'Straw vetoed Yarl's Wood sprinklers'

Jack Straw personally overruled a senior fire chief who said sprinklers were essential in the Yarl's Wood detention centre to protect lives, an official inquiry is set to reveal.

The minister decided to open the secure centre for nearly 400 asylum seekers without sprinklers after being told inmates would set them off to cause malicious damage, the Evening Standard has learned.

Yarl's Wood was burned down in February in an orgy of rioting and arson by detainees who started fires as cover for a mass escape.

The inferno gutted two mixed accommodation blocks, badly damaged others and cost £38million in damage. Some 16 inmates are still unaccounted for more than four months after the blaze on St Valentine's Day.

Mr Straw's role will be disclosed in a report by Stephen Moore, head of the prisons service, which will also recommend planning and safety improvements for similar buildings.

The failure to install sprinklers, which would have contained the blaze and saved millions of pounds, was one of the most perplexing aspects of the affair. Yarl's Wood was a timber-framed building with poor water supplies, was more than five miles from any fire station and held scores of bogus refugees who faced deportation.

The Home Office was given at least one direct warning that sprinklers were essential. In early 2001 a meeting was held at Bedfordshire fire headquarters with the head of the Home Office's Immigration Service where the acting fire chief of the county, Jeff Goddard, strongly urged the move.

Mr Goddard said: "My strong advice was that sprinklers were essential. They resisted the idea, however, because of costs and delay."

The Home Office denies that costs influenced the decision.