This block was clad as part of the "warm safe and dry" initiative. This was funding provided by central government to make sure that council housing was energy efficient, resistant to both criminal and antisocial damage.
Also fixing roofs. You'd be surprised how many time roofs fail on council houses.
> The national government voted against banning this cladding
This isn't really true. They voted against a specific amendment that demanded that rented accommodation be fit for purpose. (Local councils have had the power to condemn accommodation, but they then have to re-house the tenants. its really complex.)
The scandal here is in three parts:
1) The people that inspect building regulations are paid for by the developers, and not by councils. So there is lots of "optionality" in an otherwise good set of rules
2) The fire ratings of materials appears to not be independently vetted. I'm not sure how they are vetted, but this is a massive failure in the entire system.
3) The firebrigade having shit kit, also failed to learn from larkenhall.
> ignored serious safety complaints from the residents
Local residents always complain about everything. I know because I used to be the vice chair of the Tenants and residents association. 25% of the time they are correct.
Grenfell has some interesting features:
1) it wasn't being managed by the local council. It was owned and run by a "TMO" this is quite common.
2) they appear to have added new flats, which subsidised the works, again quite common.
3) leaseholders were not billed for the repairs. This is very unusual. Normally they'd be liable for a pro-rated proportion of the total bill (ie if the building has 100 flats of the same size and 10million pounds spent, they would be liable for 100k) I was stung for 50 grand, others in my estate had bills of 70k+
This is not the first time that a block of flats has killed people because of shoddy work. What is unusual in this case is that according to the paper work, the work was done to the correct standard.
I felt this tragedy closely. As a fellow council resident, I know how easily it could have happened to me. Fortunately for us, we chose our house specifically with fire in mind (larkenhall fire having happened months before) I was lucky because I had a choice. If I had been a tenant, I'd have little choice.
In this case there had been a previous fire that revealed that the cladding was dangerous.
The residents were complaining not about the same kind of abstract risk that we deal with in IT, like "what if Microsoft Azure ceases to exist overnight", but a real risk of death with a recurring proximal cause.
The flat members had spent serious time and effort trying to bring attention to their plight, and they were ignored.
It's not such an exaggeration to say that corporate manslaughter was legalized here.
No, I agree. I should have been more nuanced in my point. during renovations the sheer number of complaints are enormous.
They range from (and this is based on personal history):
o We don't want a flat roof, they leak
o the scaffolding is allowing people to climb into my bedroom
o the builders are swearing
o the builders are dropping rubble on the walk way
o we are being charged to much for item x, look here's a quote from supplier z
o I don't like that the builders are speaking language y
o they are using flammable hole filler
I was lucky that on my estate we had a number of people who both had the ability to get the council to do things, and run multi-million pound public procurement contracts. we had the expertise to tackle both the council , the Quantity surveyor, the main contractor, the sub contractors and the site team.
our estate was just under a thousand homes. Grenfell was < 200. Whats more there were less people in grenfell that had grown up with the council house system. We were lucky that we had a number of residents that moved into the place originally, so knew all the tricks.
Again, I'm trying to get across that its not as clear cut in hindsight.(apart from the corruption, that is clear cut.) The residents would be complaining about safety because thats often the _only_ way to get people to listen.
This should not however lessen the tragedy, and more importantly the motive to change. None of this is acceptable. Residents should be listened to. Standards should never be corrupted.
Possibly their idea was that if they allowed the sprinkler system they would have to give up on preventing the cladding.
Please let's say this part quietly. Somehow we haven't started doing this in USA yet.
1) It’s controlled locally, which means it would have to be privatized city by city or county by county.
2) Building code varies by city and county, which makes it much easier for the county to enforce directly.
Even with the MAX disaster, aviation standards are significantly better than the 70s/80s.
Boeing + Airbus have a very very very vested interest in making sure that aviation is safe, and appears very safe (which is why Airbus did NOT go on the attack on Boeing's safety. It would hurt the entire industry).
Building codes and fire safety are something that should damn well be simple / codified enough that it's inspectable by a reasonable person.
