1. From byelaws to building regulations: recasting building control in Britain since the nineteenth century

The onset of public health regulation

In September 1666 fire raged across London, devouring property in the City. King Charles II’s subsequent proclamation paved the way for the introduction of byelaws, described by Clingan as ‘our first building regulations of national significance’.¹⁴ The byelaws transformed the City’s built form in two ways: first, by stipulating the use of brick or stone for rebuilding houses, with fixed thickness and height of walls; and second, by widening streets with greater distances between frontages in order to limit fire spread. From 1774, faced with the challenge of housing a growing population, the first statutory surveyors were appointed with powers to enforce compliance with London’s byelaws.¹⁵

Between 1800 and 1845 almost 400 local improvement acts dealing with building and sanitary control were approved in England and Wales. However, despite the statistical evidence confirming the link between mortality, sanitation and housing conditions in industrial towns, calls for a national building act went unheeded. Opponents, many of whom were landlords, objected to the argument that national legislation would benefit communities on the grounds that it interfered with prevailing laissez-faire thinking. They also warned that building control would threaten their proprietary rights and increase housing costs, which they threatened to pass on to renters, establishing a longstanding precedent that has been frequently invoked in recent years to reject calls for tougher controls over the housing market.¹⁶ Subsequent legislation retained the principle that building control would remain permissive and be administered primarily at local level, which meant that improvements to the quality of building remained patchy. Although the 1848 Public Health Act introduced oversight from central government, boroughs jealously guarded their powers to self-govern.¹⁷

The principle had thus been established that regulatory reform would be piecemeal, discretionary and consolidatory, following the path of least intervention. A centralised public health regime, created during the 1870s, established the first comprehensive administrative system, with accompanying building codes, incorporating wider areas of control designed to improve the public’s health. The creation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871 standardised control and raised the status of surveyors within local government. The landmark 1875 Public Health Act consolidated previous legislation and granted powers to local authorities to frame byelaws for promoting public health and preventing fires. Two years later, the LGB issued model byelaws to encourage local authorities to raise the standard of house-building; London was again excluded from these provisions. By 1882, over 1,500 sets of byelaws had been approved, albeit retaining significant local variations.¹⁸

London continued to be governed by its own building codes, administered from 1855 by the Metropolitan Board of Works and, from 1889, the London County Council (LCC). One of the LCC’s first tasks was to secure an updated Building Act to establish controls over the growing fashion for taller buildings, which it did in 1894 with the support of professional bodies such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The Act also introduced a greater range of clauses regulating building height, which was set at 80 feet to reflect the maximum length to which the Metropolitan (later renamed London) Fire Brigade’s escape ladders could extend.¹⁹

The regulatory system was subjected to increasing pressure to standardise in the aftermath of the First World War. In 1918, the report of a Departmental Committee on Building Byelaws recommended government introduce a national code to expire every ten years, thereby requiring local authorities to adopt up-to-date model byelaws.²⁰ The case for stronger controls was overridden by the urgent demand for new housing, however, especially in the light of Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s ‘homes fit for heroes’ speech in 1918. With shortages of materials and skilled builders, government instead advocated the continuation of the existing system of byelaws. The Housing and Town Planning Act 1919 established a greater role for the state in subsidising builders to construct model housing. Any major reform of building control was put on hold for much of the inter-war period until the system was brought onto a national footing on the eve of war. It also incorporated the definitions of a 1932 British Standard for ‘fire resistance’, stipulating that roofs, walls and floors ‘shall possess a degree of fire-resistance appropriate to the purpose for which the building is intended to be used’.²¹ From 1939 local authorities were required to make their own byelaws for all new buildings, based on the model series overseen by the Ministry of Health, although policymakers remained sensitive to accusations of overregulation. But a consensus had been reached within Whitehall that a discretionary system produced inconsistent checks and balances; the path of least intervention was about to take a decisive, but reversible, diversion.

The emergence of national regulation

The conditions were ripe for creating national building regulations in the years that followed the end of the Second World War. A 1952 revision of byelaws introduced two advances. Firstly, ‘deemed to satisfy’ provisions were combined with ‘standards of performance’ to allow ‘the utmost possible freedom in building methods provided the functional requirements are satisfied’.²² Greater flexibility was designated ‘in the national interest on account of the housing shortage and in order to stay apace of the needs of modern industry’.²³ George Clingan’s bold prediction had come to fruition two years before his retirement after fifty-two years’ public service.²⁴

Secondly, the 1952 byelaws contained more precise assessment of fire risk by specifying fire resistance periods in relation to building type and size based on the findings of the wartime government’s fire grading committee. This established the principle of compartmentation within large buildings with shared access routes. Integrating approved walls, floors, doors and windows into a building’s passive defence heralded a major shift in firefighting policy, providing for the safe exit of occupants while assisting firefighters in their work. It also led to the adoption of a British Standard Code of Practice in 1962, which established the ‘stay put’ fire service strategy for higher-risk residential buildings (HRRBs).²⁵ These changes, alongside the relaxation of rules concerning maximum building height, incentivised the construction industry to embrace new industrialised building systems, including high-rise flats, as part of the state’s housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The greater expense of construction materials and state subsidy would be offset by lower site and labour costs; additional savings were offered in the provision that only stipulated a single internal staircase for means of escape in case of fire in all tall buildings that exceeded the fire brigade’s rescue height.²⁶

National regulation had thus been adopted within central government as an administrative instrument for enforcing improved construction standards by the 1960s. The 1961 Public Health Act offered the opportunity to extend executive responsibility, removing from local authorities powers to make their own byelaws and centralising them within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG), a forerunner of the Department for Communities and Local Government²⁷ which presided over the regulations in 2017. In its spirit, then, the 1961 Act represented the culmination of a longer-term shift in building control, relegating local authorities to the status of agents of central government policy in all cities with the exception of London where the LCC retained discretionary powers.

