Grenfell Tower inquiry: key things we’ve learned this year
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
One thing I wish this article called out: Grenfell was not unique. About 400 other high-rise buildings have been or are being remediated for having some combination of the cladding and insulation used at Grenfell.
Some of the testimony is absolutely sickening and despicable - the insulation manufacturers coming up with a 'clever' way to lie about the fire rating of their material, and a few other things.
But mostly the testimony reminded me of how complicated the world is, and how little we know about our own jobs. (Perhaps this is more unique to me, but I suspect not).
The architects felt like they were only specifying a design and the 'look and feel' of materials.
The fire safety specialists concentrated their comments on egress and smoke extraction systems.
The inspectors concentrated on external appearance.
And so on, and so on. Everybody felt like they were just doing their job. Work and real life are complicated, and there are always time and budget pressures, so people just don't have the time and attention to pick up on all the things that we notice after the fact.
---
A few brief reflections: Beware of a culture of 'pencil-whipping' tests. If you raise a safety/security concern with your manager and they don't want to know about it, it's a very bad sign. If you have a safety/security concern raise it explicitly in email. Beware of rare events: it was clear from testimony that very few people involved in the project even imagined a large systemic fire risk, it wasn't on their radar.
Local Authorities (such as responsible for the building here) used to employ a 'site agent' to oversee works in order to ensure it was done to proper standard. He/she would have industry experience and considerable authority. Such a person would be unlikely to turn a blind eye to bad practice.
But this was seen as an unnecessary cost and contractors are now allowed to self-certify much of their own work.
Even where it is a legal requirement for some aspects to be signed-off by another party (such as compliance with building regulations) this can also be contracted out to firms who rely upon the goodwill of contractors for continuity of work. This leads to obvious conflicts of interest and perverse incentives to certify work that isn't up to scratch.
And then something tragic happens, and the voters look for someone to blame, and measures are taken, sometimes overboard. But eventually, the attraction to lower taxes comes back and rinse, repeat.
I hear this a lot, and I'm just not sure that's supported by evidence whatsoever. Partially because, well, here you are, ostensibly arguing for higher taxes, but also because the effective tax rates (in the US) on individuals have skyrocketed by... ~2% since 1979? It's hardly like the vast populace is voting anti-tax consistently - that flies in the face of both tax rate history and government spending (and the populist movement in general!). So, TLDR: _some voters_ will always vote for lower taxes.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-averag...
[1] Companies run by finance guys really hate contract oversight managers.
The UK government are trying to pass the costs of remediation for other cladded buildings on to leaseholders who didn’t have any involvement in the design, build or sign-off of their buildings.
Some people are already being bankrupted through extortionate waking watches, mitigation and remediation bills and I’ve even heard that one person in my city (Leeds) has killed themselves due to the stress.
According to the select committee reviewing the Building Safety Bill, “the only people who believe leaseholders should pay are the government”.
The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill.
We’re talking sums amounting to up to £100k being charged to people who paid similar amounts for their apartments in the first place! One affected block was built since Grenfell, so the entire ownership could effectively be in massive negative equity.
The government have put together a fund of £1bn for non-ACM cladding remediation, expecting that to cover ~600 buildings, but already over 2,700 buildings have applied and the estimated cost UK-wide is upwards of £15bn.
The whole thing is an utter shambles and people are stuck unable to sell their properties (stalling the first time buyer market as they can’t move up to other properties, and meaning they cannot move for work in a time when there are masses of redundancies) or even remortgage!
How does the amendment ensure leaseholders don't have to pay without putting taxholders on the hook? You can't make money from nowhere.
I imagine it's meant to leave all other options on the table (taxpayers, developers and/or anyone else) rather than force a specific choice (except leaseholders).
The company and officers who sold the cladding (especially the ones who cheated on the tests) could pay
Though that doesn't sound right for the current UK government.
This story is about how fire watches are being organised with little to no notice and the costs charged to the flat owners.
