It was a Sunday night about 18 months ago when Adam Higgins got the call that any developer dreads.
Capital & Centric had acquired Liverpool’s iconic Littlewoods building and, just 12 weeks earlier, had unveiled plans to turn it into an international film studio. Now he was being informed that the building was on fire.
“I was told by the fire service the next day that the temperature would have got to nearly 1,000 degrees,” says Higgins. Up to 90 firefighters had battled to save the two-storey, brick-built art deco building. And, much to the relief of the Capital & Centric co-founder and many, many others who cared about the fate of one of the city’s best-known structures, they succeeded.
Since the Grenfell Tower tragedy and the Hackitt report which followed, fire safety in residential buildings has, rightly, rarely been out of then news, or far from regulators’ sights. However, fire safety in the commercial real estate sector has not received the same level of attention, despite several examples of serious fires in commercial buildings – from a Shurgard self-storage facility in Croydon to an Ocado Warehouse in Andover (pictured), both of which have burned in the past 18 months.
“The number of fires is declining, but the severity is increasing,” says Iain Cox, chair of the Business Sprinkler Alliance. “And people do tend to think it’s not going to happen to them.”
I honestly think that if you asked 10 developers who is responsible for fire safety in a new building, I reckon seven of them wouldn’t actually know
Adam Higgins, Capital & Centric
Time for change
The former Littlewoods Pools headquarters may have survived fire in September 2018 – the roof fell in but the walls remained standing – but it brought home to Higgins the fact that the fire safety regime for commercial buildings needed to change, just as it is changing for residential premises.
“It has completely altered my perception,” he says. “I honestly think that if you asked 10 developers who is responsible for fire safety in a new building, I reckon seven of them wouldn’t actually know. There’s a big misapprehension in the property industry that once you’ve got building regs approval that’s the box ticked and you’ve got a safe building.
“I honestly think that a lot of people believe a building control officer is the person who is basically saying this building is safe. That’s not the case. A building control officer is by definition a sort of fairly general discipline. They are dealing with disabled access and all sorts of different things. I think it’s the fire engineer and the chartered fire engineer where people need to be looking.
“At the moment, though, it comes down to architects. But architects are designing the building. They’re not on site every single day to see where the insulation is being put behind that cladding and whether there are any gaps in it.
“It may have been a rainy Friday afternoon in February when that 20-year-old lad putting in insulation cut it slightly too short and thought, ‘You know what, I’ll stick it on the building anyway; it will be covered up within the next half-hour’. There’s this huge chain there, and it’s very, very difficult to pinpoint exactly where that responsibility lies.”
Converging asset classes
It seems inevitable that regulation will change, and Ian Fletcher, director of policy at the British Property Federation, sees commercial real estate falling into line with residential, especially as asset classes converge.
“The regime that’s being built and that government will legislate for initially will apply to high-rise residential buildings but in time will apply, I think, to all types of buildings,” he says. “Obviously, residential these days also covers quite a range of different areas of mixed-use – student accommodation, healthcare, care homes. The days of commercial being over here and residential being over there are over.”
But will regulatory change be enough? Mark Prisk, former housing minister and now an adviser to a number of businesses including architectural studio Benoy, isn’t convinced. “The whole sector was shocked by Grenfell, as we all were,” he says. “What’s come out of it has been a whole series of recognitions about a weak, confused, poorly enforced regulatory environment. We should be putting more into prevention rather than waiting for the insurance industry to pick up the tab.
“So getting a clear line of responsibility is a really important part of this agenda. And I think that’s why, for me, regulation alone will not be the answer. It will be about changing the culture of the sector. You don’t get that overnight, and you don’t get it by passing laws at Westminster, though that can help. Changing the culture has to come from the individuals involved themselves.”
You can’t just outsource your responsibility and think you’ve got rid of the risk. We can’t let that responsibility be dissolved down
Tom Roche, FM Global
Longer-term thinking
Change will come, says Cox, himself an ex-fire officer, if building owners take a longer-term view. “You can’t live in a marble hall,” he acknowledges. “But why are we putting flammable products in without clear thought about what will happen to that building over its lifetime?
“It will be changing use as well over its lifetime. I just feel we should be thinking of a building as a 30-year investment. And if it burns down in year two – or like the university lab which burnt down before it was opened, was rebuilt and then won a sustainability price – that to me is not a proper way of doing business.”
And it won’t come unless building owners take a real-world view of who owns the risk.
Here, Tom Roche, senior consultant at insurer FM Global, wants to see more education and support, and above all clearer lines of responsibility. “I think that one of the challenges when we look at fire and fire risk is this element of ownership. The assumption that somebody else is taking care of it is not a safe assumption.
“You can’t just outsource your responsibility and think you’ve got rid of the risk. We can’t let that responsibility be dissolved down.”
Even when a building survives a fire, it takes time to get it back on an operational – or even developable – footing.
It’s 18 months since the Littlewoods fire, and Capital & Centric still isn’t back on site. “The problem is that the building is extremely dangerous,” says Higgins. “The West Wing, which is probably the most famous part of it, is extremely dangerous because there is still bent steelwork all over the place and in theory could collapse.”
“We know it can be saved,” he adds. It might not be too much to suggest that, as in the residential sector, regulation, culture and thinking around fire safety in commercial buildings need saving too.
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