FORMER BRE (Building Research Establishment) test chief supervisor Philip Clark said that a ‘typographical error’ meant that it took five minutes instead of ten for flames to climb up Kingspan’s Kooltherm K15 product.
Mr Clark, BRE’s former burn hall manager, began his evidence at the inquiry this week by denying any knowledge of ‘undeclared’ fire resistant boards on a ‘critical’ test of Celotex insulation pre Grenfell. The Independent has now reported that he ‘only became aware’ of a ‘typographical error’ in a BRE document ‘during [the] course’ of the inquiry last year that meant flames actually took five and not ten minutes to climb 4m up the K15 insulation.
The error, made in 2005, meant that the BRE document stated that fire took ten minutes to climb 4m of K15 in its test, ‘but it actually only took five minutes’, and Mr Clark said that the error ‘should have been corrected’, with the inquiry shown the original handwritten notes from the test in 2005. These showed that the flames reached the 4m mark five minutes after the test was started, and this was ‘initially recorded’.
However, the official report said flames took ten minutes, ‘after data was taken from the wrong column in the notes’, with this error then repeated throughout test data ‘from that point forward’. Mr Clark said that ‘what appears to have happened is the first couple […] were correct and then the 10 has been transposed across’, calling this a ‘typographical error which has then been perpetuated through the rest of the report and hasn’t been picked up’.
He said he did not notice this until 15 years later, at the inquiry last year, and the inquiry also heard that the report from the May 2005 test was not published until 8 December 2005, following an email from Mr Clark’s boss at the time suggesting he was getting his ‘arse kicked’ over the delay. On this, Mr Clark said that he was ‘heavily loaded with lots of other jobs’, and ‘was taking on more than I should have really and it was impacting some of the delivery times for stuff’.
In response, inquiry counsel Richard Millett suggested that the report was put together ‘over a matter of days’ after a ‘boot up the backside’ from Mr Clark’s boss. Mr Clark responded: ‘Even if it was it went through the due diligence process anyway, regardless of whether it was done in three months or two days it still went through the same due process and was checked by others, so again other people had sight of it and had they had any questions they would have pushed them back to me to get rectified.’
The inquiry focused elsewhere on Mr Clark’s conduct during the Celotex tests, where he denied breaking the law to advise the company on how the RS5000 product could pass fire tests. Footage from a BRE test on the product in February 2014 was filmed by Mr Clark’s helmet camera, and after the test failed he was heard commenting on what he thought contributed to the spread of fire.
Construction News pointed out that under the UK Accreditation Standards (UKAS), fire test managers ‘are forbidden from giving advice to clients as it may be deemed as consultancy’, with the video also seeing Celotex employee Jamie Hayes asking Mr Clark if the test failed due to cladding or insulation, or a combination; in response, Mr Clark ‘went into detail about what he thought contributed’.
Mr Millett asked him if he thought ‘these were the sorts of things’ that BRE ‘should be advising’ a client on, to which Mr Clark said he was explaining aspects of the test that ‘the clients from Celotex didn’t have a direct view of […] I don’t see anything wrong with saying that. It was fact-based and it was imparting the information that I had seen first-hand’. He was also recorded telling the Celotex staff that part of the rig ‘might break off unless it’s welded’.
Questioned by Mr Millett on whether this was advice, he said ‘no it’s a fact that I’m imparting in the way that these materials behaved […] so it’s not advice’. Mr Millett pressed him on this, asking: ‘I know it’s a difficult line to draw sometimes, and I appreciate that, but was there not an obvious risk to you at the time that this would be taken by Celotex as advice?’
In response, Mr Clark replied: ‘No, because we’re talking about what happened there and then. They couldn’t see directly where it was, and from the angle [...] So no, I don’t think there was anything wrong with that. It’s not giving advice as to how to construct the system.’
He also said he ‘could not recall’ if the conversation had continued after he turned off his camera, which he said he had done to prevent ‘hours of drivel’ being recorded.