovery and stressing that the industry was not complacent in improving its products, while MPs were paid to lobby within Westminster.²⁶ FIDOR also criticised the government’s supposed overreaction on the basis that unprotected fibreboard was rarely used in houses, but was normally plastered over to cover the joints and reduce the fire risk to the same level as ‘many other materials which have hitherto been considered to be “safer”’.²⁷ This does not appear to have been universally the case, however, as serious fires in Bristol’s council houses in the 1960s, involving untreated wooden-board partitions, caused ‘extremely severe and abnormal’ levels of damage and led to council workers plastering over boards in 680 council houses at a cost exceeding £82,000. With the introduction of Building Regulations, for Scotland in 1963 and England and Wales two years later, restrictions on the use of combustible internal linings were further tightened, which again shows the benefit of regulations when properly enforced.²⁸

While their motives may have differed, industry bodies and scientists agreed that greater precision was required to accurately measure the contribution made by materials to a fire’s growth. Trials, part-funded by FIDOR, led to the creation of a flame propagation test in 1968. This test involved exposing a specimen sample to gas burners and radiant electric bars contained in a combustion chamber for up to 20 minutes; performance was expressed as a numerical index with values indicating the rate of heat release. The propagation test had two consequences: first, it was easily replicated by commercial testing stations rather than having to rely on the larger furnaces of the FRS. This consequently reduced the costs of testing while redistributing them from the taxpayer to the market; second, by ascertaining the rate of heat transfer, the test enabled the finer grading of materials as class 0, thereby permitting their use when treated with fire-retardant chemicals. BS 476-6:1968 proved to be especially useful when measuring flame spread between different storeys within a building, which meant it was later adopted in routine tests involving multi-storey buildings, the majority performed by private testing laboratories in Cheshire (by Warrington Research Centre) and Buckinghamshire (by the Timber Research Development Association, later renamed Chiltern International Fire) from the 1970s. The precedent had been established that the private sector should play a greater role in product testing and approval as well as in the monitoring of regulatory standards; fire research was entering a new era of scientific self-governance and it was unsurprising to see senior scientific civil servants being headhunted by industry, at a higher salary than they could command in the public sector, during the 1970s and 1980s.²⁹

Consumer safety

While the FRS’s early work focused on building materials, it diversified into consumer safety from the mid-1950s. The widespread availability of labour-saving devices such as cookers and electric irons has been recognised by historians as a cornerstone of the new consumerist society, first in 1930s middle-class homes, then in working-class households from the 1950s. The revolution in electrical appliances brought science into domestic life and transformed the mid-twentieth-century home into a controlled space engineered for safety as much as comfort and convenience. Post-war council houses and flats were designed with functionality and modernity in mind, with kitchens positioned as ‘central to healthier, more hygienic and less labour-intensive forms of living’.³⁰ Firms and the state increasingly drew upon the skills of the scientist and the engineer to design safety into new products, which was the consequence of heightened ‘consumer consciousness’ and a demand for a participatory style of consumer politics.³¹

New consumer goods were not without their risks, of course, as the Ronan Point explosion proved so catastrophically. In this case, the tenant of the flat in which the explosion occurred, Ivy Hodge, was called to give evidence to the all-male inquiry, despite clearly being traumatised by her experience and suffering from burns injuries. Pictured by one newspaper heavily bandaged and flanked by a nurse, Hodge was questioned about her decision to ask a neighbour to install her electric cooker rather than a qualified electrician. Her burnt-out cooker was subject to intensive laboratory tests by FRS officials before it was brought into the courtroom as evidence of the devastating consequences of an ill-fitted appliance.³² ‘Scientific governance’ had thus brought the home into the public domain of the courtroom, opening up that previously private space to expert scrutiny and media speculation in a practice that has been replicated countless times since, including during Phase 1 of the Grenfell Inquiry where the Hotpoint fridge-freezer in the kitchen of Flat 16 in which the fire originated was subject to forensic attention before its owner was absolved of any blame. In both cases, the offending appliance was pictured in newspapers and official reports and the insinuation that they had been poorly fitted or tampered with lingered after both parties had been absolved of blame.³³