To ensure that statutory requirements kept pace with technical advances, the 1961 Act appointed an advisory body of professionals working across the construction industries and the fire service. While the higher civil service had long drawn on the expertise of scientists, the 1960s heralded a ‘technocratic moment’ for British social and political life in which specialists were consulted by governments to benefit daily life in a variety of mundane but essential ways, as we shall explore in the next chapter.²⁸ First meeting in 1962, and reporting two years later, the Building Regulations Advisory Committee kept the regulations under constant review, working closely with partners in the Fire and Rescue Service and other government agencies. Initially located within the MHLG, it was transferred to the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works in 1964 before returning to the MHLG three years later, eventually settling in the Department of the Environment (DoE) in 1970.²⁹ Multiple ‘machinery of government’ changes – a theme we shall return to later – reveal the tensions between ministerial interest in matters of building control and the heavy administrative burden imposed on civil servants and their advisory bodies to keep up to date with specialist professional practice.

The Building Regulations came into operation in 1966, two years after their approval by ministers.³⁰ Their principal objective was to extend the model byelaws across England and Wales, with the exception of that part of London under the administration of the new Greater London Council (GLC).³¹ As with the Victorian public health reforms, the introduction of national regulations was never intended to be the end of the story. In the twenty years following their introduction, they were consolidated twice and amended fourteen times, before they were ‘recast’ in 1985. While predominantly of an administrative nature, the amendments reflected the changed priorities of government towards the modernisation of social infrastructure as well as its wider commitment to protecting public safety. The 1970s, far from being a decade of political inertia as they are commonly and erroneously described, were a time of continued refinement and improvement to public safety, as recent histories have revealed.³²

Three main amendments were introduced at the start of the decade. First, metric regulations were approved in 1972, in readiness for Britain’s entry into the Common Market the following year.³³ Second, an amendment in 1970 introduced new rules for controlling the design of buildings over five storeys high in order to give structural protection against accidental loads. This was in response to the Ronan Point gas explosion in May 1968. The Tribunal of Inquiry rebuked the Labour Government for its top-down managerialist approach and called for the block’s strengthening.³⁴ Thirdly, the 1965 regulations had not specified means of escape in its precautions. This omission was corrected with the 1971 Fire Precautions Act, which forms the focus of the next chapter, and a 1973 amendment stipulated the provision of exits and escape routes in larger multi-storey buildings. The 1973 amendment was a response to the Summerland leisure centre disaster earlier that year on the Isle of Man. This tragedy, with fifty deaths and eighty serious injuries, including many young children, revealed systemic failures in building control and sent shockwaves reverberating across Britain.³⁵ It has subsequently been cited by several experts as evidence of the British state’s and industry’s blindness to learning from historic multiple-fatality events in the aftermath of the Grenfell fire, including the Hackitt Review.³⁶ Indeed, in their closing submissions to Phase 1 of the public inquiry, counsel representing the bereaved and survivors cited Summerland as one of ‘The Fires That Foretold Grenfell’, with one claiming that, although ‘it led in the short-term to the strengthening of outdated Building Regulations in the UK, the lessons were not learnt by the powers that be’ and, by the early 1980s, ‘the deregulation of fire safety was in full swing’.³⁷

These are bold claims but not without merit. Even before the special commission of inquiry had been tasked with investigating the tragedy, newspapers asked questions of the Douglas Corporation, which had approved the architect’s application to allow the approximately 50,000-square-foot frontage to be clad in Oroglas, a combustible acrylic glass sheeting which had never been subjected to testing. The fire, which was accidentally started by three boys smoking in a disused kiosk on the miniature golf course, soon ignited the eastern end of the main building, itself clad in another flammable material called Galbestos, made from plastic-coated steel sheeting. The flames quickly engulfed the Galbestos sheeting and, spreading through poorly fireproofed vents, ignited the acrylic roof, sending burning chunks of molten plastic falling onto holidaymakers as they evacuated. A three-and-a-half-acre ‘dream complex’, marketed as ‘Britain’s first forget-the-weather family fun centre’, was reduced ‘so swiftly and so hopelessly into a blazing death trap’ and the centre’s designers, builders and regulators were all implicated in its failure.³⁸

A scathing front-page editorial in the Daily Mirror, which echoes similar pieces published in the days following the Grenfell Tower fire,³⁹ blasted those who had failed to protect holidaying families:

New types of plastic material are constantly being put on the market. They may be safe. They may not. They may be safe under some conditions. But not under others. The responsibility lies heavily on the Government, on every local authority, on every architect, on every builder to ensure that no material is used that has not been independently tested … In the year 1973 it should be possible to guarantee that no fire will spread with the terrifying speed of the one that engulfed Summerland.⁴⁰

Yet the borough council waived its byelaws in order to allow the use of Galbestos and Oroglas to reduce costs and create an artificial sunshine palace. Aesthetic and financial considerations were prioritised at the expense of safety in the most flagrant abuse of regulations since their introduction, which, as the Grenfell Inquiry reminds us, demonstrates that governments must be held accountable for their failure to protect those who are most vulnerable to fire.

