14 June 2017. I remember where I was. Most people who work in fire safety do. The images from that morning are ones you do not forget: a tower consumed, a community shattered, and the slow, awful realisation that this was a failure of systems, oversight, and accountability that had been building within the industry for years.
Nine years on this Sunday, I find myself trying to answer an honest question: what has genuinely changed?
The legislative landscape is almost unrecognisable compared to where we were. The Building Safety Act 2022 fundamentally restructured accountability for higher-risk residential buildings. The Building Safety Regulator is now operational. Accountable persons and principal accountable persons carry legal duties that simply did not exist before Grenfell. The golden thread, a concept that might have sounded abstract in 2017, is now a statutory obligation for higher-risk residential buildings, requiring that information about a building’s construction, materials, and fire safety measures follow the asset through its entire life. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 report has put the failures of duty holders, the competence of those operating in the built environment, and the structural inadequacies of the regulatory regime all firmly on the table.
More changes are coming. Amendments to Approved Document B land on 30 September this year, bringing in requirements for second staircases in residential buildings above 18 metres, addressing cladding systems, and tightening sprinkler requirements. These are not small adjustments. They represent a substantial reset of how we design and assess fire safety in tall buildings.
And then there is the mandatory certification consultation for fire risk assessors, which closes on 18 June, just four days after this anniversary. That consultation matters enormously. It is, in many respects, the clearest policy response to one of the most damning findings to emerge from the inquiry: that the people responsible for assessing fire safety in buildings had no consistent competence standard, no mandatory qualification, and no clear route for accountability when things went wrong. Mandatory certification is long overdue. I have submitted my response, and I would urge every responsible person, building owner, and practitioner with a stake in this to do the same before the window closes.
So yes. The framework has changed. The culture has shifted, at least in parts of the sector. The conversations I now have with clients about competence, duty, and accountability are markedly different from those I had before 2017.
But I would be doing the industry, and the memory of those 72 people, a disservice if I pretended the picture was uniformly positive.
There are still buildings in this country with unresolved cladding, awaiting remediation. There are still responsible persons who are unclear about their obligations under the Building Safety Act or The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 who are choosing not to engage with them. There are still organisations buying fire risk assessments on price alone, selecting the cheapest assessor with no scrutiny of competence or methodology, then filing the resulting document without acting on its findings. The race to the bottom on fees did not end with Grenfell. It slowed. It shifted. But it did not stop.
In addition, third party accreditation services and tiered fire risk assessment schemes have not provided a clear pathway to competence for individuals or companies, with others providing new qualifications which would not even result in direct access on to their own competence scheme.
For those who are in a position to change the industry for the better, this unfortunate anniversary should be a reminder that our overall goal is to keep people safe. This should not be seen as an opportunity to make money from those genuine consultancies or individuals doing the right thing.
The potential prosecutions are a reminder that accountability, when it finally comes, can be severe. They are also a reminder of how long the road from tragedy to consequence can be.
Complacency is the enemy we are always fighting in fire safety. It is all too easy for time to erode urgency. Each year that passes without another Grenfell scale disaster can, perversely, reduce the perceived risk rather than reinforce the importance of vigilance. That is exactly when standards start to slip again.
I, along with my two colleagues, set up Empyrean Fire Consultancy because we believe that genuinely independent, competent fire risk assessment matters. Not ticking boxes. Not producing documents that sit in drawers. But identifying real risks, communicating them plainly, and supporting the people accountable for buildings to actually act on what they find. That has always been what this work is about.
On this anniversary, I am not simply reflecting. I am looking forward. The certification consultation represents a real opportunity to raise the bar across the profession. If mandatory certification is introduced with rigour, properly administered and properly enforced, it will be one of the most meaningful structural changes we have seen since Grenfell. The consultation closes this Wednesday, 18 June. If you have not yet made your voice heard, please do.
Nine years is a long time. In some respects, fire safety in England looks very different from what it was in 2017. In others, the same conversations are still unresolved. We owe it to those who died, and to the people living in buildings across this country today, to keep pressing.
Mark Jonson is Director and founder of Empyrean Fire Consultancy Ltd, providing independent fire risk assessments and fire safety consultancy.
If you manage residential or commercial premises and are concerned about hidden fire safety risks, contact our team at info@empyreanfire.co.uk or call 020 3633 9078.
