Asks:
Might CO2 targets be behind the fad for flammable cladding?
After the Grenfell disaster, local authorities are busy checking their housing stock for fire risks. Rightly, they are looking at the estates and blocks that have been retro-fitted with external cladding, which has been identified as a probable key factor in spreading the fire at Grenfell...But few people have asked why so many tower blocks and housing estates in the UK have been clad in recent years. Some have argued that the refurbishments were cosmetic, added to appease private investors by prettifying housing estates. But this is not the main reason for the cladding. In fact, it was added to meet the government’s targets for reducing CO2 emissions.
Just last year, Kensington and Chelsea Council proudly announced the completion of the £10million refurbishment project at Grenfell, which included ‘the installation of insulated exterior cladding’, new boilers and double glazing. The council said that the reason for the project was to ‘enhance energy efficiency and help reduce residents’ living costs’.In May 2012, the government’s committee on climate change (CCC) published its ‘advice on how local authorities can reduce emissions and control climate risk’ under the 2010 Climate Change Act. The CCC identified social housing as one of the key areas where CO2 emissions could be reduced by improved energy efficiency from greater insulation...
There is nothing wrong in principle with cladding. But it is a piecemeal solution to the question of energy efficiency put forward by a state that has put severe limits on new building...The rush to act on energy efficiency is undermined by the reluctance to build new houses and estates...
The problem with cladding and other kinds of insulation is that they are add-ons that are imperfectly integrated into the original design of a building, often with unintended consequences. One unintended consequence is that many of the estates that were given extra insulation were unnaturally warm, even stifling. The whole block would become a tower of hot air. On a summer evening, many tenants of these blocks would open windows to let some cooler air in. This was another reason why the fire at Grenfell spread between floors...
Though the conclusive report on the fire at Grenfell is not expected for some time, it does seem that Rydon’s cladding aggravated the spread of fire between floors. A likely cause is the gap between the cladding and the building, which can act as a flue; the use of combustible materials in the cladding; and the insulating foam between the aluminium cladding and the building. Any engineer will tell you that more moving parts means more things to go wrong – and that is true of buildings as well.
The fad for recladding tower blocks in London and the rest of the country looks increasingly like a hysterical response to international obligations for action over climate change. Social-housing tenants were the people who could most easily be made to carry the responsibility for energy efficiency because they had little control over their estates.
James Heartfield is the author of Let’s Build! Why We Need Five Million New Homes in the Next 10 Years ( 2007)
