Dealing with structural engineering and fire safety blind spots

Property owners and managers often treat structural safety and fire safety as separate worlds. Structural risk is seen as predictable and slow‑burning; fire risk as sudden and catastrophic. But the uncomfortable truth is that both disciplines suffer from the same systemic weaknesses;  weaknesses that allowed the Grenfell disaster to happen even though the underlying issues were well known.

John Carpenter,  a structural engineer with over 40 years’ experience, recently resigned from the Institution of Structural Engineers after decades in the profession. His public comments were blunt:

“Nothing new came out of Grenfell… they were all well‑known problems that we have allowed to grow into big ones.”

Understanding why these failures persist is essential for anyone responsible for buildings, safety, or long‑term asset performance.

Why structural risk is so often misunderstood

Structural (and fire safety) failures rarely come from new or complex causes.  Carpenter’s decades of incident analysis show that catastrophic failures almost always stem from familiar, recurring issues which span across both structural and fire safety engineering:

• unclear responsibilities

• inadequate checking

• fragmented design

• insufficient resources

• poor communication between designers

• commercial pressure to rush work, overriding judgement

As he notes,

“Failures almost always happen because there’s a shortcoming… it’s almost always a combination of those.”

In a speech to the UK Chapter of SFPE in February 2025, Professor Jose Terero suggested that we knew how to prevent the significant loss of life at Grenfell:

• We understood means of escape.

• We understood compartmentation.

• We understood fire suppression.

• We understood façade fire spread.

• We understood layered protection.

What failed was not knowledge, it was competence, coordination, and execution and for far too long we have had a culture in the various industries affected of having a siloed mentality.

These are not technical mysteries, they are systemic management failures. Yet, in our experience, so often as a sector, we continue to hide behind technical complexity, because it deflects responsibility.

The industry normalises deviation and professional institutions have been slow to lead

One of Carpenter’s most important observations is how risk becomes invisible:

“There is a small deviation from the norm… nothing goes wrong… over time that becomes the norm… until you get to the point where something does happen.”

This “creeping normalisation” is how missing structural elements, unverified design changes, or poor detailing can remain undetected for years, and lets be clear this also effects fire safety engineering as well.

Carpenter resigned because he believed institutions were unwilling to confront the scale of change required after Grenfell. He argues that engineers need institutional backing to resist commercial pressure and uphold safety standards.  Without that leadership, risk, he believes, accumulates quietly.

Grenfell demonstrated that fire engineering is not immune to the same cultural and organisational failures that affect structural safety.

Grenfell was not caused by a single failure, the Inquiry showed that the disaster resulted from a chain of well‑known issues:

• combustible materials

• missing or poorly installed cavity barriers

• unclear design responsibilities

• product substitution

• inadequate oversight

• fragmented design and construction processes

The industry already knew these risks but allowed them to grow unchecked.  Carpenter’s comments that “nothing new came out of Grenfell” is a warning that needs heeding.

Institutional Failure Is at the Core

The professional institutions cannot claim neutrality here. The Institution of Fire Engineers and other bodies have faced sustained criticism following Grenfell and rightly so.

The findings of the Grenfell Inquiry were stark:

• the title “fire engineer” was not meaningfully regulated

• competence was inconsistent and often unverified

• known risks, especially combustible cladding, were not acted on decisively

• guidance failed to keep pace with practice

• there was no effective mechanism to enforce standards across the industry

The Inquiry described decades of failure, marked by weak leadership and a lack of urgency.  In some cases, engineers were found to be more focused on achieving approval than ensuring safety.

Carpenter also described a common pattern across many different professions: designers’ hand over incomplete work, contractors redesign without coordination, and responsibilities become blurred and fragmented. That same fee‑driven race to the bottom means that so often commercial pressures undermine safety.

This is exactly what the Grenfell Tower Inquiry found.  Life safety systems and design are often value‑engineered.  Basically, too often essential, critical life safety systems are often left to installers to deal with, with little oversight, and design changes are often undocumented and inspections are rushed or omitted.  These are not technical failures, they are cultural ones.

Why property owners and managers must rethink their approach

For property owners and managers, risk is not a technical problem, it is a management problem; both structural and fire failures arise from systemic behaviours, not isolated errors.  Owners and managers therefore have to focus on:

• clarity of responsibilities

• the competence of designers, contractors and advisors

• evidence‑based assurance

• proper resourcing

• independent checking

• maintaining the “golden thread”

Fire and structural risk must be treated as interconnected, both rely on competent design, accurate information, proper installation, robust inspection and long‑term maintenance arrangements. If any of these fail, both structural integrity and fire performance degrade silently.

What property owners and managers should do now

In our view change in the industry cannot be led by regulation, it has to be led and in our view property owners and managers play a vital role in that change.  Here is our four point plan on what owners and managers must do:

• Firstly, demand clarity and competence; insist on named designers and advisers

with clear responsibility, evidence of competence, coordinated design and supporting information and independent review of high‑risk elements.

• Secondly identify the critical safety systems within your building.

• Thirdly maintain the golden thread; owners must ensure that design intent is preserved, changes are documented, inspections are recorded and maintenance is competent and continuous

• Lastly, recognise that “no news” is not good news;

Carpenter warns:

“Most failures are the same old reasons… people don’t pay enough attention.”

Silence does not mean safety. It often means risk is accumulating unnoticed.

Grenfell was not an anomaly — it was a symptom

It’s time that as a sector, we stop treating Grenfell as a tragic anomaly. It wasn’t.  Peter Clark, Managing Director at Ark posed a question to the sector in a recent speech, “are we post Grenfell or pre-next Grenfell?”

Grenfell was the foreseeable outcome of an industry that knew the risks, understood the failure mechanisms, and chose, collectively, not to act with enough clarity, discipline, or integrity.

For property owners, managers, and safety professionals, the most dangerous misconception today is that the system has corrected itself. It hasn’t.

The failures that led to Grenfell were not unique to fire or structural engineering. They were symptoms of deeper cultural and systemic issues that also affect safety decisions, and every other aspect of building performance.

For property owners and managers, the lesson is stark, if you treat fire or structural risk as a technical issue, you will miss the real danger.

Written by

David J. Hills FRICS, FIIRSM, MIFireE, MSFPE, RSP 

Senior Director - Regulatory, Technical & Technology Solutions 

Ark Workplace Risk