Fires on educational premises are expensive and cause major educational disruption affecting 90,000 students each year. One in twenty UK schools has a fire each year with 75% of these being due to arson. Back in March Schools Minister Jim Knight announced that, ‘the DCSF expectation is that all new schools will have sprinklers fitted. Any exceptions to this will have to be justified by demonstrating that a school is low risk and that the use of sprinklers would not be good value for money’.
In November Knight launched the new 'Design for fire safety in schools', repeating what he said in March but with one notable exception. Knight amazed fire safety campaigners when he said, ‘There is now a presumption that new schools, built under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, will include sprinklers in the vast majority of cases’. Given that there has recently been a major fire tragedy in a building without sprinklers, it seems very disingenuous for Knight to also say, ‘The installation of sprinklers can extinguish fires quickly and reduce damage to buildings’. Really, then why not make it mandatory for all schools, including those being refurbished as part of BSF?
Frustratingly, Knight claimed that fires in schools are down but Zurich Municipal, part of the Zurich Financial Services Group, who specialize in insuring UK schools, said that in 2006 fires cost £74m - a £7m increase on 2005 (Zurich also say 75% were arson whereas Knight says 60%). Zurich also point out that school fires in the US cost only £50m, yet they have five times as many schools. This it says is ‘due to the extensive use of sprinkler systems’. Larry Stokes, Zurich Municipal’s Underwriting Manager and Chair of the Arson Prevention Bureau’s Schools Working Group said, ‘Only fires that are allowed to grow cause the catastrophic damage that we see resulting from some school fires. Sprinklers are 99% effective in limiting damages and in our experience, losses in buildings fitted with sprinklers are up to 90% less than those in schools where no system was fitted’. Yet he pointed out that at the start of 2007 only around 300 of the UK's 30,000 schools had sprinkler systems.
Given that the Fire Protection Association, Arson Prevention Bureau, the Fire Service and over 100 MPs lobbied the DCSF for sprinklers in schools to be mandatory, how did Knight and his advisors still manage to fudge this issue?
