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Ex council resident here. This block was clad as part of the "warm safe and dry" initiative. This was funding provided by central government to make sure that

Ex council resident here. 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.

secondcoming 6y ago
> 3) leaseholders were not billed for the repairs. I would assume that most, if not all, of the Grenfell residents were renting. I don't think they'd be liable for repairs?
- epanchin 6y ago
  Right to Buy - many of the council tenants will have bought their flats.
- avianlyric 6y ago
  Right to buy will mean that most of the flats will have been bought. The buyers would then become leaseholders, and most leasehold agreements make you liable for the cost of repairs to common areas. Those buyers may have then sub-let their flats (and those renters won’t normally be liable for repairs), but it’s no uncommon for families to buy their council homes and continue living in them. 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.
  - dstola 6y ago
    > 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 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.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Generally there's a management company. In some situations owning your flat automatically gives you a share in the management company. Other times the company and the freehold - as it's called - are owned by a third party. 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).
jiggawatts 6y ago
> Local residents always complain about everything. 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.
- pydry 6y ago
  This was the worst part for me. You could literally see the words online of the resident who said that if nothing was done this would end with charred bodies. It's not such an exaggeration to say that corporate manslaughter was legalized here.
- krona 6y ago
  It seems there wasn't collective agreement with residents about safety concerns of the cladding, since if there was, surely residents wouldn't have rejected the installation of an adequate sprinkler system? The council leader has publicly said residents (collectively) didn't want the added disruption during the refurbishment.
  - thefringthing 6y ago
    > surely residents wouldn't have rejected the installation of an adequate sprinkler system Possibly their idea was that if they allowed the sprinkler system they would have to give up on preventing the cladding.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  > The residents were complaining not about the same kind of abstract risk that we deal with in IT, 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.
jessaustin 6y ago
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. Please let's say this part quietly. Somehow we haven't started doing this in USA yet.
- jcynix 6y ago
  Maybe not for buildings. But Boing controlling Boing with the 737 max does sound similar?
  - virtue3 6y ago
    apples to oranges. The USA isn't willing to invest in a branch of the FAA that can actually go through every aspect of the engineering of the 737-max in order to understand if it's working effectively. 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.
    - jrochkind1 6y ago
      1. "Boeing + Airbus have a very very very vested interest in making sure that aviation is safe, and appears very safe" 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.
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
scoot_718 6y ago
> Local residents always complain about everything. Only true because the UK has a horribly regressive stance on renters rights.
- qxmat 6y ago
  Can you expand on this? To my knowledge - as a one-time lettings paralegal - we have some of the best tenancy rights in the world.
  - Swannie 6y ago
    That would be in comparison to some mainland European countries, such as Germany, where tenants are more like a leasor, in that they can decorate, improve, etc.
jariel 6y ago
What is "resistant to both criminal and antisocial damage" ? 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.
- RugnirViking 6y ago
  The idea is that the cladding won't be stolen off the side of the building to be sold (criminal) or torn off by bored vandals (antisocial).
  - jariel 6y ago
    Wow, the thought never crossed my mind. My family works in construction, one of my family members owns a myriad of mostly low income properties, and I wouldn't have fathomed this was an issue to the extent that it affected actual construction materials. The world is indeed diverse.
    - phil21 6y ago
      Pretty common in some areas in the US for lower income properties, especially in very rural but poor areas. I considered starting in the business until I helped do maintenance for a friend who owned in some "rough" spots. 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.
ashtonkem 6y ago
> 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 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.

secondcoming 6y ago

> 3) leaseholders were not billed for the repairs. I would assume that most, if not all, of the Grenfell residents were renting. I don't think they'd be liable for repairs?

epanchin 6y ago
Right to Buy - many of the council tenants will have bought their flats.
avianlyric 6y ago
Right to buy will mean that most of the flats will have been bought. The buyers would then become leaseholders, and most leasehold agreements make you liable for the cost of repairs to common areas. Those buyers may have then sub-let their flats (and those renters won’t normally be liable for repairs), but it’s no uncommon for families to buy their council homes and continue living in them. 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.
- dstola 6y ago
  > 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 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.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Generally there's a management company. In some situations owning your flat automatically gives you a share in the management company. Other times the company and the freehold - as it's called - are owned by a third party. 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).

jiggawatts 6y ago

> Local residents always complain about everything. 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.

pydry 6y ago
This was the worst part for me. You could literally see the words online of the resident who said that if nothing was done this would end with charred bodies. It's not such an exaggeration to say that corporate manslaughter was legalized here.
krona 6y ago
It seems there wasn't collective agreement with residents about safety concerns of the cladding, since if there was, surely residents wouldn't have rejected the installation of an adequate sprinkler system? The council leader has publicly said residents (collectively) didn't want the added disruption during the refurbishment.
- thefringthing 6y ago
  > surely residents wouldn't have rejected the installation of an adequate sprinkler system Possibly their idea was that if they allowed the sprinkler system they would have to give up on preventing the cladding.
KaiserPro 6y ago
> The residents were complaining not about the same kind of abstract risk that we deal with in IT, 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.

jessaustin 6y ago

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. Please let's say this part quietly. Somehow we haven't started doing this in USA yet.

jcynix 6y ago
Maybe not for buildings. But Boing controlling Boing with the 737 max does sound similar?
- virtue3 6y ago
  apples to oranges. The USA isn't willing to invest in a branch of the FAA that can actually go through every aspect of the engineering of the 737-max in order to understand if it's working effectively. 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.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    1. "Boeing + Airbus have a very very very vested interest in making sure that aviation is safe, and appears very safe" 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.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago

scoot_718 6y ago

> Local residents always complain about everything. Only true because the UK has a horribly regressive stance on renters rights.

qxmat 6y ago
Can you expand on this? To my knowledge - as a one-time lettings paralegal - we have some of the best tenancy rights in the world.
- Swannie 6y ago
  That would be in comparison to some mainland European countries, such as Germany, where tenants are more like a leasor, in that they can decorate, improve, etc.

jariel 6y ago

What is "resistant to both criminal and antisocial damage" ? 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.

RugnirViking 6y ago
The idea is that the cladding won't be stolen off the side of the building to be sold (criminal) or torn off by bored vandals (antisocial).
- jariel 6y ago
  Wow, the thought never crossed my mind. My family works in construction, one of my family members owns a myriad of mostly low income properties, and I wouldn't have fathomed this was an issue to the extent that it affected actual construction materials. The world is indeed diverse.
  - phil21 6y ago
    Pretty common in some areas in the US for lower income properties, especially in very rural but poor areas. I considered starting in the business until I helped do maintenance for a friend who owned in some "rough" spots. 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.

ashtonkem 6y ago

> 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 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.