Council admits insufficient Fire Risk Assessments at Lakanal House

On 3^rd July 2009, a serious fire broke out on the 9^th floor of the Lakanal House flats in Camberwell, London.

150 people were evacuated from the flats and 6 people lost their lives.  18 fire engines attended the blaze.

Southwark Council said that it had spent around £3,500,000 on refurbishment to meet current fire safety standard.

Kim Humphreys of Southwark Council said: “London Fire Brigade provided our housing officers with training which we presumed, erroneously, would meet the requirements.  This has not been the case and that’s why we decided that we are going to have outside experts provide us with fire risk assessments for those complex blocks.  We have identified that we want to go further than just the basic fire risk assessment and we will be carrying out intrusive inspections of those blocks.”

The Council have now taken further steps to ensure that staff receive sufficient training.  An article on the Councils website said: “As we are London’s largest social landlord, with over 50,000 properties and over 300 high rise blocks, we take our responsibilities seriously.  The responsibility to do a fire risk assessment was transferred to local councils in 2006. We asked the London Fire Brigade to train our staff to conduct fire risk assessments and they trained 132 Southwark housing officers. Following the training programme a number of follow-up sessions were run to support staff.  Blocks over six storeys have had an FRA conducted by a council officer.  Where we believe it is necessary we can escalate the fire risk assessment for further technical or intrusive work, carried out by external experts”.