In general the leasehold system in the UK is quite unfit for purpose and a proper feudal throwback. Agency problems galore and regulatory rent seeking at it's worst. I'm surprised there is not a more sustained political movement to get rid of it!
> The government have put together a fund of £1bn for non-ACM cladding remediation, expecting that to cover ~600 buildings, but already over 2,700 buildings have applied and the estimated cost UK-wide is upwards of £15bn.
There's also a 30M fund for waking-watch relief... Which at 150k per alarm, you can get 200 alarms.
> The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill.
It's a farce. The building has industry paid millions in donations to the Conservative party since Grenfell. And at every turn despite parroting "leaseholders should not pay" it has been obvious that they really meant "should pay".
Meanwhile, in a fit of hypocrisy, Jenrick has been campaigning for a (Labuor) council to fix a bridge "because they own it".
Under ~18m tall building are much easier to escape from in a fire and thus have different fire safety rules. People can normally exit the building quickly. Worst case jumping from the 3-5th story is likely to result in serious injury but is often survivable. Start talking 6+ floor things get exponentially worse with every additional floor increasing the risks.
This is of course an arbitrary line, I would have a lower limit but the tradeoffs are complicated.
A brief web search suggests to me that about 50% of people who fall from 15 meters (approx 4th floor) will die. Those are awful odds, and most survivers of falls from that height probably aren't landing on the sort of pavement you might expect to be surrounding a high-rise building. And how many of the survivers ever walk again? How many can even feed themselves again?
Seriously, 50% is worse than even russian roulette, a 'game' generally recognized as suicidal.
The expectation is for people to be able to exit the building or at least get to a lower floor, because that’s the usual case. Failing that ladders can generally evacuate people from the 5th floor. Jumping is very much considered a rare last resort, but is more controlled than people simply falling that distance. Further, first responders are more likely to be onsite which again increases the odds.
As an example of 4 people jumping from the 5th floor and only one being sent to the hospital. While everyone else in the building evacuated normally. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/family-jumps...
So, while there are a lot of relevant regulations building height is a meaningful distinction.
PS: On an 18m tall building. The 1st floor is ~0 meters off the ground, the 2 floor is 3 meters up, 4th floor is ~12m up and 5th floor is thus 15m and the roof is at 18m. A window adds 1m but someone dangling removes ~2m based on their height. As in dangling from the 2nd story window is ~2m fall and a 15th floor balcony would be a 13m drop vs ~14m from a window. (Using G, 1, 2, 3, 4 is the same numbers just offset by 1.)
That's the expectation in America surely, but is it in the UK? In America people are told to get the fuck out of buildings as fast as they can when the fire alarm goes off, but in the UK people are told to stay inside high rise buildings, apparently because they have fewer and narrower staircases. Highrise buildings in the UK are evidently not designed to be escapable. I think that should be the real scandal. The cladding is bad and effects hundreds of buildings, but how many UK highrise buildings have inadaquate stairways? Tens of thousands? More? The reason this isn't part of the scandal is probably because the scope of the problem is too enormous.
I encourage you to look up the timeline of events inside Grenfell; if evacuation began when the fire was called in, there would have been ample time for complete evacuation. 14 minutes elapsed between the initial call and fire spreading out the window of the origin flat. People were only reported trapped by smoke ~40 minutes after the fire was called in. These people were killed by the UK's policy of staying put inside buildings on fire.
Anyway, I've seen some videos of people falling a fraction of 15 meters onto pavement and dying. It seems depraved to expect somebody even on the third floor to jump onto pavement.
As to evacuations, that’s simply what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases. In England for the 12 months ending June 2020 there where 156,128 actual fires responded to and 231 deaths. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
That’s with current regulations and resources. So, looking at that people are trying to balance spending more on fire safety vs very other issue and this is the balance they struck. I am not saying it’s perfect, just that it’s vastly more complicated than making every building as safe as possible with money as no object being the obvious correct choice. When you give that up then it’s all coming down to various compromises with different tradeoffs.
