The UK’s official inquiry into the deadly Grenfell Tower residential fire has been released, after seven years of work. In the report, the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) is heavily blamed for the disaster, as the report’s authors accuse the accreditation body of a litany of failures and ignoring its own procedures.
The report was developed in two phases. Phase 1 presented a factual narrative of the event, and Phase 2 provided the investigation results and various root causes. The Phase 2 report, released today, is divided into seven volumes totaling over 1,700 pages. UKAS appears throughout the volumes, as the Inquiry authors consistently return to UKAS’ failure to apply proper oversight of the tower’s inspection bodies as a main root cause.
[All emphasis herein has been added by Oxebridge.]
UKAS Blamed for Negligence
In the first volume, the authors blame UKAS for an overall lackadaisical approach to its work and incurious nature of its audits.
UKAS did not always follow its own policies and its assessment processes were lacking in rigour and comprehensiveness. Even when failings were identified they were not properly explored and opportunities to improve were not always taken. The process relied too much on the candour and co-operation of the organisations being assessed and too much was left to trust. UKAS should have taken a more searching, even sceptical, attitude to the organisations it accredited. Its powers to take action were surprisingly limited, with no powers of enforcement. The most it could do in response to unsatisfactory conduct was to suspend or withdraw accreditation.
In its summary in Volume 8, under the section on “Recommendations,” the report blamed UKAS and its certification bodies for not doing enough to ensure public safety. The authors even suggest that UKAS accreditation not be used as a measure of performance quality at all.
Manufacturers were able to use misleading marketing material in part because the certification bodies that provided assurance to the market of the quality and characteristics of the products failed to ensure that the statements in the certificates they issued were accurate and based on appropriate and relevant test evidence. The United Kingdom Assessment Service (UKAS), the organisation charged with accrediting them, failed to apply proper standards of monitoring and supervision. The fact that three separate manufacturers were able to obtain misleading certificates relating to their products is evidence of a serious failure of the system and points to a need for a different approach to the certification of construction products.
UKAS Accreditation of Test Labs Called into Question
Under a section called “the testing and marketing of products,” the report writes:
One very significant reason why Grenfell Tower came to be clad in combustible materials was systematic dishonesty on the part of those who made and sold the rainscreen cladding panels and insulation products. They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market. In the case of the principal insulation product used on Grenfell Tower, Celotex RS5000, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) was complicit in that strategy.
Those strategies succeeded partly because the certification bodies that provided assurance to the market of the quality and characteristics of the products, the British Board of Agrément (BBA) and Local Authority Building Control (LABC), failed to ensure that the statements in their product certificates were accurate and based on test evidence. UKAS, the body charged with oversight of the certification bodies, failed to apply proper standards of monitoring and supervision.
Later, in Volume 2, the report’s authors recognize that many of the parties took UKAS-accredited certifications at their face value, but disagreed that the UKAS mark should represent a free pass for scrutiny. The report reads, “a building control body should be able to rely on statements in certificates issued by certification bodies accredited by UKAS, but not that they are entitled to do so in the face of ambiguity or obvious error.” Teh report also criticized the IAF scheme — without naming the IAF — of refusing to perform unannounced audits, and having them telegraphed and scheduled ahead of time.
In addition, its internal policies provided for a rolling programme of annual assessment visits, examining each of the organisation’s accredited activities at least once over a four-year period. If it found that improvement was needed, by identifying a failure or “non-conformity” with a relevant standard, UKAS required the organisation to propose steps known as “improvement actions” to address the deficiencies. UKAS assessed whether those improvement actions met the problem and had been performed satisfactorily and then decided whether the body had met the accreditation standard. In addition, UKAS could make extra visits, including unannounced visits, outside the rolling programme and did make extra visits to some bodies as a result of the Grenfell Tower fire. However, it rarely made unannounced visits, so the organisation in question almost always knew when a visit was about to take place.
Confidentiality as Excuse for Inaction
The report also criticized UKAS’ reliance on “confidentiality” to mask the bad behavior of bodies holding its accreditations, a common theme that Oxebridge has fought against for decades. Routinely, IAF member bodies, including UKAS, have refused to investigate complaints of fraud and legal liability while invoking “confidentiality” for not providing evidence of any actual probes. The report claims that UKAS has altered its policy on this practice since the fire, but Oxebridge has found them still engaging in the obfuscation as recently as this year.
