Kingspan, the manufacturer of Grenfell Tower’s combustible insulation, rigged tests and hired lobbyists after the disaster to try to persuade MPs that rival non-combustible products might not be less dangerous.
It recruited Portland, a Westminster public affairs consultancy and also hired Grayling, another agency, to try to persuade politicians that combustible materials were “no more dangerous than non-combustible materials when properly installed.”
Kingspan set up tests to try to show that non-combustible rival insulation would also fail. It rigged them with deliberately “weak structural specification” and an assembly designed “to perform poorly.” No one had suggested that non-combustible insulation such as the mineral fibre made by rival Rockwool was a fire risk, but Kingspan set out to suggest it could be. The testing plan was to set fire to two walls using aluminium composite panels, with Rockwool insulation behind one and Kingspan’s plastic foam behind the other. Planning emails showed discussions about the need to create gaps to get “some ‘draw’ to get the flames to get above the … rig”, and about which panels “would give most fuel to get the flames up there”. Kingspan then sent a summary of the results of three tests to the House of Commons select committee investigating fire safety without disclosing that they had been designed to fail.
The firm’s most senior leaders were involved in the deceit, Gene Murtagh, Kingspan’s chief executive, and Gilbert McCarthy, its executive director.
Richard Millett QC suggested that:
“The reality is that Kingspan’s position, even in 2018 in the face of a government investigation into fire safety after Grenfell, is doing its best to ensure that the science was secretly perverted for financial gain, and that has been your own approach and Kingspan’s general approach for years and it’s still going on.”
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