Boeing did lie about shit. Middle management pushed some real bullshit with the max.
2. "Boeing did lie about shit. Middle management pushed some real bullshit with the max."
So how are these two things squared? I'd say clearly Boeing has other interests which compete with safety, like profit. The difference between "appears safe" and "is safe" can be profitably "arbitraged", until you mess up and get caught.
It doesn't seem their very very very vested interest in making sure aviation is safe was sufficient to replace outside supervision after all.
In my (British) conception of America, that way trumps privatisation/corporate empowerment.
'An Englishman's home is his castle.'
As an American, this is wild to me. I’m not sure how it works for our public houses, but as a private citizen I actually have to pay the local city to bring a government inspector out and double check any electrical, plumbing, etc. work that I do. The people that built my home decades ago likewise had to pay a percentage of the home’s value to the city for inspection.
The idea that a developer anywhere can decide who gets to inspect their building seems like an obviously bad idea.
Why would people make major repairs to be resistant to 'criminal' damage? And what is 'anti-social' damage?
I think there is some lingo lost in the transatlantic here.
While somewhat rare, you'd eventually end up doing silly things like having to run PEX plumbing because some tenant ripped out the copper pipes as they got evicted.
Air conditioner condenser units are also stolen quite a bit for some reason as well, so you get to box those in a locked cage.
Any large property with common areas (e.g. a large multistory apartment tower) is much worse, and has to be designed with damage resistance in mind. In fact it got so bad here we abandoned even trying to develop that sort of public housing arrangement as the living conditions became unbearable.
Just items like easy-to-paint-over materials due to graffiti matter when you are sending a crew around once a week to paint over the last round of tags.
Only true because the UK has a horribly regressive stance on renters rights.
To my knowledge - as a one-time lettings paralegal - we have some of the best tenancy rights in the world.
I would assume that most, if not all, of the Grenfell residents were renting. I don't think they'd be liable for repairs?
In theory reserve funds etc should prevent surprise bills, but that isn’t always a guarantee.
For those not familiar with how flat purchases work in the U.K. We have a crazy system where people purchase “long-leases” for their flats, you don’t own the flat, your just renting it for a long period of time (normally 99 or 999 years depending on your landlord). When you sell your flat, you’re just selling the remaining period on your lease (the 99 years doesn’t reset). And yes this does mean that once the lease expires you no longer own your flat anymore, there are ways of purchasing extensions etc but it’s a bit much to put into a HN comment.
That sounds like real estate in China: the government owns all the land, but sells "land use rights" that last for a maximum of 70 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_law#Procedure...
The original idea was a Georgism-inspired approach to capturing land value increases through rent to help fund the city's development, but nowadays it functions effectively like freehold, as most lessees do not have to pay anything other than nominal rent, and you can renew your lease effectively automatically every 99 years, with the added interesting complexity that the government uses additional lease clauses as a form of planning controls.
Imo, it's a good thing, since that mandates that the local municipalities have to keep maintaining the standards for the provision of services in areas with limited leases. On the other hand, areas with hands-off sales usually have very shoddy local services and shit maintenance.
My parents live in a relatively cheap area in a Middle Eastern city, where you can't buy the property, but only lease it for 99 years, yet the services there are far better than those in the more "glitzy" uptown areas with more expensive flats. It was the same story when I was flat-hunting in Singapore - locals prefer living in the HDBs while renting out the freeholds.
1) a one off fee for the actual lease, for a 125(typically but it can be 999 years for private leaseholds, and <10 for commerical property) year term. This is normally 10-70% of the going rate for a similar freehold property.
2) each year for the "ground rent" ie a "pepper corn" or nominal fee to the person who actually owns the building (this is nominally fixed at £1-100, but in some recent scams they are exponential)
3) "reasonable" maintenance. this is normally paid to either the council for a ex council house, or a management company. They may not be the same entity as the freeholder. You cannot be compelled to pay for "improvements" only reasonable upkeep.
Once you have a leasehold, it is tradeable like a freehold.