The wider social benefits of fire science were perhaps best exemplified by space heaters, which attracted considerable public attention during the post-war years following several fatal fires involving children. Scientific interest was piqued by statistical evidence which showed that the number of fires involving paraffin heaters was increasing at a greater rate than the domestic consumption of paraffin. In 1950, there were 300 fires nationally in which oil heaters were the probable cause; by 1957, this figure had risen to 1,300. Of these, 1,075 involved portable appliances. The following year, 1958, saw the figures rise to a startling 4,464 fires, of which 23 per cent were accounted for by portable drip-feed oil heaters flaring or overheating.³⁴ Firefighters and trade unions repeatedly raised the ubiquity of cheap mass-produced heaters in homes as a concern. Aimed at working-class households, drip-feed heaters inexpensively warmed homes during the winter, but at a risk, not least from the fact that households would keep a supply of paraffin tucked away at home. Invoking wartime rhetoric, the Fire Brigades Union quoted calls for safeguards to prevent draughts from ‘turning apparently innocent oil stoves into incendiary bombs’.³⁵

Government only acted following a gruesome fire in a council house in Ware, another growing town in outer London, which claimed the lives of five children aged between two and nine years. Dennis Lawson, newly appointed director of the FRS, was summoned to attend the inquest where he reported that tests on drip-feed heaters revealed how quickly flames spread with a small draught. In this case, the father of the children had briefly left the front door ajar while buying provisions from the grocery van, which caused the heater to topple and the flames to spread instantaneously, cutting his children off from rescue.³⁶

Having heard the evidence, the jury returned a verdict of accidental death, adding a rider urging manufacturers to take all measures to remove dangers and issue public warnings. The coroner recommended government to urgently consider legislating before further deaths occurred. Indicating the public interest in the fire, daily newspapers reported at length from the inquest, albeit using different tropes in their coverage. While a broadsheet paper like The Times reported verbatim the proceedings of the inquest, the Daily Express, until recently Britain’s most popular newspaper, published a pictorial report on the tests to stress the urgency of the peril facing homes equipped with oil heaters. The accompanying article emphasised the risk posed to its readers (‘Why this matters to YOU’), deploying typically gendered language: ‘in 90 seconds, a reasonable time for a housewife to have her front door open while she pays the milkman, the heater blew up’. As historians have shown, popular daily newspapers increasingly championed domestic consumption from the 1950s, particularly targeting female readers. Managing a safe but comfortable home remained the responsibility of the dutiful housewife, even if, in this case, the father had caused the accident.³⁷

In the months that followed the inquest, Lawson oversaw further tests. His report concluded that drip-feed radiant oil heaters presented ‘a severe fire hazard’ if exposed to a draught of 3.3 miles per hour or above. The director of the British Safety Council, Leonard Hodge, followed this up with a call for the ‘tens of thousands’ of defective heaters to be recalled, stating ‘the sooner the public gets something safe and not just an incendiary bomb the better’.³⁸ Support emanated from the government’s backbenches, with Conservative MP Gerald Nabarro noting that ‘A speed of 3.3 m.p.h. is slower than the speed at which I walk through the Lobby.’ Not only was Nabarro able to set an impressive pace on foot but he also promoted a Private Member’s Bill, under Parliament’s Ten Minute Rule, introducing minimum standards of safety in domestic oil-burning appliances. MPs from across the House united over their shock at the events in the Ware case and a copycat blaze which caused fatal burns to two children in Nottingham in early 1960. The outcome, the Oil Burners (Standards) Act 1960, was a rare instance of a Private Bill passing into law with cross-party support and proved that positive change could be effected when politicians were prepared to act boldly. Firefighters welcomed the action, even if it was years overdue.³⁹

New safety regulations were quickly issued by the home secretary, and adopted by the Oil Appliance Manufacturers Association, which caused a slowing in the rate of fires and injuries caused by upturned heaters.⁴⁰ Some local authorities, listening to manufacturers’ concerns, issued guidelines warning against tenant misuse of heaters in council houses. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea issued rules governing the use of storage heaters for residents of its new Lancaster West Estate in the mid-1970s. Its local tenants’ association warned residents not to tamper with the heaters without expert advice, noting that some people received hospital treatment for scalds from doing so.⁴¹ This combination of expert and lay voices coalesced to pressure central government into action to protect those least able to protect themselves. The era of scientific governance accepted the merits of government intervention when it was underpinned by up-to-date scientific research that stood up to public scrutiny. The FRS had materially contributed to public safety, which makes the later dilution of its responsibilities all the more disappointing.