While fire industry experts reassured tourists in England and Wales that the ‘construction of such a building as the Summerland holiday complex would be unlikely to be allowed in this country’, alarm bells inevitably rang loudly, particularly in the light of several fires at domestic holiday camps, including Butlins’ complex at Pwllheli a few days later. Anxiety was heightened as fire industry organisations voiced their concerns at the omission of means of escape provisions from the regulations: ‘When will the British accept the urgent need for adequate fire risk control?’, asked the Financial Times.⁴¹ No time soon, it would appear, as the government rejected recommendations to strengthen existing laws, insisting that local authorities already had sufficient licensing powers. Instead, Home Office officials, in remaining on the path of least intervention, drew up a voluntary code of guidance for the 1975 holiday season.⁴² The Summerland Fire Commission agreed, concluding from its investigations that the disaster was the result of ‘many human errors and failures’, but called for greater controls over exterior as well as interior features to reduce the risk of external fire spread.⁴³ As for the leisure centre’s architect, he was exonerated from accusations of professional misconduct and retired to live on his yacht off Corfu.⁴⁴

These disasters, and the subsequent regulatory changes they triggered, occurred at a crucial moment in the state’s provision of health and safety. Whereas governments had responded to accidents at work with more prescriptive regulations since the 1950s, there had been no subsequent diminishing of danger. In fact, the number of workplace deaths and injuries increased during the 1950s and 1960s, which pointed to the limitations of a reactive system of regulation. Rather than restricting worker freedoms, so it was thought, the state would be better off empowering employees to accept greater responsibility for their individual safety in order to get a grip on the problem. In 1970 a committee of inquiry, led by the former chair of the National Coal Board Lord Robens, was appointed to review health and safety provision in the workplace. Robens’s report, and the resultant legislation, forwarded the notion that occupational safety was the responsibility of employees and employers as well as the state. Workplace health and safety would be managed by a series of ‘functional regulations’ that specified the desired objective rather than the means to get there. This heralded a new era of self-regulation within a statutory framework composed of voluntary codes of practice developed within industry and by individual bodies. From now on, the state would regulate from afar, with responsibility passing onto the individual and, in certain instances, to professional associations such as the Fire Brigades Union.⁴⁵

The 1974 Health and Safety at Work etc. Act was at odds with the ‘deemed to satisfy’ provisions contained in the Building Regulations. Criticism of the heavy-handed regulations was ramped up in the context of the light-touch approach preferred by Lord Robens. Political support for greater levels of self-regulation echoed a discourse of anti-red-tapeism within the popular media, which had intensified over the previous decade. Some of this criticism was evidently politicised. Writing in 1964, Peter Whalley, the Daily Mail’s property writer, welcomed the 1959–64 Conservative Government’s draft regulations on the grounds that they promised to cut the cost of building the average home as well as encourage the construction of schools and hospitals.⁴⁶ Yet within two years, Whalley was bemoaning the same regulations for failing to improve standards and innovation, for which he blamed the Labour Government’s failure to rein in surveyors. Only by separating building inspection from local government and regulating it through industry bodies would standards be improved, according to Whalley.⁴⁷

Following Margaret Thatcher’s election as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, media criticism became more trenchant. Daniel Stedman Jones has noted the important role played by newspaper journalists in espousing neoliberal ideas such as monetarism and free trade during the 1970s, and the same can be said about support for the deregulation of building control, with polemical writers citing bureaucratic bottlenecks and excessive costs as inhibiting the rights of homeowners to change their homes without repeatedly clashing with fussy inspectors armed with clipboards and prohibition notices.⁴⁸ The Daily Mail, the most hostile newspaper, regularly published ‘puff pieces’ about the ease and convenience of home extensions, loft conversions and the installation of new heating systems, under such headlines as ‘You don’t have to move to own a larger house’ and ‘When staying put could be your best move …’. While such pieces identify various loopholes in the existing law, they also warn the reader to check with the local authority to avoid being ‘tied down by red tape’, as one middle-aged couple found with their idea for a ‘dream home’ in Essex. The couple’s plans for a farm conversion were repeatedly blocked by planners working for the local council who ‘object to every little detail – even the size of the windows’. Four years on, the family were still living in a caravan on the property, their plans on hold.⁴⁹

Recasting the Building Regulations

In 1979 a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher was elected on a pledge to introduce greater choice for the individual by undoing many of the reforms of the post-war period. With the goal to cut public expenditure and reduce economic controls, government set out to shrink the state rather than continue the post-war trend for expanding responsibilities in the interrelated fields of welfare, health and safety provision. This marked a new era of building regulation, that of deregulation, during which the fire at Grenfell Tower occurred. This era is marked by a diminished role for the state and an increased role for the private sector and property developers to self-regulate in the absence of what popular newspapers and politicians increasingly derided as unnecessary state controls. As we shall see in the next chapter, this era of deregulation also saw the erosion of the law on fire precautions, with responsibility for safety passing from the state to the individual.

