As soon as you place a material on the outside of a building it then becomes part of the wall and all external wall regulations would obviously then apply to this new material.
Otherwise you would have a loop-hole where contractors would chuck a building up that complies to regs. and then bolt stuff too it so as to bypass the regulations and save some money !
Indeed it looks like the cladding could have been illegal and doesn't meet the 'Class 0' regulation, but you see this is part of the problem!
Once you start watering down the strictness of safety regulations then stuff like this is more likely to occur, contractors are always going to push the safety reg. boundaries and cut corners to save money especially when the regulations are a bit wishy-washy and not definitive like a quantified one hour fire resistance rule!
When the safety regulations have very little tolerance or are open to interpretation then it is a disaster waiting to happen imho.
Whenever dealing with health & safety an over-engineered belt & braces approach is the best option, it gives you tolerance in worst case scenarios !
The removal of the old one hour external wall fire proof regulation certainly didn't help prevent the spread of this fire. And yes other parties should have re-instated the strict regs. but what kind of idiot thinks ''you know what, making the outside of buildings fireproof for at least an hour is a stupid idea, lets reduce that''