This isn’t true. Your landlord has a legal obligation to offer a renew at a fair price (method of calculation is laid out in law). But they have no obligation to actually renew if the leaseholder doesn’t make them. Long leases can absolutely expire, doesn’t happen very often, but it’s certainly not impossible.
I don't understand your point. My understanding is that if there is more than 21 years left on the lease the landlord has zero recourse to not give you a renewal of, I think,50 years, and if you apply for it and they fail to respond it renews automatically.
Most people facing this will engage long before 21 years as well
We’re not actually disagreeing here, I just found your original comment ambiguous.
> give you a renewal of, I think,50 years
Based on what my solicitor told me, I think you get a 999 year lease with peppercorn rent. But I could never find source for that.
So if the leaseholder is bot cooperating it can get very expensive. If the lease goes below 80 years even more so.
Who owns the flats then? A lease of 99 years with rent I would assume easily covers the outright cost of the flat. Seems crazy to me that this system continues to function.
The building owner (freeholder), who is normally also the superior landlord.
> A lease of 99 years with rent I would assume easily covers the outright cost of the flat.
You pay annual ground rent, UK law means that this is pretty much capped to £250 per year outside of London, and £1000 per year in London. Most ground rents are below that (£30-£100 per year outside London, £200-£500 inside London).
So for most leases the ground rent over the lease period doesn’t even come close to the premium (the amount paid the purchase the lease, or what most people would call the cost of the flat).
If you do a statutory lease extension (which costs money), then the lease is extended to 999 years, and the ground rent drops to a peppercorn (another bit of crazy English law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(legal) ).
There are some projects of laws to remediate this mess, but this requires to overwrite private contracts, something gvts have been reluctant to do so far.
You don't pay rent to the freeholder, but you do pay "management fees" which are supposed to cover insurance and "admin." You may also pay "ground rent" which is a small-ish fee to cover use of the land on which the building stands.
In reality freeholders often do a deal with insurance companies. They get insurance at a reduced rate and don't pass on the savings to leaseholders. There are various other scams that can make leaseholding a nightmare.
This is all completely unrelated to renting. As a leaseholder you're an owner, for varying values of "temporarily".
If your flat has a 999 year lease you can easily sell it on or if it has a share of the freehold.
If it's <99 years nd there's no share of the freehold it gets harder to sell. And by the time you get to <50 years you're going to have serious problems selling it, unless it has some outstanding features or benefits to compensate or you're in a market segment which is happy to treat the money as a simple rental (which does happen, especially at the high end).
I don't really see what the issue is, it's just another option. You can buy a freehold, a leasehold for typically a kiloyear new or whatever remains (which will be accordingly cheaper), or rent.
Edit: sorry, in Scotland it is called freehold or feuhold not commonhold but could be considered equivalent. I believe commonhold is also used in the US.
In fact, I propose that we incorporate this system at a larger scale in the USA.
Housing obtained at subsidized rate shouldn’t be treated as a speculative asset as the people signing up will likely never qualify for housing loans, normal interest rates or even have the ability to put down down payments. Especially in desirable areas. The goal is to provide stable affordable housing for those who are housing insecure. The market place has been made accessible to them for habitat and not to get an unfair advantage as a speculative play.
Do you have any source where I can look at the numbers?
ETA: the same system here in the us is called BMR or below market rent apartments. It’s not social housing or section 8. There are also 55+ only senior communities to assure that seniors are not priced out due to housing insecurity/eviction threats.
The government does sell leaseholds of their home to council tenants through the right to buy scheme, but in general leaseholds are not a government scheme: they are sold and bought between private parties.
In the past I understand that a significant percentage of the UK population used to be council tenants but the through the right to buy scheme the government got rid of a lot of housing stock and it only replenished a fraction of it.
"Purchasing" one of these "long-leases" strikes me as doublespeak, a gimmick no different from prepaying 99 years of rent. Ownership doesn't expire.
Why on earth would one do this?
Condominium ownership required specific legal authorization in the U.S., which only happened mid 20th century. Before that there was no way to have different people owning different units in a larger building. The closest thing to it was a cooperative, in which you also don't really own your unit as real estate, although it isn't quite the same thing as a UK leasehold, it overlaps.