The era of scientific self-governance

The ascendancy of the FRS was short-lived because it was an easy target for funding cuts and privatisation during the 1970s and 1980s. With starting capital costs of £100,000 and running costs of only £50,000 in the late 1940s, by the mid-1950s its budget had been modestly increased to £125,000. Fire research contributed a small proportion of the DSIR’s overall expenditure on research, with five to six times more spent on building and roads. Given its unique funding arrangement, JFRO was relaxed in allowing manufacturing associations to provide financial support for testing. By 1970, following a significant expansion in its remit over the previous decade, the FRS, now spending approximately £540,000 each year, had a steadily increasing income of £74,000 from consultancy work.⁴²

By the 1970s, however, the FOC’s contribution had fallen to one-third of the station’s annual running costs. This growing disparity led to proposals to reduce government support for routine testing. In 1972 the FRS was merged with the BRS and the Forest Products Research Laboratory to create BRE, and placed under the control of the new bureaucratic monolith, the Department of the Environment (DoE), which started negotiations to transfer routine testing to the private sector.⁴³ There was some logic to merging building and fire research and the FRS’s scientists continued to contribute to the mitigation of fire losses over the next decade. While only approximately 40 per cent of the total number of fires occurred in buildings, they were responsible for over 85 per cent of casualties and more than 95 per cent of damage. According to figures published by the British Insurance Association, national fire losses amounted to £120.4 million in 1969 and £176 million four years later (more than £2 billion today). With greater emphasis placed on the economics of fire safety, the FRS developed a cost–benefit model that underpinned successive governments’ resourcing of the fire service. The costs of fire protection were assessed alongside the value of property and life at risk in order to determine the best allocation of public resources to early detection as well as prevention and protection. This included determining the cost of enforcing fire precautions legislation, estimated at £37 million per annum in the mid-1970s, which was used to justify the introduction of competition in building control and reduction in fire service enforcement powers during the 1980s.⁴⁴

Following the introduction of the customer/contractor principle across government, the FRS was also required to subject its work to greater financial scrutiny, recruiting customers from industry as well as government. Many of its projects were commissioned in the wake of multiple-fatality fires. Its first project as a contractor, commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Security, followed the Coldharbour Hospital fire in 1972 and involved site visits to determine its cause. In the wake of the tragedy, a new type of hospital furniture and cubicle partitioning incorporating modern safety measures was tested in front of officials.⁴⁵

The Coldharbour fire established a precedent for site investigations following multiple-fatality fires, with the results submitted as evidence to public inquiries. Lessons were learned and the results filtered into decision making in a political system that continued to value scientific governance for non-routine work. But still the FRS had to increase its revenue from such work, especially where it involved research on behalf of customers, as was the case following the Summerland fire in 1973, and a fire at Woolworths in Manchester in 1979, which killed eleven people because toxic smoke was released by burning furniture filled with polyurethane foam. In 1981, following a fire at the Stardust nightclub in Dublin, in which forty-eight people died, Ireland’s government sponsored several laboratories, the FRS included, to assist its Tribunal of Inquiry in ascertaining the cause and spread of the blaze. The FRS ran a series of ad hoc tests to reproduce the early stages of the fire, combining experiments on simulations of parts of the original building, before culminating with a full-scale experiment on a model replica of the club.⁴⁶

If the FRS played a key role in understanding multiple-fatality fires, the impetus towards a greater level of scientific self-governance continued with the routine testing of materials, goods and fire protection equipment. Some of the changes pre-dated the 1979 general election, which resonates with James Vernon’s findings about the outsourcing of services at Heathrow Airport from the late 1960s; clearly it is insufficient to equate deregulation and privatisation exclusively with the Thatcher governments of 1979–90.⁴⁷ Privatisation accelerated in 1976 following the dissolution of JFRO, with the transfer of all routine testing and a number of FRS staff to the FOC’s Fire Insurers’ Research and Testing Organisation. Laboratories such as Warrington Research Centre undertook responsibility for routine tests, with the results hidden from public view because of commercial confidentiality.⁴⁸ Fire science was therefore one of the first parts of the post-war social infrastructure to be dismantled, creating a culture of secrecy and mistrust between the privatised fire sector and public fire service, which intensified in the decades that followed. As the Grenfell Tower Inquiry learned, tests conducted in 2001 by privately run laboratories revealed the combustibility of polyethylene-core aluminium composite material cladding, but the results, ‘bound by confidentiality’, were withheld from public dissemination until it was too late.⁴⁹

This era of scientific self-governance took place against a backdrop of squeezed public sector finances and the marketisation of public services. As industry was encouraged to manage its own affairs, it is unsurprising to see the fire protection industry assume greater responsibility for determining risk across the sector. BRE was now required to demonstrate value for money by reducing staff costs: whereas in 1976 BRE employed 1,349 staff, with 227 based at the FRS, by the end of 1980 staffing had been cut to 975 and 159, respectively. Redundancies were accompanied by a consequent narrowing in the scope of research, with the FRS concentrating on pure research and site investigations; the Home Office took responsibility for the production of fire statistics from 1976, with the statisticians transferring to its staff in 1984. By the end of the decade, BRE’s staff numbers had fallen to 654, with 101 working at the FRS.⁵⁰

