Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 6:00 pm on 1 March 2007.
I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to raise a matter of great concern to my constituents and of much wider and more general significance.
On
"it was mainly due to the prompt actions of staff and pupils that casualties were avoided".
Two hundred and thirty children and their teachers were evacuated to safety. It could so easily, and so tragically, have been different.
The chief fire officer went on to tell me that
"the incident...gave a graphic illustration of how quickly fire can take hold, and despite the best efforts of the Fire Service the school was destroyed. Clearly this had a devastating impact on the staff and on pupils and although there was no loss of life or serious injury, the long term effect has been considerable. As a consequence over 200 children had their lives disrupted and alternative education facilities had to be found."
I live in the village of Lympne and when I visited the school I was shocked by the scale of the destruction. The school hall, where children and staff were attending morning assembly at the time the fire broke out, had totally collapsed. We owe a great debt to the professionalism and prompt actions of staff and the alertness of the child who first spotted the signs of fire. But we cannot presume that that will happen every time. According to the chief fire officer:
"The severity of the fire and the damage already caused prevented the firefighters from even entering the building."
What if, for all the efforts of the school's staff, a child had been left in the building? That child might very well not have been rescued. He or she might not have survived.
Yet there is one simple step that could be taken which could make a huge difference when fires occur in schools. As the chief fire officer said:
"If the school had been fitted with a properly designed and installed sprinkler system the fire may have been controlled if not extinguished in its early stages thus preventing the total loss of the school", and, I would add, making it much easier to save lives.
I am glad to say that Kent county council has said that the replacement for the school buildings will incorporate a sprinkler system. The county council and Kent fire service are also in discussions with the aim of fitting sprinklers in all new and refurbished schools in the county in future, but I regret to say that such a forward-thinking approach is not the norm among our local education authorities.
Even though lives are potentially at stake, even though more than 90,000 pupils a year have their education disrupted by school fires as a result of damage to classrooms and loss of coursework, school work, teaching notes and aids, even though 20 schools a week are affected by arson attacks, even though school fires last year cost us £74 million—£7 million up on the previous year and £25 million up on 11 years ago—of the United Kingdom's 30,000 schools, only around 250 have sprinkler systems.
The financial cost of school fires is enormous. As I said, school fires cost Britain, in which there are 30,000 schools, £74 million last year, but in the United States, where there are about 150,000 schools, the cost was just £50 million. Why do school fires in the United States cost seven and a half times less, school for school, than in Britain? The answer is clear: following a series of major fires in the late 1950s, the United States introduced building codes to ensure the installation of sprinklers in almost all schools. The difference between the risk faced by schools with sprinklers and the risk faced by schools without them is striking: last year, not one United Kingdom school with a sprinkler system suffered a major fire.
Sprinklers are 99 per cent. effective in controlling fires, normally with fewer than five sprinkler heads operating. That dramatically reduces the severity of fire damage to the school, and water damage is minimised because the fire is contained in the part of the school where it started. Crucially, the school can be back in use on the same day, rather than two years later, after it has been rebuilt, as is likely to be the case in Lympne.
The Government are keen to tell us about the money that they have spent on school buildings. They have, for example, promised to refurbish or rebuild at least half of all primary schools over 15 years, but the refurbishments that have taken place have been completed under the existing building guidance and generally have not incorporated sprinklers. It has been argued that the cost of installing sprinklers is too high. Although the installation of sprinklers may well make up between 1 and 2 per cent. of total build cost, that can be offset. Sprinklers give greater design freedom to architects, who can use them to reduce other costs, and there is the potential for a major saving in insurance premiums, too. Schools with sprinklers can benefit from a three-quarters reduction in their insurance premiums, recouping any additional cost over time, and eventually actually saving money.
Of course, in the event of a fire, the costs for a school without sprinklers is astronomical, quite apart from the potential loss of life. The insurance premiums will have been very high to start with, and the cost of rebuilding an entire school or a large part of it, instead of refurbishing perhaps a solitary classroom, is obviously very high. Also, there is a major expense to be met if children are to be educated at a different site for two years while work takes place. That is not only financially costly, but extremely disruptive to children's education. Teaching aids, coursework and class work are often destroyed. However dedicated children's teachers are, the very fact of being taught in temporary accommodation will inevitably severely disrupt their education.