A senior official has admitted that the government knew about the danger of Grenfell-style cladding 15 years before the fatal fire in 2017.
Speaking at the inquiry into the disaster, Anthony Burd, the principal fire safety professional and later head of technical policy in the government’s building regulations division from 2000 to 2013, denied there was a cover-up.
Burd said the results of the tests – in which cladding materials failed “catastrophically”, sending flames 20m into the air within five minutes – should have been published.
But he denied that this did not happen because the government feared it would trigger “an immediate cladding crisis” and was afraid of the response of the companies that made the materials.
He told the inquiry that the damning results had instead “fallen down between the department and Building Research Establishment”, which the government commissioned to test 14 cladding systems in large-scale fires, including five with rainscreen panels, all of which failed.