PS: Looking at the hard numbers, pushing evacuations might actually make things worse.
There will be more fires, more deaths, and more changes to regulations. What experts say should be considered, but not treated as dogma. At best they are less wrong than their predecessors but more wrong than their future successors. If the people in that tower had disregarded the advice of extant UK experts, they would have gotten out alive. If that building had been constructed with more stairwells than UK experts presently say is required, they could have gotten out alive. If there had been an operational building wide alarm, as are found in American buildings, those people would have gotten out alive. There is a whole lot wrong with extant regulations in the UK, and commercial interests have politicians and the public ignoring most of it to focus on the cladding fraud (those responsible should be in prison for life, but the cladding fraud is not the only problem this fire revealed.)
> Looking at the hard numbers, pushing evacuations might actually make things worse.
This is not a crowded nightclub we're talking about; rapid evacuation of residential highrises is a reality in America. Please go look at the hard numbers of Grenfell, particularly the timeline of conditions inside the tower. There was ample time to evacuate the tower several times over. In modern America, most of the residents would have been waiting on the sidewalk before the firemen even got there. The building wide fire alarm would have been blasting their eardrums out.
Not trust, just statistics. Great Britain has ~half the fire related deaths per million people vs the US. Various differences make comparing countries difficult, but their doing reasonably well vs the US.
Anyway, I don’t think the current system is optimal. However, fixing the stairwell issue before telling people to evacuate might be better than telling people to evacuate tomorrow. Eventually, evacuation is likely the better option and should therefore be the long term goal.
And so it goes across a million possibilities which is guaranteed to be suboptimal and interact with each other.
And While Non-ACM cladding isn't illegal, it's still being treated as a risk for 'low-rise' buildings. It's still resulting in surveyors deeming the property unsafe, and it's still resulting in the leaseholders (not owners) of those buildings having to pay millions to 'remediate' it.
This coupled with decades of deregulation, poor construction and minimal oversight has resulted in over 5% of the market suffering from the same problems, ACM, Non-ACM, 50 meters tall, or 5 meters tall.
And nearly all of it is driven by the banks. The government has only banned ACM cladding, The banks have done the rest.
The banks don't give a shit that your odds of jump out your window are 50%. The banks just want to make sure the property they've given you a loan against doesn't burn down when you die from the fall.
My understanding is:
In 2018 the government banned ACM cladding.
Shortly afterwards RICS (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors) developed the "External Wall System" or "EWS-1" form. Which is a means of assessing the risk of cladding (external wall systems) to a building. This was not a legal requirement. It is merely a tool to assess risk. It does not even specify the credentials required to issue one, just "suitably experienced".
Surveyors carrying out an EWS-1 form would effectively be on the hook for any damages if they made the wrong call, This ended up being reflected in their insurance, so most if not all would perform a full top-to-toe inside-out fire-safety survey. These full surveys have resulted in other defects in most buildings being found. Combustible material used in balconies, insufficient fire and smoke barriers between dwellings, faulty or incorrectly installed fire doors. Note These 'defects' aren't necessarily illegal or against code, they just push the perceived risk of the building past the surveyors acceptable risk.
Banks, being horribly risk-adverse made an EWS-1 a requirement for loans on buildings over 18 meters.
Somebody in Parliament said something along the lines of "All buildings should be safe". Banks then started making the EWS-1 a requirement for all loans of multi-tenant dwellings.
But someone is always responsible for ensuring a building is 'safe'. A poor EWS-1 result means someone has to make it safe. This someone is generally the buildings Management Company, or the Freeholder (who is entitled to recover those costs from the leaseholders).
So you want to ban single family houses made of wood?
Or maybe it is and the building industry is run by scumbags who having created this issue, are now double dipping.
Or maybe it’s a little bit of both. I don’t know myself.
Owning the land is called a freehold, and the owners are called freeholders instead of leaseholders.
Contrast the US where a lease of a home is typically paid monthly and contracted on a year to year basis.