The Thatcher Government’s approach towards ‘recasting’ the Building Regulations can be understood in the context of two broad developments; first, the late twentieth-century shift from social democracy to market liberalism, which saw her appeal to a growing popular individualism among voters; second, her party’s longstanding support for a ‘property-owning democracy’. This led to ‘the largest transfer of property from the state to the individual’ in the country’s history as ‘a new type of citizen’, the working-class homeowner who was more likely to be aligned with traditional Conservative voters, emerged as a key voter. Thatcher’s government was elected on a promise to roll back ‘the frontiers of the state’ by selling off state assets and reducing public debt while also offering greater choice to those people who were increasingly confident in staking a claim to their rights and identities. Publicly owned utilities were seen as an obstacle to efficiency, removing the incentive to innovate and deliver improved services at a lower price to the ‘consumer’. As a result, policymakers advocated that public services should be subject to competition from the market to encourage them to operate more economically and efficiently.⁵⁰ The ‘Right to Buy’ programme, introduced in 1980, gave council house tenants who had rented for three years or more the right to buy their homes at a significant discount of the market value; eventually this became ‘the largest single privatisation of public goods’ at an estimated value of £2 billion by 1997.⁵¹

Just as supporters of ‘Right to Buy’ cited the importance of ‘choice’ for tenants to own their own homes, so too did these arguments dominate the building control sector. As several expert witnesses have testified to the Grenfell Inquiry, the new secretary of state for the environment, Michael Heseltine, ‘fired the starting gun for the policy of deregulation in the construction industry’ that culminated with the 2017 fire.⁵² While Heseltine’s promise to ‘reduce the nannying and overseeing’ of local authorities by Whitehall pleased professional associations exasperated by ‘the nightmare of bureaucratic control’, for Heseltine, sweeping away ‘expensive and time-consuming’ controls translated into diminished responsibilities for local authorities and greater levels of competition between the state and market.⁵³ Indeed, ‘far from giving local government more freedom there may, in fact, be worse to come’, noted the Municipal Journal, which warned that local authorities were entering a new decade shackled ‘in chains’ amidst threats to cut public expenditure and introduce rate capping.⁵⁴

In December 1979, Heseltine pledged to take ‘a hard look’ at the system of building control in a speech to the National House-Building Council (NHBC), a private consumer watchdog that had long advocated for greater freedom for housebuilders. ‘I am not in the business of just tinkering with the problem’, he insisted; he was committed to creating a simplified system, the main thrust of which would involve reducing the role of local authorities and granting greater responsibility to private providers with the ultimate aim of making building control self-financing and self-regulating: ‘There are strong arguments for a system of control which embodies the principle that anyone who carries out work, or causes it to be carried out, should be responsible for the outcome.’⁵⁵ While simplifying the language of the Building Regulations was welcomed across the sector, Heseltine’s proposal for greater self-regulation by the construction industry met with disapproval from building control inspectors who wanted a greater measure of independence themselves. What was needed, wrote the Institution of Municipal Engineers (IME), were ‘suitably qualified practitioners’ to ensure that the primary objective of building control remains ‘the effective protection of the health and safety of the public’ and not the reduction of controls.⁵⁶

A government consultation document, published in 1980, outlined options for simplifying the system and reducing its burden on the taxpayer. These included ‘recasting’ regulation as a minimum number of functional requirements only; exempting local authorities from control; and introducing certification by approved private persons as an alternative to local authority control. A white paper consequently proposed a combination of all three options by widening exemptions and introducing certification that provided for greater self-regulation by construction professionals.⁵⁷ Unsurprisingly, the NHBC, which had been lobbying for powers to act as a certifying authority, welcomed the proposals, seeing them as beneficial for homeowners. RIBA also welcomed the reforms as freeing its members from the costs of building control. The Institute of Building Control and the local authority associations expressed concern at the intended fragmentation of responsibility and loss of revenue, while also warning that private firms would poach ‘competent persons’ from local authorities with the offer of competitive rates of pay. Minimum self-regulation ‘would obviously lower standards’, warned one surveyor, who noted that multiple-fatality disasters occurred in buildings outside the scope of regulatory controls, as was seen in the case of the Summerland fire. Other commercial bodies, including the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), predicted that the proposals could lead to a sharp increase in the cost of insurance, with many landlords passing these on to tenants or leaseholders, which is precisely what happened in the wake of the unfolding cladding crisis following the 2017 Grenfell fire.⁵⁸