Alongside staffing changes, initiatives were introduced to make BRE more ‘business-like’ by adopting private sector management techniques. By the end of 1982–3, the FRS earned over £120,000 in income from industry for sponsored research and advisory services. A Technical Consultancy was created in 1988 to attract industry funding. Its new director, Roger Courtney, boasted of BRE’s growing commercial potential in ‘preparing for a future in which its clients, in both Government and industry, will be using BRE not only for its technical excellence, but because it offers the best value for money’ to overseas markets.⁵¹

One of the Technical Consultancy’s first commissions was to assess the smoke control design proposed for redeveloping Battersea Power Station into a leisure park. An innovative computer modelling programme called JASMINE (‘[J] Analysis of Smoke Movement In Enclosures’) predicted the effects of fire on buildings without having to resort to burning full-scale replicas. The development of electronic computers stimulated a refinement in the modelling of fire, drawing together researchers from across the public and private sectors to predict fire behaviour in prescribed situations. This had far-reaching implications for building control, as the FRS recognised following controversial reforms to the Building Regulations in 1985.⁵² The financial and time savings promised by computer modelling attracted policymakers. From 2007, ‘full-scale test data’ was permitted to predict fire performance, which was interpreted as allowing for the use of desktop studies because of their use of ‘test data’ instead of full-scale tests in burn halls or laboratories.⁵³ As a result of changes to the published guidance, manufacturing firms could commission a succession of desktop studies in order to secure approval for their construction products. This was permissible even in cases where a manufacturer’s product had failed in situ physical tests, as was revealed during the Grenfell Inquiry where one firm commissioned a total of twenty-nine desktop studies to secure approval for its insulation product using data obtained from an earlier failed test.⁵⁴ For many in central government and the construction industry, flexibility was the preferred way of ensuring regulatory compliance, which reveals a gradual but perceptible shift from the laboratory to the computer suite in determining fire behaviour and assessing acceptable risks to human life.

The development of computer modelling did not fully replace full-scale fire tests overnight, however. Indeed, it cohabited alongside conventional methods, including physical testing and field investigation, particularly with the emerging problem of multi-storey building fires. Public concerns about the safety of HRRBs were first raised following the Ronan Point explosion in 1968 when metropolitan local authorities across the country made use of site visits and surveys to assess the safety of their own tower blocks.⁵⁵ The FRS investigated the incidence of fires in post-war multi-storey flats in London, finding ‘no evidence that occupants of the flats are more likely to be trapped than those in other dwellings’, which justified the continued use of the ‘stay put’ policy by fire brigades.⁵⁶ Fears dramatically escalated in the 1970s following several overseas fires involving large loss of life. Even then, the overwhelming consensus was that the residents of Britain’s tower blocks were safer owing to a combination of good design and regulatory compliance. Yet problems persisted, not least in the discrepancy between the growing vogue for high-rise living and the contradictory messages around evacuation. In one case, a fire at a block of flats in Brent, northwest London, in 1975 led to the death of a thirty-year-old male after London Fire Brigade’s ladders were found to be too short to rescue him from his thirteenth-floor balcony flat. This fire led to the revision of official advice on ‘stay put’ by a working group for the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council (CFBAC), warning against using balconies ‘unless they form part of an escape route’.⁵⁷

Clearly lessons were still being learned and acted upon to avoid ambiguous messaging and help save lives as part of the micro-politics of the state’s regulation of its citizens during emergencies. Fire safety policymaking was, in this sense, experiential and embodied practice in that it responded to cases where the limitations of ‘stay put’ were exposed by building design or the state’s limited protective resources. ‘Stay put’ inevitably came in for criticism – from housing activists, firefighters and residents alike – in cases where frontline firefighters were unable to safely reach occupants trapped in multi-storey buildings. Meanwhile, national advisory bodies like the CFBAC – which enjoyed a wide representation of interested bodies speaking on behalf of frontline firefighters as well as employers and senior officers – played important roles in reflexively learning from incidents such as these, thereby contributing to longer-term improvements in public safety.