If it had proof of fraudulent behaviour or an accredited organisation deliberately provided false information or deliberately violated accreditation rules, UKAS was obliged to initiate the process for withdrawal of accreditation. If UKAS suspended or withdrew an organisation’s accreditation, it did not publish the reasons for doing so because it considered itself bound by the confidentiality undertaking in its standard terms. In cases of fraud or where there were serious concerns about safety UKAS would consider who needed to know about such matters. That might involve notifying the regulator or, if there were no regulator, might involve putting the information into the public domain. Since the fire UKAS has changed its standard terms to make clear that it is not bound by confidentiality in cases of fraud or a risk to the safety or health of individuals. UKAS had no regulatory or enforcement powers.
Elsewhere in Volume 2, the report’s authors criticize UKAS for lackadaisical oversight of bodies under its control, going so far as to say UKAS failed to perform “critical examinations” of the processes involved.
We have not seen any evidence that when it assessed the BBA’s competence to issue Agrément certificates UKAS carried out a critical examination of the process by which individual Leader certificates had been produced. Instead, it appears that it considered whether the BBA had followed the steps set out in the contracts with its customers. However, that did not enable it to understand what the BBA was doing to follow those steps. The appendix to the contract made in 2006 between the BBA and Arconic for the certification of Reynobond, for example, consisted merely of short and rather uninformative summaries of the aspects to be considered, such as “behaviour under fire”. It contained no description of the steps the project manager was expected to take to assess and record the product’s properties. Accordingly, when it came to assess the work of the BBA, UKAS could not tell what the project manager was supposed to have done and therefore whether it had been done properly or at all. That led to a tendency on the part of UKAS to look only at the BBA’s generic documentary processes rather than examine its technical assessment of performance for each type of product to see whether it was sound. In that respect there seems to have been a gap in its assessment of the BBA’s Agrément certification scheme.
Poor UKAS Oversight
The investigators found that UKAS did poor oversight audits of the certification bodies involved, shortcutting audits entirely:
UKAS’s policy relating to the assessment of conformity to ISO/IEC 17065 was to conduct a technical review of all schemes at least once every four years. It regarded each category of products (for example, wall and cladding products and systems) as a separate scheme and accredited the BBA on that basis. Accordingly, although UKAS assessed the Agrément process as a whole, because it was similar for every scheme, it should have assessed the scheme for each of the thirteen Agrément product types separately every four years.
In practice, however, it failed to do so. The BBA’s Agrément certification relating to “Wall and cladding products and systems” was assessed just once between 2008 and 2016, in 2009.2101 UKAS thus failed to meet its own requirements for assessment of the BBA during that period. It is possible that UKAS treated an assessment of one scheme as being sufficient to accredit the BBA for all thirteen Technical Specifications, but there is no evidence that it did and if that was its reasoning, it was unsatisfactory, given the very significant differences between the products and systems covered by the Technical Specifications. Overall, as Ms Turner accepted, UKAS did not pay sufficient attention to the BBA’s activities for Agrément certification.
The report’s writers were unaware that Oxebridge and other stakeholders had raised these same issues for decades before the Grenfell fire. Had UKAS taken those complaints and reports seriously, UKAS might have exerted the proper levels of control over the inspection bodies involved, and the Grenfell fire may have been avoided entirely.
The report also criticizes the rigor applied during UKAS’ audits of a key body, suggesting UKAS auditors missed crucial fire performance data that might have been raised and forced changes that could have prevented the fire.
However, despite declaring in their report that the statements made in the certificate were supported by appropriate test data, [UKAS] failed to notice that the fire performance certificates provided by Arconic at the time of the initial assessment related only to the product in rivetted form, not in cassette form. They also failed to notice that the description of the product blurred the distinction between the form in which it left the factory (flat sheets) and the form it would take in use, which required that it be cut to shape and drilled for rivets or fabricated into cassettes. Those were significant failings, because in these particular assessments UKAS’s specific role was to consider whether statements made by the BBA about the performance of the product were complete and accurate.
