BARROW BOROUGH Council was told that the Building Safety Bill and Fire Safety Bill will lead to ‘major changes’ to building controls in the area.
NWEMail reported on the comments from development services manager Kevin Morrison, who said that housing developers ‘will be forced to include sprinkler systems and better safety signage in their properties in a bid to protect residents in high-rise buildings’. He added: ‘Things will operate in so many new ways now. I anticipate major changes to building controls around Barrow in the light of the Grenfell recommendations and make fire regulations a lot safer for residents.’
He said that new training and qualifications ‘will be the benchmark of a safer Barrow’, and added that ‘local authority teams will have to provide support in the building environment and be tested on their competence and be licensed first before building work can begin’. While the area has ‘no buildings currently on the scale of Grenfell’, with the ‘new ways of building’ to come, Mr Morrison believed ‘new larger buildings are possible’ in the area.
He stated: ‘High risk will include new and existing buildings over six stories or 80 metres in height. There are none at present but a working group is looking at bringing more buildings into scope, so more buildings will be regarded as higher risk.’
Councillor Hazel Edwards was ‘keen to be reassured on building cladding issues’, asking ‘are there any cladding concerns currently now in the borough?’ – but none had been ‘identified’