The high-rise fire risk became more prominent during the 1980s with the vogue for over-cladding and the structural issues that beset individual tower blocks were upscaled to a national crisis by the turn of the present century. Problems posed by damp and rain penetration in local authority Large Panel System housing created the need for improved thermal insulation by over-cladding masonry walls with a variety of materials ranging from rock or glass fibre to combustible thermoplastics. One such building, the twenty-four-storey block of council-owned flats at Royston Hill in Glasgow, built in the late 1960s, suffered a fire, fortunately without casualties, in 1988. Post-fire investigations revealed not only that the refurbishment had compromised the building’s structural resistance but also, in a move that resonates with the experiences of Grenfell Tower’s residents, that tenants had been repeatedly ignored when they raised legitimate concerns with the council’s housing department. Two years before the fire, warnings had been issued in Adam Curtis’s documentary for the BBC, The Great British Housing Disaster, that the flats failed to meet structural regulations to withstand a main gas explosion and thus posed a ‘very obvious’ fire risk, while laboratory tests revealed ‘a risk of increased vertical fire spread’ in over-cladding systems; the flats were subsequently demolished.⁵⁸

Two later destructive fires further exposed the risks to public safety from tower blocks, bringing existing ad hoc local campaign groups together in a national effort to challenge the state’s abandonment of its duty of care to high-rise residents. In 1990, a fire at the fifteen-storey Merry Hill Court in Smethwick claimed the life of a resident and highlighted a litany of defects in the tower block’s protection, including an absence of fire stops beyond the ninth floor, no fire-proofing of internal gas pipes or ducting and defective dry risers which hampered firefighting efforts. Brian Fuller, the experienced chief of the West Midlands Fire Brigade, called for greater powers to allow firefighters to issue safety certificates for multi-storey residential schemes following site inspections, but these went unheeded.⁵⁹

Little had seemingly been learned by housing providers from the case at Ronan Point, and it took a rigorous grassroots campaign to force lasting change. The Newham Tower Block Tenants Campaign, armed with a converted double-decker bus that toured local estates to discuss pressing issues with residents, put the issue of Ronan Point back on the agenda. This was supported by data gathered from fire safety tests conducted by Sam Webb and his students which revealed the tower block to be structurally unsound. Eventually, following extensive media coverage at the national and local levels, the local authority agreed to dismantle the tower block and rehouse all residents as well as commit to improving conditions for all tower-block residents in Newham. ‘Good riddance Ronan Point!’, reported the Newham News, alongside a photograph of elated children standing outside the condemned tower under an unfurled banner which read ‘VICTORY FOR TENANTS!’ ⁶⁰

Following a major conference in 1983, with the tagline ‘Tower Blocks: Homes Not Prisons’, the National Tower Blocks Network (NTBN) was formed as a loose federation of groups and individuals with a shared concern about the quality of life in Britain’s tower-block homes. Through information sharing, publicity and encouraging practical solutions to social and structural problems, the NTBN would bring together local campaigners facing similar problems, thereby ‘making tower blocks the national issue they deserve to be’.⁶¹ In the aftermath of the Merry Hill Court fire and following a spot survey of five local authority-managed tower blocks across the country, the NTBN issued a call for urgent government-funded research into the fire performance of over-cladding systems and encouraged residents to organise in support of a national fire safety charter for flats. Residents and housing activists would no longer trust government and other official bodies to dictate the pace of change within the sector in a move that was mirrored by similar developments in the houses in multiple occupancy sector, as the next chapter will show.⁶²

The following year, in 1991, a fire in a bin storage area on the ground-floor level spread rapidly up a newly installed rainscreen (a form of sheet-boarding to provide weather protection and improve a building’s energy efficiency) over-cladding on the eleven-storey Knowsley Heights in Liverpool. This was, reported the NTBN’s newsletter, a £1 million refurbishment project projected as a ‘showpiece’ for the revitalisation of tower blocks up and down the country, part-funded by central government, but it proved to be nothing more than a showcase for the dangers associated with over-cladding.⁶³ Fortunately the fire did not extend into the interior of the building and all residents scrambled to safety amidst what was described as ‘a towering inferno’.⁶⁴ An investigation by the FRS’s Fires of Special Interest Section revealed that, while the refurbishment materials met Building Regulations approval, no fire-stopping barriers had been installed in the gap between the cladding and the walls, allowing the fire to spread unchecked upwards in a ‘chimney effect’ that a firefighter described as ‘the most frightening thing any of us has ever seen’.⁶⁵ Rather than publicly admit any failings, the government’s Housing Management Estates Division, which administered the national cladding programme, requested its press office ‘to play down the issue of the fire’. The experience at Knowsley Heights was consequently treated by civil servants as ‘insignificant’ rather than a forewarning of the risks of over-cladding using proven combustible materials.⁶⁶

Subsequent recommendations by civil servants for ‘a major increase’ in the use of barriers on similar block refurbishment programmes were fiercely resisted by the over-cladding industry on the grounds of cost. Moreover, industry proposals for a commercial desktop study testing programme were initially rejected by the government in preference for an independent FRS testing rig at Cardington, Bedfordshire. This new four-storey facility would be capable of conducting large-scale tests of over-cladding materials, which would more accurately reveal a fire’s performance over a multi-storey block – as well as its impact on the ventilation properties of cladding – than a small-scale test at its existing premises or a desktop study.⁶⁷

