PAS 9980 – A watered-down unsafe, unsuitable and unwanted approach to fire safety
“We will prioritise residents and protect their interests, make sure that industry builds safe homes, and provide clear accountability and enforcement” said Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner, as she announced the Government’s acceptance of all 58 recommendations in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report.
What was missing from the statement was an acknowledgement of the quiet post-Grenfell watering down of fire safety protections for those currently living in what may well be unsafe buildings. Shocking as it may seem, the previous Conservative government and the current Labour one have adopted a Bourbon-like approach to ensuring fire safety in existing buildings—they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
72 people died on the night of 14 June 2017 because of lax standards that were inadequately enforced. Yet, inexplicably, governments of both parties have decided to repeat the errors of the past in the name of a more “proportionate” approach to remediation—or, more likely, to appease developers and limit the cost to the Exchequer.
PAS 9980
Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 9980 was introduced in January 2022 to replace previous guidance that the then Conservative government felt had “been wrongly interpreted by the industry as requiring remediation of all cladding irrespective of building height.” The new code of practice (PAS 9980 is a code of practice, not an official British Standard) aims “to help fire risk assessors take a proportionate approach to the assessment of walls and avoid wholescale cladding replacement where safe to do so.”
However, it is a well-kept secret that PAS 9980’s risk-based proportionate approach is flawed and not compatible with the fire safety regulatory regime and the “stay put” policy that applies to most residential buildings.
Fire safety regulatory regime
The fire safety regulatory regime is made up of two elements—building regulations and the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. Building regulations require buildings to be built with adequate fire safety measures and the fire safety order is concerned with fire safety management within occupied premises.
The two elements of the fire safety regulatory regime have different methods of ascertaining that their requirements have been met. Compliance with building regulations ensures a baseline of fire safety, while the Fire Safety Order requires responsible persons (building owners and managers) to manage fire safety on a risk-based basis.
PAS 9980 is incompatible with the fire safety regime because its risk-based approach ignores the fundamental assumption of building regulation compliance in the fire safety regime. It is essential to the safety of residents and firefighters that buildings and fires within them behave as designed or expected.
However, PAS 9980, as its drafters have acknowledged, does not consider building regulation compliance as a benchmark of acceptable risk. Instead, it accepts heightened risk arising from non-compliance with statutory guidance or building regulations and, despite an assessment process that “will inevitably be, to a large degree, subjective,” takes the view that the risk might still be low enough to be tolerable.
The substitution of a risk-based approach in place of ensuring building regulation compliance complicates firefighting and undermines the assumptions underpinning the “stay put” strategy that governs the design and construction of most blocks of flats. Residents and firefighters are placed at a higher risk of death or injury than would otherwise be the case as the London Fire Brigade has pointed out:
Firefighting operations are underpinned by key assumptions about building design and how they will behave in a fire. When dangerous and often hidden conditions exist due to failures of design, build and maintenance the effectiveness of the operational response will be seriously undermined and the safety of members of the public and firefighters could be severely compromised.
PAS 9980’s building-specific and subjective assessment of risk and remediation requirements removes the certainty previously provided to firefighters through building regulation compliance that a building would behave as expected in the event of fire.
Its risk-based approach is incompatible with the “stay put” strategy. Lord Khan of Burnley, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, recently reiterated the importance of building regulation compliance as an essential prerequisite for a “stay put” policy.
On the “stay put” strategy, which I have mentioned before, that depends upon buildings being properly constructed, refurbished and maintained to building safety regulations.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry concluded that “A stay put strategy in response to a compartment fire will be acceptable only if there is negligible [emphasis added] risk of fire escaping into a spreading through the internal wall.” PAS 9980 takes the view that the less stringent assessment of a tolerable risk is acceptable.
Ironically, PAS 9980 itself makes clear that it should not be used when residents rightly expect their building to comply with building regulations in force at the time of construction—not a subjective risk assessment—or where policies or strategies assume that buildings will behave as expected in the event of fire.
For some stakeholders, there is no appetite to consider a risk‑based approach and, for these stakeholders, the only satisfactory outcome is certainty in the performance of external walls in fire, with zero risk to life as the principal objective. The methodology in this PAS cannot be applied when such a view prevails.
FTT rejects PAS9980 ‘tolerable’ risk standard
The FTT also resisted the submission that a “building safety risk” will only exist where a PAS 9980 assessment has identified a fire risk that is not considered to be “tolerable”. The FTT opined that a better view was that:
“any risk above “low” risk (understood as the ordinary unavoidable fire risks in residential buildings and/or in relation to PAS 9980 as an assessment that fire spread would be within normal expectations) may be a building safety risk. Section 120(5) describes a risk to the safety of people arising from the spread of fire or collapse, not a risk reaching an intolerable or any other particular threshold. We do not think “collapse” indicates the risk must be of catastrophic fire spread, as was suggested. It need only be a risk to the safety of people arising from the spread of fire in a tall residential building”.
PAS 9980 revision
It is disappointing that successive housing secretaries have manoeuvred quietly to water down fire safety standards for the hundreds of thousands of residents living in blocks of flats that might not comply with building regulations in force at the time of construction.
However, all is not lost, as there is the opportunity to easily and speedily remedy PAS 9980’s flaws through its forthcoming revision.
The revised standard should require the removal of all combustible material on all buildings over 18m. Combustible material was only permitted on high-rise buildings for the short period 2000-2006 and should be removed.
It should also require PAS 9980 assessors to specifically assess compliance with building regulations in force at the time of construction as the first step in any assessment. Any additional fire risks can then be dealt with under a risk-based approach.
Details of the PAS 9980 revision project can be found at https://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com/projects/2024-00624#/section