In terms of acres the land is owned by descendents of friends of Henry 8th, sure. Majority of houses though aren't leasehold - although many new houses are being sold as leasehold for the last 20 years or so.
On the contrary, the UK is deeply obsessed with house ownership! The key word though is 'house', the Grenfell related scandals have all been about large blocks of flats, where the residents will almost certainly be leaseholders, with the actual building owned by someone else (probably a company)
That's a new one for me.
The US only protects property rights of some. Read up on asset forfeitures in the US. Police can seize cash on you with only "reasonable suspicion" with no conviction required.
The right to occupy a given flat in the building is then sold for 99 or 125 years to a 'leaseholder', who also signs up to pay for the operational costs (insurance, cleaning, gardening etc) for the open area
They also agree to pay a 'ground rent', say £20-50 a month to the freeholder. That often doubles every 25 years (so about 2-3% increase per year), but sometimes doubles every 15 or even 10 years (so 7-8%)
In practice, leaseholds are mainly used to apportion "ownership" within buildings such as apartment blocks, where simple ownership of the land does not sufficiently capture the complexity of the situation.
Problems arise in a number of areas:
First and foremost, leaseholds resemble property ownership, and so many people naively treat them as such. But the value of a lease decreases as time goes by. When only a few years remain, the value drops very quickly. People who are unprepared for this can get a nasty shock, and feel hard done by.
Secondly, and more subtly, the leasehold creates a complex relationship between the landlord and the tenant - just like any rental agreement. The terms are set out in a contract which is specific to that particular leasehold - so they may vary greatly one from another. There are a myriad ways that they can contain unfair clauses, or unexpected terms.
One recent scam is for landlords to create leases that have a small, annual "service charge" (payable to the landlord) whose cost doubles every few years. After a while, the payments become extortionate!
In this case, the landlord is allowed to charge tenants for the cost of some kinds of works to the building. In the lease, that probably looks like a small item, but a clever landlord can specify the works in such a way that the tenants shoulder most, or all of the cost.
First the leaseholder has a presumed right to renew this long lease when they want to. There's even a tribunal (ie a court) specifically to resolve any situations where a leaseholder believes they've been asked to pay an unreasonable amount for such a renewal, although of course going to court isn't free.
Second the leaseholders together can demand to just buy the freehold (ownership of the actual land) in most cases, under a specific formula. This is not cheap, but if your freeholder becomes a problem for all the leaseholders the freeholder cannot stop them just buying the building.
Some years ago a government tried to institute a more modern structure, Commonhold. Commonhold takes the mechanism often used to "defeat" leasehold by groups opposed to it, and turns it into a built-in feature of English law. With Commonhold the people who own individual dwellings have a lease still, but they also each own a share of a legal entity which exists only to own the freehold and they can't sell the one separate from the other. The legal entity plays the role of freeholder, but since it is owned entirely by these leaseholders it has no reason to try to charge them ground rent or mess them about in any way - it is them, jointly.
Unfortunately to the average person Commonhold just seems like you're buying the same thing for slightly more money, because Leasehold "purchases" look cheaper. So Commonhold did not take off and few exist today.
One of my pet projects (on hold because I decided not to look for a job during the pandemic so although I have plenty to survive I can't go around funding speculative legal work) is to buy the building where I live and convert it into Commonhold, partly to prove it can be done.
It sounds interesting, but also horrible. Having people be perpetual renters is the exact opposite of every government housing initiative for the past 6+ decades.
As I understand it the main residual value is from payment to renew leases (mortgage lenders don't want to lend against a home you may not have in a few decades, so it's often not possible to sell a lease to a "normal" buyer who wants a mortgage if it has say 50 years left on it, you'd pay to renew it), and from any "ground rent" owed by the leaseholders each year indefinitely. Historically ground rent was often set at a token amount, but of course there was an opportunity for greedy people to jack that up when creating a new leasehold property and so e.g. mine is £250 per annum.
