Fire safety expertise was in great demand following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017. The government established a review of building regulations and an expert panel to inform its responses to Grenfell, and many other relevant organisations also formed their own expert panels. However, expert knowledge in fire safety is a highly contested domain, with knowledge claims based on differing sources. Fire fighters can claim expertise based on their experience of fighting fires, scientists and science-based engineers can claim expertise from experimentation, and those who create and enact regulations can claim expertise in what can termed ’codespeak’—the language of regulation. Although distanced from fundamental empirical experience of fire, codespeak is powerful because of its relative clarity and certainty, and legal status. Building users also bring their own form of ‘local’ expertise—they have first-hand experience of the practicalities of the solutions wrought by the other experts. Policy-makers thus face many competing forms of expert advice on fire safety, and their ability to judge what is most relevant in any particular case rests on the existence of a sufficient range and depth of in-house government expertise.

在2017年6月伦敦Grenfell塔楼大火之后，对消防安全专业知识的需求很大。政府建立了建筑法规审查和专家小组，以告知其对Grenfell的回应，许多其他相关组织也成立了自己的专家小组。但是，消防安全方面的专家知识是一个备受争议的领域，其知识主张基于不同的来源。消防员可以根据其扑救火灾的经验来要求专业知识，科学家和科学工程师可以从实验中获得专业知识，而制定和颁布法规的人员可以在所谓的“代言”（即法规语言）中获得专业知识。尽管与基本的火灾实证经验相距甚远，但Codepeak却具有强大的功能，因为它相对清晰，确定，并且具有法律地位。建筑用户还带来了他们自己的“本地”专业知识形式-他们对其他专家提出的解决方案的实用性有第一手的经验。因此，决策者面临着许多关于消防安全的专家建议，它们相互竞争，而他们判断任何特定情况下最重要的问题的能力都取决于是否存在足够范围和深度的内部政府专业知识。