The Grenfell Tower fire is one of the worst housing incidents in this country in living memory – at least I can’t remember anything worse. For those concerned, it is just terrible. Our hearts go out to them.
There is also much anger.
Anger because this was a wholly unnecessary tragedy, caused by human error and mismanagement.
So who should bear the blame?
- Is it the Council, desperate to save money at any cost?
- Is it the suppliers of the material – someone there surely must have known it was unsuitable and dangerous?
- Or is it the government for failing to review the fire and building regulations after previous fires threw up these issues in the past?
I think it is a culmination of all of these. But I think the real problems are more fundamental and go back further.
Is it Austerity?
I have no doubt that austerity has a big, a very big, part to play in this. However one of the bigger problems, caused in part by austerity, is the gradual dismantling, over many years, of the expert staff and services in Councils.
I was very impressed by this letter in the Guardian from Dr Richard Simmons, Former chief executive, Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment:
Another vital question must be how government gets advice about buildings. Since the privatisation of the BRE in 1997, government has moved further away from employing construction experts in-house and relied more and more on industry advice. Few professionals remain in government departments. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the statutory adviser on architecture, was abolished in 2011 to save money. In 2015 the chief construction adviser was axed. Locally, the city architect is an endangered species.
Government should have access to ideas and innovation from outside its ranks, but problems arise when there is too little expertise inside the civil service: generalists cannot weigh complex technical advice and counter commercial lobbying with hard data.
The dangerous pretence
There seems to be a general tenancy nowadays, in all fields, for people to disrespect knowledge and experience and assume that people with no knowledge and no experience can – with advice – do as good a job as the experts.
They can’t.
It is also a fact that you can’t change things by wishing. Which means that
- If you have no experience whatsoever in government, you are probably not going to be a very good President
- If you do not have proper legal representation, you are going to find it very difficult to succeed at Court (even if you are in the right). And
- If you have no training in construction (not an easy subject) particularly if you are under enormous pressure to save money, there is a strong probability you will make wrong decisions when dealing with the maintenance and upgrade of an elderly tower block.
The trouble is – even if you get good advice from outside – a generalist staff member will not be able to understand it fully if there is no-one within the organisation with the technical knowledge to translate that advice (which will inevitably be couched in technical terms) into understandable language.
If you don’t know something, you can’t take it into account.
Meaning that decisions are being made, up and down the country, by Councillors and other politicians, without a proper understanding of the full facts – arguably an abrogation of their duty as an elected member.
Further, and worryingly, if there is corruption involved, no-one will be able to spot the signs of this, signs which would have been apparent to an expert employed by the Council and whose loyalties are to the Council and public service.
A public tragedy
It is a tragedy that so much experience and knowledge have been lost to our public services due to cuts and austerity.
In the past, many people worked in the public sector, often at a lower salary than they would have got in the private sector, because they believed in public service, as a vocation. Outsourcing and reducing things to generalism (‘lean working’) has undermined this, and our public services themselves.
This is surely an element which has led to this tragedy. Lesser qualified persons are incapable of recognising inherent (but inapparent) dangers.
In conclusion
I doubt whether any of the employees or members of the RBKC actually wanted a tower block in their borough to go up in flames with massive loss of life.
No doubt some on the Council had attitudes towards the working class poor in their area that others would find offensive. However, it is possible that all concerned genuinely believed that they were doing the right thing and making the right decisions – in the context of their personal knowledge and understanding and the situation within which they made those decisions.
They weren’t of course – otherwise, the tower block would not have gone up in flames.
This tragedy is partly down to Austerity and the squeeze on funding.
However, I think it is also an outcome of the general feeling – endemic in society today – that you can do things without proper training and expertise, and that it is acceptable for important public services to operate without expert input and proper staff training.
It is also the outcome of the destruction of the public service ethos caused by getting rid of expert public servants and replacing them with outsourcing to the private sector – who do not and cannot, care in the same way – and who may indeed adapt their advice to suit what they perceive their customer wants.
If this does not stop, this will not be the last scandal and tragedy facing us.
With thanks to Graeme Gee for his help with this article.
Ben Reeve-Lewis says
You could also rope in the Housing Act 1956 which created subsidies to councils for building tower blocks in the first place where the higher the block the greater the subsidy. Driven in part by a desperate shortage of housing following WW2 but also the canny trick of being able to sell off land previously occupied by houses
From their inception to their current history it always seems to have been based solely on cheap is cheerful but I note reading a piece in an architecture magazine that in actual fact, because of the design of tower blocks they are in reality more expensive to maintain than low rise developments.
Colin Lunt says
Condolences to all the people who lost their lives or have been injured. The police have, today increased the number of fatalities to 79. In addition the other residents will have lost all their possessions, the personal keepsakes and everything of their history.
