BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.

Hello and welcome to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast with me, Kate Lamble.

This week, a senior archonic manager accepted the use of the cladding panels installed on Grenfell Tower was an accident waiting to happen.

We'll get to that evidence later in the episode, but I want to start with the

building research establishment or BRE. In the context of Grenfell, the BRE hasn't necessarily

been in the headlines, but it's a really important part of the construction industry. So before we

go into what the BRE said, I want to take a second to explain what it is and what it does.

Pete Apps is the deputy editor of Inside Housing magazine.

So the building research establishment has quite a long history.

They go right back to the start of the 20th century when they became our national facility for researching building science.

And throughout the 20th century, they've done research for government, which has underpinned

policy decisions which government has made about how to set building regulations and fire

standards and that sort of thing.

What happened in 1997 was that

they were privatised. They stopped being part of a state and became an independent charitable trust.

And what that meant was they now had to develop an income stream for themselves as a private

organisation rather than just getting work from government.

So they're looking for a private income stream. Where did they find that?

They've taken their income from several places. One is to win government contracts for research.

And one of the reasons why the BRE has seen is so important is because even now as a private

organisation, the work that

they've done has had a big impact on the policy for the built environment. But the thing that we're

...