A question recently posed to me by a social housing executive was perfectly simple, and of course completely implausible given existing statutory regulations, but I played along anyway. ‘If you could invest in just one fire safety system to protect residents, what would that be?’
The speed and brevity of my response – ‘A sprinkler system’, may have taken the questioner aback slightly, but it really shouldn’t have done, and especially not as we were having this conversation in Scotland. While recent figures show an unacceptable 23% of the country’s highest risk buildings still require cladding remediation, this is also the nation that back in 2021, ahead of anywhere else in the UK, mandated the installation of sprinklers in all new build social housing, flats and shared multi-occupancy residential buildings.
Sprinklers save lives, this is a simple fact backed up by volumes of first-hand experience and the statistical proof that since 1945, no one in the UK has died as a result of a fire in a building with an operational sprinkler system. The question of their efficacy preserving life was already answered in Holyrood four years ago, and my response was no different today.
Sprinkler systems represent the globally recognised gold-standard fire protection system for residents as they suppress, and often extinguish fires, but most importantly buy time for emergency services to respond and for the full and safe evacuation of buildings. Since mandating sprinklers in all Scottish multi-occupancy new builds, there have been growing calls to introduce a framework to cover all existing buildings falling within the same scope. The logic is clear, if we believe residents are at risk of fire in a new build, then arguably the risk to people in existing buildings is at least the same, but most likely even greater.
Sadly, through direct observation, we know that this latter point is often the case. We may be instructed to ‘close out’ Fire Risk Assessment (FRA) actions, but as we embark upon this work, we often discover the ‘unknown risks’ that weren’t picked up by the FRA regime – the non-existent fire compartmentation in the ceiling voids, the defective fire stopping in the service risers and worse.
We see a sliding scale in the detailed knowledge of building assets from landlords, some exemplar, through to many less than exemplar. But even those organisations boasting the best golden thread asset information can be undone by the unknown risk, especially for older buildings constructed under different design and performance standards and with 50 years of modifications and ‘upgrades’.
An active fire suppression system is not just an insurance policy in an asset potentially hiding a host of unknown risks but is also a tangible fire safety enhancement for residents – the ultimate proven protection against harm. And on the subject of insurance policies, the effectiveness of sprinkler systems is recognised by insurers with major reductions in premiums, and actuaries are not generally known for their generosity without good cause.
Within Scotland, it is becoming increasingly hard to argue against the logic of retrofitting sprinkler systems when there is a two-tier situation for occupants in existing residential buildings. As many local authorities and housing associations start to take positive action to give their residents a universal fire protection insurance, we may just be at a tipping point where once again Scotland leads the way.
Matt Ford, Head of Mechanical & Electrical