This research into over-cladding revealed how much of the FRS’s work was not best left to the private sector. As BRE Chief Executive Roger Courtney stated in a 1995 interview, ‘The maintenance of the knowledge base is fundamentally a non-commercial operation … We can’t have people thinking we are pursuing some commercial agenda of our own.’⁶⁸ Yet BRE’s future as a public body faced ever greater scrutiny from John Major’s Conservative Government in its programme to extend deregulation in the name of improving national competitiveness. In 1994 legislation paved the way for the further removal of ‘barriers to trade’, while an Efficiency Unit was tasked with recommending proposals for removing government controls; its research establishments were one such area earmarked for privatisation.⁶⁹

Eventually, in February 1997 government sold BRE to a management bid team, rejecting a similar bid from University College London which would have retained its public service ethos. A registered charity, the Foundation for the Built Environment (later renamed the BRE Trust), took ownership, with the board, chaired by Courtney, recruiting its members from the fire and construction sectors.⁷⁰ It is noteworthy that none of the members of the construction industry who responded to the DoE’s own scrutiny report supported privatisation, while the Labour Opposition raised questions about the unfair advantage of the in-house bid team. Yet still the decision was approved a few weeks before Parliament’s dissolution ahead of the general election and was justified by the outgoing minister, John Gummer, as evidence of his department’s commitment to ‘press forward with deregulation where appropriate and sensible’.⁷¹

The problem was that the decision was neither appropriate nor sensible but was a blunt political instrument. Moreover, privatisation was rushed through Parliament at a time when emerging fire risks, particularly from over-cladding, demanded greater attention in the name of public safety rather than commercial exploitation. Freed from the supposed shackles of state control, BRE was ‘[n]ow in a position to exploit its world-class capabilities both in the UK and internationally’. Its first move was to expand its international business and make 115 of its 677 staff redundant.⁷² In other words, while it had been many decades in the making, the era of state-funded fire research had come to an end, with the British government a customer of BRE much like any other organisation. Whereas once the firefighting and research communities had been joined together through their membership of centralised policy organs – notably the CFBAC, which was disbanded in 2005 – privatisation created an irrevocable split between the fire research industry and the fire service that has materially harmed public safety.

Conclusion

Left largely unsupervised, with a conscious curtailment of the enforcement powers of public fire brigades, the construction industry was able to set its own parameters for fire research and testing from the turn of the present century. Moreover, BRE’s failure to provide oversight in the testing and certification process for a variety of products – including flammable cladding panels and combustible foam insulation products used in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower in the mid-2010s – was revealed during Phase 2 of the Grenfell Inquiry and described by housing journalist Peter Apps as ‘one of the great corporate scandals of our time’.⁷³ Simply put, by privatising fire research, successive governments since the 1970s have diminished the level of public scrutiny that was so beneficial to public safety during the three decades that followed the Second World War and, as a result, abandoned the state’s responsibility for protecting its most vulnerable civilians from fire.

1. 1  R.E.H. Read, ‘Fire Risks in High-Rise Buildings’, Building Research Establishment Information Paper (1979), 1.

2. 2  Otto Saumarez Smith, ‘The Lost World of the British Leisure Centre’, History Workshop Journal 88 (2019): 192.

3. 3  Read, ‘Fire Risks’, 1, 3.

4. 4  Don Leggett and Charlotte Sleigh, ‘Scientific Governance: An Introduction’, in Leggett and Sleigh, eds., Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914–79 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 2–3.

5. 5  See, eg, Sabine Clarke, ‘Pure Science with a Practical Aim: The Meanings of Fundamental Research in Britain, circa 1916–1950’, Isis 101, no. 2 (2010): 285–311; Kieron Flanagan et al., Lessons from the History of UK Science Policy (London: British Academy, 2019); Abigail Woods, A Manufactured Plague: The History of Foot-and-Mouth Disease in Britain (London: Routledge, 2004).

6. 6  Wetherell, Foundations, 5.

7. 7  Hodkinson, Safe, 41.

8. 8  TNA HO/45/15071, Ministry of Reconstruction, 26 April 1918; TNA DSIR/36/4267, Progress Reports, January 1919; Kenneth and Jane Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive: The Political Career of Christopher, Viscount Addison (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 71.

9. 9  Andrew Hull, ‘War of Words: The Public Science of the British Scientific Community and the Origins of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1914–16’, British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 461–81; Clarke, ‘Pure Science’, 301.

