New rules designed to strengthen fire testing for cladding systems on residential buildings in the wake of Grenfell have been published for consultation by housing secretary Sajid Javid.

The consultation will look at restricting or banning the use of desktop studies as a way of assessing the fire performance of external cladding systems. The government has also asked whether desktop studies should be used at all.

Desktop studies take the results of full-scale fire tests on cladding systems and model variations to the specification to demonstrate equivalent fire performance.