Likewise, UKAS’ evidence sampling practice was taken to task:
UKAS … considered the technical competence of Valentina Amoroso and Prayer Nkomo, both of whom had been involved in the reviews of the Reynobond certificate. However, it did not record any assessment of the competence of Hamo Gregorian and Brian Haynes, who had worked on the original Reynobond certificate. That was a significant oversight,because one purpose of the visits was to assess the validity of the certificate for the whole of the period from its initial issue in 2008. That required a more thorough investigation into whether those involved in the initial certification had the necessary skills and had properly assessed the product’s performance at the outset.
The authors also found conflicts of interest by UKAS, which had assigned a former employee of BBA to then perform its assessment of that organization:
The Lead Assessor for UKAS on the visits to the BBA in both July and August 2017 was Cary Randall, who had previously been employed by the BBA on Agrément certification until 2012. Indeed, his own work on the BBA’s certification of a cladding product had been assessed by UKAS in 2009, the only assessment of the “Wall and cladding products and systems” scheme it had carried out. Mr Randall had also worked for a time for Geoffrey Gurney, who had provided technical approval for the Reynobond certificate. His appointment created a potential conflict of interest, as UKAS was aware. However, it decided that it was not inconsistent with its policy for Mr Randall to assess the BBA because five years had passed since his employment by it and its policy required only a two-year interval.
Although the potential for bias was to some extent mitigated by the fact that Mr Randall was assisted by individuals who had no connection with the BBA, we consider that the decision to use him was unwise.
The investigators then wrote, “the assessments of the BBA carried out by UKAS in 2017 resulted in almost no significant criticism.”
Failure to Comply with Own Policies
The investigators found that tUKAS had dramatically under-audited the test provider BRE, violating its own policies.
In the four years between 2012 and 2016, UKAS witnessed only one test in 2016 as part of its assessment of BRE’s competence to conduct BS 8414 tests and there are no records of its having witnessed any such tests during the period between 2008 and 2011. UKAS planned to witness BS 8414 testing every year from 2011 to 2016 and although we accept that there might have been difficulties in arranging to observe a full-scale test, nonetheless UKAS failed to meet its own policy of witnessing a live test once every four-years.
In failing to witness BS 8414 tests for many years UKAS was depriving itself of the ability to monitor BRE’s performance effectively and was unable to say if BRE was conducting the tests accurately and consistently.
Editing Reports to Remove Nonconformities
In a shocking revelation, the investigators found that UKAS officials watered down a report by its auditor John Leadbeatter, which had found deficiencies at the test organization BRE, after the laboratory objected to Mr. Leadbeatter’s findings. Rather than defend their auditor, UKAS issued an amended report, diluting the findings without notifying Mr. Leadbeatter.
UKAS [performed] an extraordinary assessment of BRE, which was conducted in May 2021 by John Leadbeater, Senior Assessment Manager and Technical Focus Person for fire testing, with responsibility for leading on fire testing. He found no evidence that the tests had been performed incorrectly, but he did find evidence of weakness in complying with documentary requirements and internal audit procedures. He recommended that if similar non-compliances were noted on the next routine assessment, there might be grounds for partial or full suspension of the BRE’s accreditation for those activities.
BRE objected to various aspects of the report and as a result UKAS withdrew it and replaced it with a less critical version that made it clear that the findings had no bearing on the current performance of BRE. That was done without consulting Mr. Leadbeater, who was not made aware of the decision to withdraw the original report.
In the end, the report’s authors criticized the entire IAF accreditation scheme:
[This] seems to us to be a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs. A voluntary system of accreditation, where the accrediting body has no power of enforcement other than suspension or withdrawal of accreditation, in the end simply leaves the designer and building owner having to trust the certificate or test report and classification. It deprives them of the confidence that the relevant body has itself adopted rigorous methods which are wholly free from the commercial pressures inherent in relationships with manufacturers.
It is not clear what the UK government intends to do with the report, which provides the most damning condemnation of UKAS in British history. Oxebridge has been pressing the UK government to investigate UKAS for fraud and failure to comply with its procedures for over a decade, but has had little success. UKAS and its CEO, Matt Gantley, are largely protected by a government that feels national pride over UKAS, as well as by House of Lords member Lord Lindsay, who acts as UKAS’ sponsor and public relations protector.
Under Gantley, UKAS logos appear in use by companies accused of human trafficking and other criminal violations, as well as on certificates issued in Russia against UK sanctions. The IAF, which oversees UKAS’ activities and issues it ISO 17011 accreditation, has refused to take action against UKAS.
