Published: Friday 18 October 2019
18 October 2019
We understand that our tenants, and many others across the country, have been concerned about what is happening with fire doors and we have moved as quickly as possible to answer these concerns and take action where needed.
In 2017, following the Grenfell tragedy, we committed to replacing all flat entrance fire doorsets in council housing to ensure they were all fire resistant for 30 minutes. We have signed an agreement with Gerda Security Products Ltd to provide the initial 2,000 fire doors. Production of the doors began in September 2019 and all 2,000 are expected to be installed by September 2020.
Separately to this we are currently replacing 145 fire doorsets on five priority sites across the borough and this work is expected to be completed during November.
Since 2017 we have been surveying all fire doors on the Lancaster West Estate and are replacing all the letterboxes. As part of this inspection we are also carrying out any other adjustments that are needed to the fire doors.
There has been a national issue for councils and housing associations looking to replace tens of thousands of fire doors where the regulations were unclear.
This led to a delay, particularly when the DCLG found that the former testing regime meant usually composite fire doors were only checked on one side.
At this stage the Council decided it would only use fire doors that had been tested on both sides.
Following an extensive procurement process we selected a provider to provide timber fire doorsets as Government testing showed they did consistently well in fire tests.
All our housing blocks have been risk assessed and there are clear fire procedures in place.