In the 21 century age of the internet blogs some people race to allocate blame; the Public Enquiry must be allowed to carry out its work with reasonable speed before blame is laid
One aspect that has not been mentioned is that there may well be some owner occupiers who had opted for RTB or even private tenants of private owners. This very shocking incident is multi-faceted and every single aspect needs to been explored in detail. Whilst austerity will no doubt have been relevant it is also relevant that Kensington LB is said to have £300 million of reserves. Most councils reserves will have been depleted over the last 7 years and would be delighted to still have £300M left
Ben Reeve-Lewis says
HI Colin,
Yes I heard a few of the residents had done the RTB as well and whilst I agree that there can be a modern tendency towards a race to blame lets hope that the subsequent public enquiry doesnt take as long as most of them, the tendency being to drag them out for decades until those responsible have either died or retired, voices of opprobrium by that time having also done the same.
ray green says
I believe there are twelve leaseholders although I think it unlikely that many will have remained in occupation. Apparently they weren’t charged their share of the cost of the work (about £80,000 each) as it was deemed to be improvements not repairs.
i have read various reports and there is great emphasis on the energy saving benefits of the cladding and absolutely no mention of the appearance of the tower.
BTW I think the building tower blocks to dispose of land for profit point is flawed. In the NW England industrial town where I worked there was no spare land to dispose of. A tower block of 100 flats took up all the land from a street of 100 terrace houses and by the time you had included a play area, maybe a few garages and possibly a community centre there was no land left to dispose of.
John says
Well, that’s what happened with Hillsborough and probably others if I care to think about it, and that’s almost certainly what will happen here. KCBC is not cash strapped so I don’t buy the austerity argument at all. They spent £10M on Grenfell Tower, that’s roughly £83,000 per flat, hardly chicken feed. The cladding, put in to increase the U value as I understand it, is the cause of the fire, bearing in mind the fire brigade put out the fire in the flat where the fridge caught light. Whether this cladding was correctly installed is also open to question, as I recall one photo of the block ablaze with the fire going up and diagonally across the block from bottom to top, which should not have happened.
Steve Hards says
Tessa has highlighted a very important point: ripping expertise out of the civil service has happened across all Government departments – and councils too, apparently – for the past few decades.
I worked within the Department of Health 1997-2005 as an independent contractor and saw first hand how knowledgeable people from the different health professions were deliberately not being replaced when they moved on, and sometimes were even reorganised into redundancy. The civil servants boasted about it. The professionals were disliked by the top civil servants because their occasional injection of reality into a discussion made decisions more difficult but they were often equally disliked by their professional organisations because they were suspected to have ‘gone native’ with the civil servants! In fact, without exception, the ones I met used their privileged position to nudge policy in the direction that was best for patients and to challenge the professions’ self-protectionist tendencies. In other words, they could simultaneously be a thorn in everyone’s side but also the grit in the oyster that resulted in better outcomes. It’s no wonder the civil service wanted them out and no wonder the heath service is in the mess it is in now.
The lack of input to the work of the civil service from knowledgeable professionals possibly accounts for why action on review of the building regulations failed to materialise in the Department of Communities and Local Government for four years and why the nonsense of the punitive tax changes for landlords gained traction in the Treasury.
Wonderkitty says
The residents blogs make it very clear that the overpaid KCTMO management team were not qualified/experienced to listen and act on residents complaints. Further, they obstructed and ignored residents concerns and criticisms. Residents should take a vote of no confidence in the Chief Exec of the TMO/ALMO as he has not had the decency to resign.
John says
The CE of RBKC has been “forced” to resign so he says. He should have had the decency to resign as soon as the scale of this tragedy was apparent, but, like the rest of the entire disgraceful public sector staff we now have in this country, he was hanging on waiting to get the big money offer from the Council to “go quietly”.
Anon says
I cant agree this is down to Austerity. We own an ex-council property in a high rise tower block, we received a bill of £30,000 to renovate the tower block. If similar works had been undertaken by myself or a small privately block of the flats, the cost would have been about £15k.
The council was spending more then the £30k for their own council own flats, a they were doing additional works such as renewing kitchen and bathroom, gas central heating etc…
Where was this money coming from. The Blair / Brown government gave councils £40billion to renovate our council housing stock. People say Labour did not build council housing, that is an unfair statement, as they spent the money on renewing council housing stock. As the money was flowing from central government, they were milking it and exaggerating repairs. But people who bought ex-council homes, where landing with very high bills.
Some councils sent their leaseholders bills for £50k such as for a roof repairs :
“Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles vowed to introduce the cap after a 93-year-old constituent was landed with a £50,000 bill by her local authority for roof repairs.”
Kensington had finished these works in 2016, but they did spend millions. Camden had finished their cladding in 2007 (according to residents).
People blame Thatcher for not replacing council housing, but I suspect she did n’t trust councils to do build good homes.
Camden Council (London) had 1000 Fire Door missing, if a private landlord had them missing they would get prosecuted. How can councils prosecute landlords, when they can’t manage their own housing stock?. Many councils are charging hundreds of pounds to License private landlords. Calling us ‘slum landlords’.
At Lakanal another tower, another six people died in 2009. Southwark Council admit, it had not done a Fire Risk Assessment. It was a Labour Borough, so everything was covered up to protect their own.
When I build an extension, I pay a fee to the council for Building Control services. So how can we trust them now, if council up and down the country, failed in their duty to detect problems with cladding?