CELOTEX’S FORMER assistant product manager Jonathan Roper admitted that the company had been ‘dishonest’ and made ‘misleading’ claims by ‘rigging a fire test’.
The Guardian, Huffington Post, Building and Inside Housing all reported on Mr Roper’s continued testimony at the Grenfell inquiry, at which he admitted that Celotex had been ‘dishonest’ by ‘over-engineering’ a cladding fire safety test so that its insulation product could pass. He had worked on two fire tests on the insulation and subsequent sales plans, with the first test – in February 2014 – failing within 26 minutes at the Building Research Establishment (BRE).
Mr Roper claimed that BRE’s Phil Clarke suggested the test had failed due to non combustible cladding panels cracking in front of it, and that a thicker panel would ‘achieve a pass’. That test saw flames ‘engulfing the rig’, but after changing some of the materials used around the insulation, including ‘adding concealed fire-retardant panels’, a second test in May that year passed, ‘and was used to market the foam boards as safe for high-rise buildings’.
The ‘overengineering’ of the second test saw Celotex add a 6mm fire resisting magnesium oxide board to the cladding test right made of 12mm thick fibre cement panels, with 8mm fibre cement panels added over the magnesium oxide to ‘conceal’ its presence, ‘making the whole system almost flush – but for the 2mm difference’ – with the magnesium oxide added ‘with the express knowledge of senior managers’.
He agreed that the decision to use a ‘thinner layer was to make it less noticeable there was something behind it’, which would help ‘see off any prospect of anyone asking questions’, and was ‘fully aware’ that the test was being ‘overengineered to achieve a pass’. Mr Roper also was ‘not in any doubt’ that Mr Clarke was aware of the plan to include the magnesium oxide.
Mr Roper was asked to produce slides for the company’s sales team and senior management to explain the testing process, which he was later told ‘would not include’ mention of the failed test or the addition of fire resistant materials to the second test. He admitted that the presentation was ‘downright misleading’ and ‘intended to mislead’, as well as that the company had behaved in a ‘completely unethical’ way.
When published, the BRE test report meanwhile ‘contained no reference’ to the magnesium oxide boards, with Mr Roper claiming that Mr Clarke ‘decided they did not have a major impact on the test result so omitted them’. Despite this, Mr Roper asked them to remove the only image that showed the boards, which was rejected.
He then ‘cop[ied] and pasted’ Kingspan’s description of its product, mentioning that it was suitable for use on buildings above 18m, into a brief for the Celotex marketing team to include in the RS5000 product literature, with ‘no reference’ made to the magnesium oxide boards. Asked by inquiry counsel Richard Millett if the ‘omissions and misdescriptions were not accidental’, Mr Roper admitted that ‘no, they were deliberate’.
When the product was presented to his own marketing team, Mr Roper ‘continued to remove’ the key testing details, with Mr Millett asking if it was his idea ‘that they would practice this deceit on Celotex’s customers, the better to sell this product’; he ‘accepted that this was the aim’, but said it was not his idea.
Asked in turn if he had realised ‘at the time’ that ‘this would be a fraud on the market’, Mr Roper said ‘yes, I did’, and added that ‘I felt incredibly uncomfortable with it. I recall going home that evening, I was living with my parents at the time, and mentioning it to them. I felt incredibly uncomfortable with what I was being asked to do’. He also said he had been made to ‘lie for commercial gain’.
He said all senior managers were in the meeting about the marketing strategy, stating: ‘This was a common practice. All of the management action board were present when… the decision was made. I have subsequently heard and seen that this isn’t the only manipulation of the test data this business has had: there are issues around the Class 0 fire performance, around the thermal performance of its entire range. It was within the culture of that business at that time. It’s something I maybe should have, or definitely should have, expressed more of a concern about.’
He added ‘I went along with a lot of actions at Celotex that, looking back on reflection, were completely unethical and that I probably didn’t potentially consider the impact of at the time. I was 22 or 23, first job, I thought this was standard practice, albeit it did sit very uncomfortably with me’.
He also said that the matter led him to quit his role in product management and move to sales, adding: ‘I felt entirely uncomfortable but equally useless in the whole lead up from testing through to marketing through to launch. It was one of the contributory factors for me leaving my role as product manager because I felt so uncomfortable … and I knew there was going to be a level of questioning that came into things post-launch that would essentially mean I would have to lie for commercial gain again.’
Mr Roper told the inquiry that all of his work was overseen by product manager Paul Evans, and the inquiry was shown an email from Mr Roper in November 2013 that said ‘trying to do the right thing’ by following the rules ‘would require a huge [publicity] campaign and probably a lawsuit’ from Kingspan, and that Celotex could ‘back out’ of trying to sell the insulation for high rises ‘because in the event of a fire it will burn’.
He noted that it ‘quicky became apparent’ after sending that email that this was not the route Celotex planned to take, with its commercial team ‘keen to replicate’ Kingspan’s approach in order to avoid ‘limiting sales’.