Proposals for the simplification of the regulations were issued in 1982. The main proposal – to shift from ‘deemed to satisfy’ clauses to open-ended functional regulations – was welcomed by housing providers and industry bodies. In general, local authority groups opposed the proposals, concerned at the loss of responsibility and revenue. Serious reservations were raised by fire safety organisations. In a warning that later bore fruit, the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE), whose core membership was composed of firefighters, warned that the new form ‘will give Architects much greater freedom and enforcing authorities much less control and much greater difficulty in enforcing “Safe” performance standards’. In particular, the IFE warned that ‘the expertise and experience of the Fire Authority in matters relating to fire is recognised and should not be lost’, indicating that no building control authority should approve plans until they received from the fire authority a safety certificate, yet this is precisely what the government introduced.⁵⁹

Undeterred by the criticism, and bolstered by a larger majority following the 1983 general election, the government’s Housing and Building Control Bill was passed the following year. In addition to extending the provisions of its ‘Right to Buy’ programme, the Act introduced competition into building oversight. Under regulations issued the following year, it allowed for privately certified building inspectors, including the NHBC, to compete for contracts. The government’s pro-market sentiments continued in its subsequent attack on ‘red tape’, deploying the language popularised by newspapers by pledging to ‘lift the burden’ on small firms through the removal of a raft of regulations. In a 1985 report, ‘Burdens of Business’, by Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Lord George Young, building regulations were cited as one of the top ten ‘burdens’ placed upon small firms.⁶⁰ The subsequent white paper committed government to deregulation in order to achieve two aims: first, ‘freeing markets and increasing the opportunities for competition’ and, second, ‘lifting administrative and legislative burdens which take time, energy and resources from fundamental business activity’. This would be achieved in two stages: by ‘simplifying’ existing regulations so that they afford greater ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ to the building process, before establishing ‘how far they can be reduced or dropped altogether’ in order to reduce regulations ‘to the minimum required to secure their essential function, which is the preservation of public health and safety’.⁶¹

Right-wing newspapers welcomed Young’s proposals, with Robin Oakley in the Daily Mail gleefully reporting that ‘[m]asses of red tape and pettifogging regulations which hamper small firms are to be slashed away’. Similarly, Peter Hitchens, writing in the Daily Express, reported that government had gone to ‘war on red tape’, praising proposals to free businesses from ‘needlessly elaborate regulations on safety and fire’.⁶² More muted voices warned that cutting red tape could lead to more dangerous living and working conditions. The Guardian quoted Labour’s Treasury spokesman, a young Tony Blair, who described the white paper as a ‘shabby and irrelevant document … whose ideology is unable to solve the problems of the economy’, before seeking guarantees that the plans ‘will not lead to loss of safety and fire regulations or environmental protection’.⁶³

The recast Building Regulations, introduced in 1985, were described as ‘the most radical shake-up of the building control system since the … establishment of the system of building bye-laws’ in the Victorian period.⁶⁴ It can equally be argued that they heralded the beginnings of a diminution of public safety, or, in the words of Judith Hackitt, a ‘race to the bottom’ of a culture of building control that prioritised profit over safety through ignorance or indifference.⁶⁵ Other than for means of escape in case of fire, functional requirements were introduced, which stated the aim of the regulation rather than the means of achieving the requirement. Even then, government was committed to ‘reducing the level of regulation in these areas, where this would not lead to increased risk to personal safety’. Critics of the regulations had increasingly bemoaned the length of the published regulations, which they complained had been allowed to ‘breed like rabbits’ by successive governments. As one author noted:

In the bad, dangerous past of pre-1965 we had 78 pages of regulations. The year of 1965, when regulations were nationalised, these became 168 pages. The take-off point started in 1972. There are now over 350 pages, and even more are breeding in the department’s hutches.⁶⁶

Thatcher’s government added to the number of regulations it inherited; it took intervention in order to deregulate. In 1980 a scale of fees was introduced for building control in order to bring about public expenditure savings of £40 million. Critics, however, warned that fees would ‘do nothing to ease the present climate of dissatisfaction with which building control officers have to cope’ and would contribute to enhanced client expectations for building approval.⁶⁷ Moreover, while later controls were introduced to ensure adequate access for disabled persons, these were not seen to deflect attention away from the more radical changes of providing for private certification and removing ‘unnecessary regulations’. Indeed, Thatcher’s government slavishly culled its own breeding programme, reducing three hundred and ten pages of specific regulations supported by twelve detailed schedules to twenty-four pages comprising twenty functional regulations and three schedules.⁶⁸ Yet the detail did not disappear, as twelve booklets of advisory guidance, known as Approved Documents, were introduced, including one booklet – Approved Document B – dealing entirely with structural fire safety. ‘So much for cutting red tape’, noted the authors of a recent history.⁶⁹

This published guidance went through several revisions from 1992 under Conservative and New Labour governments alike. While the 1991 and 1992 revisions updated fire safety features, they opened up more areas of building control to private operators, extending a process that had started a decade earlier. This inevitably led to greater fragmentation of regulatory control.⁷⁰ Further revisions, introduced in 2000, endorsed large-scale fire testing of external cladding systems alongside greater choice for construction product manufacturers in satisfying the regulations, especially as they pertained to taller buildings. To cope with the growing workload of testing, the New Labour Government later permitted the widespread use of ‘full-scale test data’.⁷¹ In practice, this meant that use of combustible materials was permitted under certain conditions, in particular for insulating buildings with exterior wall cladding, while an ever-shrinking pool of fire prevention officers meant that enforcement was patchy at best. Deregulation established the legal right, if not the moral legitimacy, of developers to prioritise the costs of development over and above those of the safety of a building’s occupants. So much for learning lessons; successive ‘machinery of government’ changes since the 1990s meant that responsible ministries like the DoE and its successors had forgotten the horrors of earlier cladding fires such as Summerland.