It doesn't feel like renting at all, it's just that historically English law provided no way to outright own 3D space, only 2D parcels of land can have freehold, and arguably in practice it wouldn't mean anything anyway. If I "owned" this space, but the building it is in burned down, how do I live here without re-building it?
The freeholder is responsible for insuring the building (the certificate of insurance is posted on a notice board on the main entrance floor of my building near the weird art that presumably the owners or builders liked, and the elevator) and collecting a fair share of insurance premiums from all leaseholders, likewise they hire a maintenance company to sort the gardens, do elevator safety checks, resurface the parking, clear junk illegally left by ex-tenants (could they try to sue instead of billing the remaining tenants? Sure, but if a lawsuit costs £1000 and hiring a clearance firm costs £180 guess which gets done) and so on.
Leaseholders can (are legally always entitled to) buy the freehold, but now you've got the headache you were paying somebody else to deal with. You (collectively) need to buy insurance, hire a maintenance firm, and so on or else pay to hire somebody to do that on behalf of everybody. For a shared building where I live (as opposed to standalone houses) this division of labour makes at least some sense and I'm not opposed to it continuing to exist. Creating more leasehold houses is crazy nonsense, but alas the present governing party really like rich people, and thus has not exactly prioritised banning such practices.
They won’t be though.
The building regulations in the area we're talking about here are very simple. They don't specify how, just what. E.g. The cladding material must not be flammable (simplified).
There is a system of building inspection and certification, and you cannot buy/sell/insure a building that does not have a certificate to prove that it complies with building regulations.
The issue is that at some point some complete genius said "if you're a large enough housebuilder, you can self certify".
All of the effected properties were bought in good faith with completion certificates that stated that they complied with building regulation. The properties with flammable cladding that needs replacing do not comply with building regulations.
You can't sue the builder/developer in most cases, because this will have happened more than 10 years ago.
The system of regulation is there to protect the public from unsafe buildings, and it has failed them. Why shouldn't the government pay, after all it was their promise that has been broken.
What needs to be done, without any unnecessary delay, is for the management of the companies and authorities involved to be put on trial for corporate manslaughter.
It's a crazy system we have with misaligned goals/metrics all over the place.
> "It's unclear whether all the Arconic witnesses will give evidence. Some are arguing that a French law prevents them from disclosing commercial information in foreign judicial proceedings."
The apparent moral cowardice of some people is depressing.
The prohibition, subject to a criminal penalty of six months’ imprisonment and a fine of €18,000, or approximately $20,200 (increased to €90,000, or approximately $100,900 for a legal entity), is designed to protect French companies against Anglo-Saxon discovery mechanism, which allows the litigant (who is sometimes an American competitor) or the US administration to request from the French company the disclosure of documents, including those that may have an economic value for the said company. "
If I were a french citizen I'd try to avoid getting a criminal record, a possible prison sentence and a fine. It could destroy my family.
The uk should negotiate a better treaty with france to allow these people to testify.
This is a catchy slogan, but it doesn't really make sense.
Edit: apparently it may be attributable to William Penn, of Pennsylvania fame.
For whatever reason [0] came to my mind thinking about it.
In all those cases, the victims have not received "justice" for a major, defining, part of their life. That's what the catchy slogan tries to capture.
Everybody has to report on the initial disaster, and after each wave of the media cycle, more outlets decide to stop reporting on the story (or for many, decide if they can get away with stopping.) The government press releases get fewer and trickle to a near stop, so now the only press releases they're getting are from victims groups and lawyers which are easy to ignore. Eventually a report is released that condemns everyone for incompetence and nobody for malice, and a recently retired fall guy is chosen to have some moderate consequences, like a retroactive reduction in rank that slightly affects their pension.
If our rulers weren't protected from consequences, they'd have to be competent. Endless delay got Epstein night-jail on a child sex trafficking case that started as one of the most observed prosecutions in the US.
This list is a terrifying glimpse of how the entire world would end up without effective regulation. People like this would glide to the top on a carpet of skeletons and we’d basically have to re-invent government to stop them.
It'll fall to the person with the least clout.