10. 10  DSIR/FOC negotiations are in TNA DSIR/4.

11. 11  GTI, LBYP20000001/52, Bisby, ‘Phase 2’, 53.

12. 12  British Standard Definitions for Fire Resistance, Incombustibility, and Noninflammability of Building Materials and Structures, Including Methods of Test, No.476 (London: British Standards Institution, 1932).

13. 13  Ewen, Fighting Fires, 131–2.

14. 14  TNA DSIR/4/77, ‘A Description of the Work of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research’, undated, 35.

15. 15  Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Report for the Year 1947–48, Cmd. 7761 (London: HMSO, 1949), 68.

16. 16  Joint Committee of the Building Research Board, Fire Grading of Buildings Part I: General Principles and Structural Precautions (London: HMSO, 1946).

17. 17  British Standard Code of Practice CP 3: Chapter IV – Precautions against Fire. Part 1: Flats and Maisonettes (London: BSI, 1971), 5, 34.

18. 18  Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Report for the Year 1947–8, Cmd. 7761 (London: HMSO, 1949), 36–7; Harry Melville, The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), 60, 158–61.

19. 19  Dougal Drysdale and Jack Watts, ‘David Rasbash and the Department of Fire Engineering’, Fire Safety Science News 35 (2013): 14–15; GTI, JTOR00000006/82, José L. Torero, ‘Phase 2 Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Adequacy of the Current Testing Regime’, 4 January 2022, 83.

20. 20  Peter Johnson and Barbara Lane, ‘In Memoriam: Professor Margaret Law’, Fire Technology 53 (2017): 2041–3; Report of the Fire Research Board for the Year 1952 (London: HMSO, 1953); Helen Glew, Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

21. 21  A comprehensive run of Fire Research Notes has been digitised by the International Association for Fire Safety Science and made publicly accessible at the Fire Safety Science Digital Archive, <https://publications.iafss.org/publications/frn/info>, accessed 7 March 2023.

22. 22  Harold Wilson, ‘Labour’s Plan for Science’, 1 October 1963.

23. 23  Financial Times, 28 February 1964, 12.

24. 24  Marian Bowley, Innovations in Building Materials: An Economic Study (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1960), 346; Daily Mail, 25 January 1947, 3; 14 February 1947, 1; 13 March 1948, 3.

25. 25  Report of the Fire Research Board for the Year 1950 (London: HMSO, 1951), 1–2, 24–8.

26. 26  Financial Times, 4 February 1954, 8.

27. 27  The Builder, 4 September 1964, 497–8.

28. 28  The Times, 31 December 1963, 6; Financial Times, 23 November 1965, 15.

29. 29  B.F.W. Rogowski, ‘The Fire Propagation Test: Its Development and Application’, FR Note (London: HMSO, 1970).

30. 30  Catriona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 189–214; Sean Nixon, ‘Life in the Kitchen: Television Advertising, the Housewife and Domestic Modernity in Britain, 1955–1969’, Contemporary British History 31, no. 1 (2017): 70.

31. 31  Matthew Hilton, ‘The Death of a Consumer Society’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 18 (2008): 218.

32. 32  Daily Express, 19 June 1968, 7.

33. 33  Newham Recorder, 7 November 1968, 1; Hugh Griffiths, Report of the Inquiry into the Collapse of Flats at Ronan Point, Canning Town (London: HMSO, 1968), 7–8; Moore-Bick, Phase 1 Report, 505–15.

34. 34  Hansard (Commons), 15 March 1960, 1124.

35. 35  The Firefighter, December 1959, 22; TNA HLG/117/200, Correspondence between Terence Parry, FBU general secretary, and Ministry of Housing and Local Government, concerning the provision of fire-guard wall fittings in new-build homes.

36. 36  The Times, 14 November 1959, 6.

37. 37  The Times, 3 December 1959, 8; Daily Express, 9 March 1960, 5; Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), 184–5.

38. 38  Joint Fire Research Organisation, Effects of Draughts on the Burning of Portable Oil Heaters (London: HMSO, 1960); The Times, 8 March 1960, 7; 9 March 1960, 5.

39. 39  The Times, 8 March 1960, 12; Hansard (Commons), 15 March 1960, 1124; The Firefighter, May 1960, 5.

40. 40  Financial Times, 17 September 1960, 6.

41. 41  RBKCA Acc/2001/003/Box 24, ‘Newssheet of the Lancaster West Tenants’ Association’, November 1976, 5.

42. 42  Figures are taken from the DSIR’s annual reports, available via UK Parliamentary Papers.

43. 43  BRE Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1972), 43.

44. 44  BRE Report (London: HMSO, 1975), 53–5; Fire Prevention, April 1970, 5; January 1974, 5.