Matters came to a head following the Grenfell Tower fire with the formation of the Hackitt Review. Issuing her final report in 2018, Hackitt concluded that the regulatory system was ‘not fit for purpose’ and called for ‘a radical rethink’ of the whole system, including the creation of a regulatory framework and a building safety regulator, managed by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), with responsibility to oversee the safety and performance of HRRBs. The construction industry had failed to reflect and learn for itself, and it had not looked to other sectors for guidance. What is required, Hackitt and other commentators write, is a culture change in the industry from top to bottom. While Hackitt’s report and the government’s subsequent response have signalled a return to the collaborative approach championed in earlier eras of regulation, it nominally goes further in advocating a stronger voice for residents, which has since been adopted by the HSE in the Regulator’s governance. It remains to be seen how far residents’ concerns will be taken seriously, which has led to a number of campaigners calling upon the government and its regulatory bodies ‘to ensure the voices of those with less power are both heard and count’.⁷² The signs do not bode well: the Conservative Government’s Fire Safety Act, finally passed in 2021, angered many campaigners for reneging on its 2019 assurance to implement all of the recommendations issued in the Grenfell Inquiry Phase 1 report, ‘in full’ and ‘without delay’.⁷³ One such recommendation, that mobility-impaired residents be supplied with Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (PEEPs) to assist them in evacuating a building in an emergency, was rejected by the government following a cost–benefit analysis on the grounds of ‘practicality’, ‘proportionality’ and ‘safety’, including concerns that evacuation ‘might hinder firefighting strategy’.⁷⁴ Yet the fact that mobility-impaired residents face a disproportionate risk to their lives from fires in high-rise buildings – 40 per cent of the disabled residents living in Grenfell Tower died in the 2017 fire – has been cited by campaigners as proof of the government’s failure to protect those who are forced to live in a perpetual state of vulnerability owing to their inability to self-evacuate. Evidently the ‘excessive costs’ cited of introducing robust safety measures continue to override the government’s priority for public safety.⁷⁵

Conclusion

The long road to the Building Regulations radically switched direction from the 1980s, returning to a quasi-Victorian model of discretionary powers and greater freedoms for property developers and construction product manufacturers to act in their own interests. Historians can only speculate on what a surveyor like George Pierce Clingan, who spent more than four decades working within local government, would have made of this policy reversal after decades of effective regulation. In this we are assisted by the written responses from professional bodies to the consultation on the recasting of the regulations in 1983. Whereas elements of the proposals were welcomed – not least the simplification and clarity given to their wording – warnings echoed from across the associations at the importance of providing training to building control officers to cope with the anticipated changes to site inspection and the introduction of Approved Documents (one body recommended the award of a ‘certificate of competence’ to building surveyors not dissimilar to RICS’s call following the introduction of controversial EWS1 surveys for High-Rise Residential Buildings in 2019⁷⁶). Moreover, several bodies – including the IME and IAAS⁷⁷ – reminded the DoE of the importance of ensuring that every residential building, including temporary accommodation provided at hotels, boarding houses and hostels, should have at least one means of escape in the event of fire in order to assist the work of the fire service as well as evacuation in instances where ‘stay put’ was inadvisable. Only with the retention of existing laws governing the provision of exits and entrances, as well as ‘unequivocable wording’ in the accompanying guidance, would the safety of residents and guests be subject to appropriate controls.⁷⁸ It is to the thorny issue of hotel precautions, as a window onto the wider theme of the deregulation of fire safety, that we now turn.

1. 1  G.P. Clingan, ‘National Building Regulations’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 93, no. 4688 (1945): 207.

2. 2  Clingan, ‘National Building Regulations’, 208; Liverpool Evening Express, 31 January 1945, 3; Liverpool Daily Post, 1 February 1945, 2; The Times, 31 January 1945, 5; The Municipal Journal & Local Government Administrator (hereafter MJ), 16 February 1945, 339.

3. 3  Liverpool Evening Express, 1 September 1943, 2.

4. 4  The Surveyor and Municipal and County Engineer, 9 February 1945, 73–4, 84.

5. 5  See Alfred Bossom’s introduction to Clingan, ‘National Building Regulations’, 204–5.

6. 6  Clingan, ‘National Building Regulations’, 206.

7. 7  Wetherell, Foundations, 3, 7.

8. 8  Grenfell Tower Inquiry (hereafter GTI), 7 April 2022, Testimony of Lord Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (2010–15), 458.

9. 9  W.S. Wright and Vincent Powell-Smith, The Building Regulations Explained and Illustrated for Residential Buildings: A Guide for Students and Others (London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1967), iii; 5th edition, 1978, vii; A.J. Elder, Guide to the Building Regulations 1985, 2nd edition (London: Butterworth Architecture, 1986), 2.

