Terry Ashton, a senior associate at Exova, was questioned
about his involvement in the refurbishment of the building by Kate Grange QC,
counsel to the Inquiry, yesterday.
Grange asked Ashton if he remembered seeing emails sent in late October 2012 by architect Studio E, detailing draft work packages for the refurbishment, sent to a number of members of the design team. Ashton was also included on the list of recipients.
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Ashton said: “No, I don’t. I probably wouldn’t have looked at them if I’m honest, unless they had a fire dimension.”
Grange highlighted the fact that there were a number of
items in the documents about overcladding and insulation. “That’s making clear
that overcladding is definitely still a big part of this project, isn’t it?”
Ashton replied: “As I say, I didn’t look at any of these
packages, if we had been asked to look at these then that would have been somewhat
different…The whole tenor of the email was: ‘We are having a meeting to discuss
the various workshops’; it didn’t say: ‘Would you, Exova, look at all of these
work packages and give us your comments.’”
Ashton added that he would have expected to see something
specific in the email “to go on”, and that Exova would not expect to look at a
whole series of building packages “just because we were part of the design team”.
Grange highlighted another email dated 31 October 2012 from
Adrian Jess at architect Studio E with the subject line “Stage C report” in
which he attached an FTP link for the report itself. Ashton was again copied
in.
But Ashton countered: “But we weren’t the primary recipients
of that, were we? We were just copied in. And that happens a lot on projects,
you get copied in. It’s a sort of scattergun approach.”
Asked if he looked at the stage C report, he replied: “No, I
didn’t. I didn’t see that I needed to.”
He added: “If I can broaden this out, we don’t routinely
look at RIBA stage C or D reports unless we’re specifically asked to do so. I
mean, on a current project I was specifically asked to look at a section of a
stage 3, which is the same as stage C, report which had fire safety
implications and the architect sent me an extract from the stage C report which
enabled me to comment on that.
“Now, to just send me a link to an FTP site without any
instruction as to what I should do with it, then I would ignore it, which is
what I did.”
Ashton is due to give further evidence to the Inquiry at a
hearing scheduled for today (9 July).