45. 45  BRE Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1973), v, 36.

46. 46  Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry on the Fire at the Stardust, Artane, Dublin on the 14th February, 1981 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1982). The FRS’s investigations are documented in TNA DSIR/4/3859.

47. 47  Vernon, ‘Heathrow’, 213–47.

48. 48  Fire Prevention, November 1976, 6.

49. 49  See, eg, GTI, Testimony of Dr Deborah Smith, BRE, 21 February 2022, 156.

50. 50  Hansard (Commons), 21 March 1980, 366; 17 June 1981, 384; 8 December 1982, 564; 14 January 1987, 183.

51. 51  Hansard (Commons), 27 April 1983, 333; BRE, Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1988), 3; BRE, Annual Review (Garston: BRE, 1991), 3.

52. 52  BRE, Annual Review (London: HMSO, 1989), 19.

53. 53  FBU, Grenfell Tower Fire, 18; Department for Communities and Local Government, Building Regulations 2000. Fire Safety. Approved Document B (London: NBS, 2006), 93.

54. 54  GTI, KIN00022610.09.18, Testimony of Adrian Pargeter, Kingspan Insulation Limited, 4 December 2020, 60.

55. 55  LMA GLC/AR/ENG/SE/1/8 (1/2) and (2/2), Ronan Point Inquiry.

56. 56  J.F. Fry, ‘Fires in Post-War Multi-Storey Flats in London, 1966’, FR Note (London: HMSO, 1971), 73.

57. 57  Read, ‘Fire Risks’, 3; The Times, 5 February 1975, 2; British Standard Code of Practice CP3, 34.

58. 58  GTI, SWE00000001/70, Witness Statement, Sam Webb, 4 March 2022, 71; F.W. Rogowski, R. Ramaprasad and J.R. Southern, Fire Performance of External Thermal Insulation for Walls of Multi-Storey Buildings (Garston: BRE, 1988); New Civil Engineer, 11 April 1991, in TNA AT/66/389, ‘Knowsley Fire’. On the failures of housing providers to listen to residents, see Daniel Renwick, ‘Organising on Mute’, in Bulley, Edkins and El-Enany, After Grenfell, 19–22.

59. 59  Building, 20 July 1990, 11, in TNA AT/66/389.

60. 60  Newham News, June 1986, 1, in NBA VF/NEW/728; ESCH 2019_esch_RoPo_03, Interview with Frances Clarke, 8 March 2019; ESCH 2018_esch_RoPo_04, Interview with Webb.

61. 61  National Tower Block Conference, 23 October 1983, <https://www.towerblocksuk.com>, accessed 7 March 2023.

62. 62  National Tower Blocks Network, ‘Annual Spot Safety Survey’ (1990); ‘Fire Safety Information Pack’ (not dated), <https://www.towerblocksuk.com>, accessed 7 March 2023.

63. 63  The View, spring 1991, 1.

64. 64  Liverpool Echo, 5 April 1991, in TNA AT/66/389.

65. 65  Private Eye, 21 June 1991, 14, in TNA AT/66/389; Grenfell Tower Inquiry, BRE00035385/2, Penny Morgan, Derek Jones and Sharon Clinch, Summary of Fires Investigated: April 1991 to March 1992 (London: HMSO, 1992). The site investigator, Penny Morgan, appeared before the Grenfell Tower Inquiry: BRE00043866/2, 20 October 2021.

66. 66  TNA AT/66/389, note by ‘Lyn’, 16 April 1991; Alison Curtis, ‘Knowsley Heights: External Fire on April the 5th 1991’, 8 April 1991.

67. 67  TNA AT/66/389, John Southern, BRE Scotlab, to Tony Morris, Section Head of the FRS Building and Structures Division, 14 April 1992; GTI, FBU00000022/4, FBU Written submission, 12 March 2022.

68. 68  The Times, 26 January 1995, 20(S).

69. 69  Department of Trade and Industry, Competitiveness: Forging Ahead, Cmd. 2867 (London: HMSO, 1995); Cabinet Office, Better Accounting for the Taxpayer’s Money: The Government’s Proposals, Cmd. 2929 (London: HMSO, 1995).

70. 70  R. Courtney, ‘Building Research Establishment – Past, Present and Future’, Building Research & Information 25, no. 5 (1997): 285–91.

71. 71  Hansard (Commons), 27 February 1997, 454–5; Department of the Environment Annual Report 1997, Cmd. 3607, iv.

72. 72  The Times, 5 June 1997, 22(S); Construction News, 6 February 1997.

73. 73  Quoted in The Spectator, 6 December 2020.