10. 10  See, eg, Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Ben Jackson, ‘The Think Tank Archipelago: Thatcherism and Neo-Liberalism’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, eds., Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 43–61.

11. 11  Majone, ‘Paradoxes’, 54; Steve Tombs, Social Protection after the Crisis: Regulation without Enforcement (Bristol: Policy Press, 2017).

12. 12  Oliver Macdonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal 1, no. 1 (1958): 52–67; Jill Pellew, ‘The Home Office and the Explosives Act of 1875’, Victorian Studies 18, no. 2 (1974): 175–94; Gerald Rhodes, Inspectorates in British Government: Law Enforcement and Standards of Efficiency (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981); Roy MacLeod, ed., Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

13. 13  Judith Clifton, Pierre Lanthier and Harm Schröter, ‘Regulating and Deregulating the Public Utilities 1830–2010’, Business History 53, no. 5 (2011): 659–72. While the experience of building control in Scotland and Northern Ireland clearly fell within these waves, they were subject to their own specific legislative regimes and regulatory bodies, which it is not possible to cover here in detail.

14. 14  Clingan, ‘National Building Regulations’, 206.

15. 15  C.C. Knowles and P.H. Pitt, The History of Building Regulation in London 1189–1972 (London: Architectural Press, 1972), 30–5, 49–54.

16. 16  Roger Harper, Victorian Building Regulations (London: Mansell, 1985), xiii–xiv; S.M. Gaskell, Building Control: National Legislation and the Introduction of Local Bye-Laws in Victorian England (London: Bedford Square Press, 1983), 6–12.

17. 17  Royston Lambert, ‘Central and Local Relations in Mid-Victorian England: The Local Government Act Office, 1858–71’, Victorian Studies 6, no. 2 (1962): 121–50.

18. 18  Gaskell, Building Control, 42–8; Harper, Victorian Building, xix–xx, xxii.

19. 19  Knowles and Pitt, Building Regulation in London, 73–7, 86–94.

20. 20  Anthony James Ley, ‘Building Control: Its Development and Application 1840–1936’, Open University MPhil, 1990, 156–63.

21. 21  G.E. Mitchell, Model Building Byelaws Illustrated, 2nd edition (London: B.T. Batsford, 1947), 34.

22. 22  Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Model Bye-Laws, Series IV: Buildings (London: HMSO, 1952), 3.

23. 23  Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–1975: A Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 60.

24. 24  Liverpool Echo, 1 September 1954, 12.

25. 25  British Standard Code of Practice CP 3: Chapter IV: Precautions Against Fire. Part 1: Flats and Maisonettes (in blocks over two storeys) (London: British Standards Institution, 1978), 5.

26. 26  The National Archives (hereafter TNA) HLG/51/1117, ‘Means of Escape from Flats and Maisonettes’, July 1954; Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 62; Peter Scott, ‘Friends in High Places: Government-Industry Relations in Public Sector House-Building during Britain’s Tower Block Era’, Business History 62, no. 4 (2020): 545–65.

27. 27  Since renamed the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in 2018 and, in 2021, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

28. 28  David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (London: Penguin, 2019), 400–1.

29. 29  TNA WORK/75/32, ‘Building Regulations Advisory Committee First Report’, Cmd. 2279 (London: HMSO, 1964); TNA WORK/75/33, ‘Research and Testing: Action Arising’.

30. 30  The Building Regulations followed Scotland’s example, which had been put on a national footing in 1959; Northern Ireland followed in 1972.

31. 31  London was incorporated into the Regulations in 1986 following the GLC’s abolition.

32. 32  See, eg, chapters in Crook and Esbester, Governing Risks; Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton and Pat Thane, eds., Reassessing 1970s Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

33. 33  W.S. Whyte and Vincent Powell-Smith, The Building Regulations Explained and Illustrated for Residential Buildings, 4th edition (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Son, 1972), vii.

34. 34  TNA HLG/118/1133, ‘Building Regulations Advisory Committee, Sub-committee to consider proposals for 5th amendment to Building Regulations’.

35. 35  The fire and its aftermath are detailed in Ian Phillips, ‘The Summerland Fire Disaster’ (2020), available at <https://www.summerlandfiredisaster.co.uk, accessed 7 March 2023>.

36. 36  Hackitt, Interim Report, 32; Kernick, Catastrophe, 29.

37. 37  GTI, Closing submissions from Counsel Rajiv Menon and Michael Mansfield QC, 11 December 2018, 24, 65–6.

38. 38  Daily Mail, 4 August 1973, 1; The Guardian, 9 August 1973, 6.

39. 39  A selection of newspaper headlines was compiled by The Guardian, 15 June 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2017/jun/15/newspapers-around-the-world-react-to-the-grenfell-tower-fire-in-pictures>. Please note that they include graphic images of the tower in flames.

40. 40  Daily Mirror, 4 August 1973, 1.

41. 41  Financial Times, 10 August 1973, 11; 4 August 1973, 24.