So, the UK didn't even pass similar legislation to legalize a condoninium-like ownership structure ("commonhold") until the 21st century. And it's still not quite the same. And for whatever reasons hasn't taken off much, maybe because the leasehold system was already so developed at that point. Switching over ownership structures in existing properties is of course a big hassle (why are there so many more cooperatives than condominiums in NYC, even decades after condos were legally authorized? that's part of it)
So, people do it, because that's what evolved from the particular historical and political context to allow "ownership" of an apartment in a building. There's noting "natural" about condominiums, they needed specific legislation to make them possible in the USA too.
In the context of council estates specifically, well there's a bunch more historical and political context. Land ownership and tenure is a social and political construct, it isn't "naturally" any particular way, it turns out.
There’s no real alternatives (other than living on the street). Why would builders and landlords give up such an obvious advantageous arrangement?
People are pushing for change, common holds are slowly becoming a thing. But ultimately there’s a housing shortage in the U.K, and beggars can’t be choosers. It sucks, but you can’t argue with reality.
> "Purchasing" one of these "long-leases" strikes me as doublespeak, a gimmick no different from prepaying 99 years of rent. Ownership doesn't expire.
It’s just like purchasing a future, or any other time bounded asset. Your purchasing the opportunity in a manner of speaking, your ownership of the lease never expires, it just becomes worthless after 99 years.
More typical might be you buy somewhere with a 550 year lease, and sell it ten years later with 540 remaining.
Clearly that barely had an impact on the value; probably it appreciated in value over that time, judt not quite as much as a comparable freehold.
An outcome from Grenfell is the government is considering mandatory sinking funds.
14 flats were "privately owned" which is code for "right to buy" leaseholds (normally 125 years)
You are correct the renters are not liable for the cost of repair directly. The council pays on their behalf. Through a huge bureaucratic process the council then gets a settlement from the government.
Council Tenants rent the flats/houses with basic furnishings (ie kitchen with cooker and bathroom) all of which can be (but not always) repaired by the council.
Council Residents have a long term leasehold, and only have the right to windows, doors and the walls. Everything else they have to look after.
Cladding is used primarily for insulation and energy conservation. I think the concept of "cladding" is more of a UK and European thing though.
> There's significant political interest in finding a corporate scandal here.
There are all sorts of unethical scandals with various forms of unethical social experimentation. It's everywhere within the corporate world, and there are also open source projects with unethical experiments going on. You just have to look and pay attention. A lot of these groups play it off like they have done proper due process, when they have not. Then they have their PR flacks take the reigns using distracting and emotive language to justify their unethical projects.
Everyone who works on projects should read this article. Pay attention to Table 3 in particular. I keep it on my desk as a reminder of what is ethical vs unethical.
An Ethical Framework for Evaluating Experimental Technology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4912576/
You’re not wrong, but emails from Kensington council made it quite clear they considered Grenfell an eyesore, and cladding was seen as a method of improving the aesthetic appeal of the building.
But the council's intention in starting the project was insulate poor people's homes free of charge, while making the area look nicer. I don't see anything wrong with the intention - it's the budget and implementation where they screwed up.
After accepting it the contractor realised some of their values were wrong so in addition to attempting to find hundreds of thousands of pounds of saving from the council, they were also trying to save hundreds of thousands due to their own misestimates.
Part of this led them to select aluminium cladding over the originally specified zinc cladding which was much less flammable but much more expensive.
So even if the average standards in the industry are high, and 95% of companies wouldn't have suggested the use of dangerous cheap materials, those companies wouldn't have won the bidding.
So any change in the rules needs to improve the bottom end of the industry - it can't be a mere voluntary scheme that improves only the conscientious and competent.
It’s an endless cycle of people wanting less government oversight until they realize why it was there in the first place.
You’ll find this happening everywhere. Such Boeing self-certifying the 737 Max.
Companies were allowed to change fire tests to make their products look better. I honestly can't see how on earth this is was allowed.
It was always my understanding that you had to submit your product to a third party for testing, and that third party was vetted.
Then there is the low grade corruption endemic in construction in the UK.
