Fire Sprinklers Week

Debate between Lyn Brown and Chris Ruane

Thursday 6th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Brady, to serve under your chairmanship. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) for securing this debate.

I pay particular tribute to my friend and colleague back in Wales, the Welsh Assembly Member for Vale of Clwyd, Ann Jones, who has led the way on sprinklers. She steered through the Assembly the Domestic Fire Safety (Wales) Measure 2011, which requires all new and converted homes to be fitted with fire sprinkler systems. That is a tremendous achievement not just for fire safety, but in legislative terms. Ann is the only Assembly Member to have steered a private Member’s Bill through the burdensome, legislative competence order process and to have her Bill passed by the Assembly. Mercifully, that provision of the Government of Wales Act 2006 was removed as a result of the 2011 devolution referendum. It was a long and arduous process, and I am pleased that Ann was able to do something bold with it.

That achievement was remarkable, but it is right to focus on the forthcoming advances in fire safety policy. I was amazed at the comments of the Secretary of State for Wales about the legislation—“bizarre” is not a word I would associate with that particular achievement. Fire sprinklers are 24/7 firefighters. The tenacity shown by Ann Jones and the Welsh Government’s Housing Minister, Carl Sargeant, means that Wales has taken the bold step to require all new homes to have those 24/7 firefighters by 2016.

[Lyn Brown]

(West Ham) (Lab): I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning Ann Jones. I had the pleasure of meeting her and she briefed me on the subject just a few weeks ago. The word to describe her is “formidable”.

[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely. I agree with my hon. Friend and I will relay my hon. Friend’s comment to Ann when I see her tonight.

I want to examine the comments made by the Secretary of State for Wales. In a parliamentary question, I asked what estimate his Department had made of the cost of installing fire sprinklers. The response was:

“Wales’s largest independent house builder Redrow has estimated that Welsh specific building regulations, including the requirement for all new homes to be fitted with a sprinkler, is estimated to impose an additional £13,000 to the unit building cost in Wales. I have written to the Welsh Government urging them to give further consideration”.—[Official Report, 20 May 2013; Vol. 563, c. 451W.]

That is deliberate obfuscation and muddying of the water. The cost is not £13,000. The commercial director Redrow Homes in Wales said yesterday that the Home Builders Federation

“and indeed the whole industry agrees the cost of building a standard three-bedroom home in Wales will be circa £11,000 more than building the same home in England if the Welsh Government makes sprinklers compulsory… Both the HBF and independent studies have concluded that the sprinklers alone would add around £5,000”

to the unit cost. I do not know why the Secretary of State bandied around the figure of £13,000, or perhaps I do know. The true cost is nowhere near £13,000. The company said it is only £11,000, and £5,000 for the sprinklers. The hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) suggested that the cost would be 1% or 2%, which would be around £5,000. The matter should be looked at.

The Secretary of State for Wales was not the only person to criticise Ann Jones. The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government also criticised her strongly. She responded by saying:

“Mr Pickles has repeatedly cited fire sprinklers as excessive ‘red tape’ which is holding back the construction industry in Wales. However”

the Secretary of State has previously

“backed sprinklers in his home constituency of Brentwood and Ongar, saying: ‘The facts show that here in Essex people are most likely to lose their lives in a fire in their own home or in their car than at work and that many of the deaths that occur in residential fires could be prevented if a domestic sprinkler system was in operation.’”

The Secretary of State also said:

“The cost of these units is relatively low but time after time it has been proved that domestic sprinkler systems can save lives and that is a price worth paying.”

I hope it is not unparliamentary, Mr Brady, to say that I think he speaks with forked tongue. He says one thing in his constituency and another in Westminster.

There is criticism within the Government of Ann Jones’s bold move, but others have supported her. Frances Kirkham, CBE, assistant deputy coroner, wrote to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government with her findings in the inquest into the fire at Lakanal house in July 2009. One of her six recommendations was the retrofitting of sprinklers, thought to have become cost-effective with the development of new technology.

There is cross-party support in this Chamber, and coroners have called for the fitting of sprinklers, as has the fire service—the true professionals. The Government must take their views on board. The professionals are the people who go into the houses where there are fires and rescue people. Ronnie King, former chief fire officer of Mid and West Wales fire and rescue service said:

“The first duty of a Government is surely to protect its citizens and we can only look on in envy at what the Welsh Government has achieved, after some 4 years of extensive scrutiny and intense interrogation of such a wide ranging cross section of organisations”.

He amplifies not just the monetary cost of deaths, but the emotional cost and said:

“I myself am a former Chief Fire Officer in Wales where I served as a Chief for twenty years…and during my tenure of office I failed to prevent 150 people from dying in fires in Mid & West Wales with another 6,000 from being burned or injured in fires. Some of those have been receiving continuous surgery for their injuries for over twenty five years, with a huge cost to the Health service. During my career myself and my fellow firefighters have brought out lifeless bodies of children (sometimes as many as five or six), who needn't have died in this horrific way, had sprinklers been installed.”

I visited a family in my constituency where there were multiple deaths, including children, and sat with the family, witnessing first hand what they had gone through. We are talking about people’s lives or, dare I say, people’s deaths, as well as the financial cost, which also needs to be weighed up. Actuaries have said that the cost of a fire death of a working person is £1.65 million: in 2011-12, there were 380 fire deaths, so there is a financial cost. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse said that the cost of damage to buildings over five years was £1 billion. The financial cost alone makes it sensible to install sprinklers, and if the emotional cost is added, it is definitely sensible.

Fire sprinklers are valuable for many reasons. They stop the spread of fire, limit the amount of damage, and often contain the fire to one room, instead of allowing it to rip through a house or engulf a room. They are good for the environment because they use far less water. On average, when a fire is put out by a fire brigade, 20 times more water is used than in a sprinkler system and there is no drenching of the house. A sprinkler system works at the source of the fire and is far more targeted, so that a fire is often put out by the activation of one sprinkler.

We have heard that the current regulations requiring smoke detectors should be sufficient. Many fire detection and alarm systems in both domestic and commercial premises produce many unwanted false alarms. That is usually because their design and installation do not comply with the requirements of the Chief Fire Officers Association’s policy on the reduction of false alarms. As a result, many fire brigades will not attend premises that have had many false alarms until a responsible person has confirmed that the premises are under threat from a real fire, but that cannot always be verified, and valuable time may be lost that could make the difference between premises and lives being saved or lost. By comparison, false alarms created by sprinkler systems are so rare that the CFOA has not even considered the need to implement a similar policy for the sprinkler industry.

Personally, I would introduce sprinklers tomorrow. I realise that Ministers and shadow Ministers have to be more cautious, but I ask them to keep an open mind. We have an ongoing experiment in Wales. We have to look at that and at the Welsh experience—perhaps we need a Welsh solution to a British problem.