42. 42  TNA AY/21/24/CP74/74, ‘Report on the Spread of Fire at Summerland, Douglas, Isle of Man’, 2 August 1973; Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Fire Services for the Year 1974, Cmd. 6145, 23.

43. 43  J.D. Cantlie et al., Report of the Summerland Fire Commission (Isle of Man: Government Office, 1974), 77. The Commission’s findings regarding external fire spread were submitted by the Fire Brigades Union to the public inquiry: GTI, FBU00000130_Exhibit MW 99, 12 March 2022.

44. 44  Daily Telegraph, 31 July 1979, 15.

45. 45  Paul Almond and Mike Esbester, Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain: Society, Legitimacy, and Change since 1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Modern Records Centre, MSS.346/4/149, ‘Health and Safety Guidelines for Firefighters’.

46. 46  Daily Mail, 28 February 1964, 11.

47. 47  Daily Mail, 7 March 1966, 8.

48. 48  Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe, 233–5.

49. 49  Daily Mail, 10 February 1973, 25; 26 May 1973, 20; 25 August 1973, 22; 15 May 1976, 14.

50. 50  Matthew Francis, ‘ “A Crusade to Enfranchise the Many”: Thatcherism and the Property-Owning Democracy’, Twentieth Century British History 23, no. 2 (2012): 275–97; E. Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories about Post-War Britain: Popular Individualism and the “Crisis” of the 1970s’, Twentieth Century British History 28, no. 2 (2017): 268–304; Guy Ortolano, Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

51. 51  Francis, ‘Crusade’, 295.

52. 52  See, eg, GTI, Martin Seaward and Nick Toms, ‘FBU00000191_Phase 2 Module 6 Part 2 – Written Closing Submission on behalf of the Fire Brigades Union’, 6 June 2022, 3; GTI LBYP20000001/52, Professor Luke Bisby, ‘Phase 2 – Regulatory Testing and the Path of Grenfell’, 10 November 2021, 1132.

53. 53  MJ, 4 May 1979, 451.

54. 54  MJ, 18 May 1979, 503; 25 May 1979, 543; 21 December 1979, 1339.

55. 55  Financial Times, 4 December 1979, 7; 11 December 1979, 6.

56. 56  MJ, 14 December 1979, 1303–5; Chartered Municipal Engineer (CME), March 1980, 64.

57. 57  DoE, White Paper on the Future of Building Control in England and Wales, Cmd. 8179 (London: HMSO, 1981).

58. 58  Financial Times, 6 October 1980, 42; MJ, 11 January 1980, 27–8; MJ, 8 August 1980, 994–5; CME, September 1980, 209–16.

59. 59  TNA AT/49/161, ‘Building Regulations Reform, Summaries of Responses to Consultation’, 30 March 1983.

60. 60  Department of Trade and Industry, Burdens on Business: Report of a Scrutiny of Administrative and Legislative Requirements (London: HMSO, 1985); Financial Times, 30 April 1985, 11.

61. 61  Minister without Portfolio, Lifting the Burden, Cmd. 9571 (London: HMSO, 1985), 15–16.

62. 62  Daily Mail, 17 July 1985, 9; Daily Express, 17 July 1985, 7.

63. 63  The Guardian, 17 July 1985, 1; Daily Mirror, 17 July 1985, 2.

64. 64  A.J. Ley, A History of Building Control in England and Wales 1840–1990 (Coventry: RICS Books, 2000), 141.

65. 65  Hackitt, Final Report, 5.

66. 66  Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1980, 11.

67. 67  CME, March 1980, 61; MJ, 11 April 1980, 454–5.

68. 68  Lifting the Burden, 15–16.

69. 69  Prosser and Taylor, Grenfell Tower Fire, 101; Department of the Environment, The Building Regulations 1985: Approved Document B – Fire Spread (London: HMSO, 1985). Approved Document B has gone through multiple revisions, the most recent of which was in 2019, with amendments in 2020 and 2022: <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fire-safety-approved-document-b>.

70. 70  MJ, 23 January 1992, 16–17.

71. 71  Prosser and Taylor, Grenfell Tower Fire, 102–3.

72. 72  Hackitt, Final Report, 5, 12; Kernick, Catastrophe, 147, 159.

73. 73  Inside Housing, 30 October 2019, <https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/news/government-to-implement-grenfell-inquiry-recommendations-in-full-and-provide-funding-63963>.

74. 74  Home Office, Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans in High-Rise Residential Buildings – Recommendations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 Report: Government Response (London: HMSO, 2022), 53; Hansard (Lords), 25 May 2022, 847–50.

75. 75  See the joint letter from Disability Rights UK, Grenfell United and Claddag (the Leaseholder Disability Action Group) to the prime minister, 12 June 2022, at <https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2022/june/grenfell-5-years>, accessed 21 October 2022.

76. 76  RICS News, <https://www.rics.org/uk/news-insight/latest-news/fire-safety/cladding-qa>, accessed 7 March 2023.

77. 77  The IAAS was renamed the Association of Building Engineers in 1993, becoming the Chartered Association of Building Engineers in 2014. The IME merged with the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1984.

78. 78  TNA AT/49/161, ‘Building Regulations Reform: Summaries of Responses’, 30 March 1983.