Several attempts have been made in the past to develop a European harmonized testing and assessment method for façades before the European commission decided to publish a call for tender on the topic. A project consortium from five countries (Sweden, UK, France, Germany and Hungary) applied to the call for tender and was contracted to develop a European approach to assess the fire performance of façades. 24 sub-contractors and 14 stakeholder entities were part of the project.

The objective of the European project was to address a request from the Standing Committee of Construction (SCC) to provide EC Member States regulators with a means to regulate the fire performance of façade systems based on a European approach agreed by SCC. In addressing this objective, the project team was asked to consider a number of issues which are presented and discussed.

The initial stages of this project were focused on:

• establishing a register of the regulatory requirements in all Member States in relation to the fire performance of façade systems, and
• to identify those Member States who have regulatory requirements for the fire performance façade systems which go beyond the current EN 13501 (reaction to fire and fire resistance) classification systems and to collate the details of these additional requirements. [6]

After having confirmed the regulatory needs the following steps were discussed:

• a testing and classification methodology based on BS 8414 - Fire performance of external cladding systems series and DIN 4102-20 - Fire behaviour of building materials and building components - Part 20: Complementary verification for the assessment of the fire behaviour of external wall claddings to address the identified key performance and classification characteristics [4] [5]
• a verification and validation proposal, in the form of a round robin programme to support the development of the proposed testing and classification methodologies.
• an alternative test method which was developed on the basis of the comments from stakeholders during the project

Several hundreds of comments were received during the project and were implemented in the development.

This paper is a short overview of results the two-year development work, which Final Report published by the European Commission in 2018 [1].