KINGSPAN IS NOT used to negative attention.
The award-winning Cavan-based insulation group, founded by current CEO Gene Murtagh’s father Eugene, is a bona fide success story; one of the biggest and most influential businesses Ireland has ever produced and a multi-faceted operation that boasted an annual revenue of €4.7 billion last year.
Listed on stock exchanges in both London and Dublin, the group has one foot on either side of the Irish Sea.
But in recent weeks, some of Kingspan’s UK activities have been thrown into sharp focus during the second module of a public inquest in London into the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster in which 72 people perished.
Although the inquiry is looking at all aspects of the tragedy, it’s currently examining products that were used in a refurbishment of the building some five years before the fire.
Last year, the first module concluded that cladding material attached to the outside of the building during the 2012 renovation did not comply with building regulations.
This was, according to the inquiry report, the “principal” reason for the fire’s rapid and “profoundly shocking” spread.
Martin Moore-Bick, the retired judge who leads the inquiry, said at the time that he believed it “more likely than not” that the insulation behind the cladding contributed to the rate and extent of the fire spread.
Some of that insulation, a product called Kooltherm K15, was provided by Kingspan.
The allegations
During opening statements in early November, Kingspan’s actions were described as being “seminally causative” in the fire; the words of barrister Stephanie Barwise, who represents many family members of the deceased.
At the heart of the matter is a question about Kingspan’s testing of the products used in the renovation of the London tower block.
Although only a small amount of it was used in the project and linked to the fire, Kingspan sold its Kooltherm K15 insulation with a fire certificate based on a 2005 test, which declared it was safe for use above 18 metres from the ground.
Fast forward to October 2020, just before the second inquiry module kicked off — Kingspan wrote to the UK Building Research Establishment to withdraw fire test reports used in its marketing for the K15 product since 2005.
The issue was that Kingspan had changed the composition of the product in 2006.
This meant that the earlier test “was not representative of the K15 product which has been sold by [Kingspan] from 2006 onwards” and was used in the Grenfell refurbishment.
Kingspan also said that it only found out after the inferno that it had supplied the product. However, it said the material was not purchased directly from the firm but by a distributor who, in turn, supplied the contractors.
On the opening day of module two of the inquest, barrister Richard Millett said the timing of this announcement “raises very serious questions about why Kingspan did not withdraw these reports at the earliest opportunity”.
Barwise told the inquiry, “It is not a defence for Kingspan to say… that it was not aware of the use of K15 on Grenfell until after the fire”.
She also accused the firm of “going out of its way since 2005″ to ensure that the fire test had “the broadest possible application”.
Kingspan has set up a page on its website with a question and answers section on Grenfell and K15 insulation.
In this section, the company expresses its “deepest sympathies” to those affected by the tragedy.
“The system used on Grenfell Tower was not compliant with building regulations, was unsafe, and should not have been used,” the company says.
“Large scale testing undertaken since the fire has indicated that any cladding system using the PE-cored ACM installed on Grenfell Tower would have been unsafe, regardless of insulation type. Modelling conducted since the fire by independent fire experts Efectis also supports this view.”
Kingspan says that it has carried out “extensive testing and re-testing which validates, for current K15… the performance claims made previously”.
‘Rigged tests’ and the PR push
Just this week, it was revealed to the inquiry that Kingspan hired PR firms and lobbyists in the weeks after the blaze.
Fearing a ban on their product, the inquiry heard that their goal was to convince “key decision-makers”, according to internal documents, that the combustible materials supplied for the Grenfell project were safe if properly installed.
The documents show that the company’s lobbyists targeted politicians including then-home secretary Amber Rudd, and then-housing secretary Sajid Javid, who went on to be chancellor under Boris Johnson.
"whey shit product scrap it" pic.twitter.com/V8UeWOw9aU
— Lucie Heath (@luciemheath) December 8, 2020
Michael Gove, who still serves in the Cabinet, was also noted as a “key decision maker” as the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs at the time.
As part of this PR effort to avert a ban of K15, Kingspan set up a test of rival non-combustible insulation products in the spring of 2018.
The inquiry heard that the goal of these tests was to “plant seeds of doubt”, as an internal Kingspan document put it, about whether other non-combustible materials would have fared better in the inferno.
Giving evidence this week, Kingspan’s technical and public affairs director Adrian Pargeter denied that the tests were rigged to fail but admitted that they set them up to “perform poorly”.
In one exchange, Millet pressed Pargeter on this point, alleging that “the intention of Kingspan right to the very top of the organisation” was to set up a test that was “designed to fail”.
Pargeter denied this but admitted it was “designed to perform poorly”.
Earlier in the week, the inquiry saw a text chain between two Kingspan employees from 2016, in which they joked that claims about the safety of the K15 material were “all lies”.
Asked by Millett if he thought that “a culture of lying about the fire safety of products is particularly serious,” Pargeter replied, “I don’t believe that we are lying. I can’t explain why they’re [the employees] describing it as such in that way between the two of them.”
The inquiry has now been suspended until 11 January after a member of staff tested positive for Covid-19.
Additional reporting by PA
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