The fact that large councils have Quantity surveyors on a percentage fee, rather than a fixed fee, is a big problem.
Those companies have deep pockets too, so the government may feel like they're a good target in this instance.
> When retested in 2007 as part of a different system [the insulation] failed combustion tests dramatically. Kingspan has argued this was not a consequence of its product, but the firm's own internal report warned the new insulation had performed ‘very differently’ — burning on its own and continuing after the test fire was put out.
> But the market was not told of these findings, nor that the product had changed. In fact, when the country’s largest private building control firm, the National House Building Council (NHBC) threatened to reject the product due to fears over its combustibility in the mid 2010s, Kingspan called in the lawyers and threatened it with defamation. The NHBC backed down.
This doesn’t mean that the government gets off scot-free but obviously this is a major corporate scandal that deserves to be investigated regardless of perceived political motivations.
It doesn't make much material difference, but I think it was more to do with insulation and saving energy, rather than aesthetics.
1/2/3. Insulation, Energy, Aesthetics
4. Cost
5. Material that doesn't burn up and torch people when it catches fire...
Since you're just guessing ("I think"), my guess is if the tower wasn't in the richest neighborhood of London, the council wouldn't give a shit about its insulation and energy savings. And my guess is they added these reasons to make themselves look benevolent instead of saying "We're adding cladding because the tower looks shit otherwise."
Actually, one of the reasons for the beautification is that it was quite close to some expensive real estate.
Oh, actually we're agreeing. I read your comment wrong.
This seems backward to me - why do you think a council with more financial pressure care less about their bottom line, and a council with less financial pressure care more?
At least, that's what I would expect here in the USA.
The scandal being safety standards being diluted by previous governments and the use of inflammable material in the tiles. The tiles being installed to beautify the tower. So as the tower would not spoil the view of the more expensive nearby towers.
Who previously got the laws diluted to allow the use of inflammable tiles on the outsides of high-rise buildings. They got round the law, by sandwiching the inflammable material between two sheets of aluminum and then getting the sandwich certified as fire retardant.
"Grenfell cladding approved by residents was swapped for cheaper version"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/30/grenfell-cla...
Unfortunately the same MPs who were trying to force us back to the office even though coronavirus was still spreading
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53942542
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-s-back-to-work-cam...
Which arguably doesn’t constitute being ‘forced’ but was followed up by the usual government outriders in the press.
The pubs were back to normal except had to sign in when you entered and it was table service only. I have about 5 pub apps on my phone.
It was at that point that the government (and the right wing press) were trying to get people to start going back into the office (and when YouGov were publishing polls that showed that the age group most in favour of people going back into the office were the retired).
And yeah, the slow dissolution of the division between the corporate and government is a real trend.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-51851900
I'd be happy to be corrected. What percentage has been fixed?
There are finite resources and experts and many works take multiple years to implement.
Thousands of buildings are undergoing this process.
Perhaps you'd care to demonstrate your point by providing a list of relevant buildings not currently in this process?
Plus broken pattern-matching by people who see individual abusers as being part of some organised conspiracy and not as evidence of changing attitudes to child abuse over time.
Cyril Smith's offending was covered up by his colleagues. Jimmy Saville's offending was an open secret for years.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/westminster-...
My word, who could have predicted that twist?
It's the easiest, and most obvious, thing in the world for a regime to kill a scandal or exposure of a conspiracy by poisoning the well with outrageous and easily exposed claims by easily discredited accusers.
Premise 1) If there was a pedophile conspiracy, the conspirators would try to poison the well with easily discredited witnesses.
Premise 2) The only evidence of a pedophile conspiracy comes from a single completely discredited witness.
Conclusion) Therefore, the pedophile conspiracy definitely happened.
This is an artifact of selective perception and contradicted by both evidence and the public record.
And what's the alternative to 1? That the Establishment commits suicide by allowing investigations capable of destroying (all public faith and confidence in) the Establishment? I'd love to know why that would ever happen.
MP's have gone to prison for 4/5 years for stuff (the cash for questions case) that would be considered normal practice in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...