Commented on:
2017-06-30T10:42:34.510
I realize that Hank, but the point I'm making is that in the case of a fire it is almost impossible to save lives above the height of a fireman's ladder. So that is an inherent risk. We're not allowed to take such risks in any other domain I know.... on the contrary, we are often bombarded with legislation that borders on the insane.
Ralph Kent, I agree with all of your points. Nick also hit the nail on the head. Colum, while arguments can be made about towers for housing, this fire would not have spread so rapidly or been so deadly had not the original design been modified with the addition of external cladding. Said cladding permitted by the preivatisation of inspection, the delegation of interpretation of building regs to industry groups, and best price contracting.
Britain is a signatory to the WTO agreements on what is euphemistically called "liberalisation", a/k/a opening up everything to market forces, ot otherwise known as "privatisation". Nobody has ever asked the British public if they agree to this, but thirty years after the Uruguay Round (1986-1994), the Grenfell Tower embodies what has been "achieved".
We probably need to tread carefully when trotting out the housing undersupply line. There are c. 27m 'homes' in the UK and c. 25m households (ONS data, Zoopla). So there are more 'homes' than 'households'.
The real issues are:
1) Unaffordability - linked to Hank's point about homes as an asset class. Affordability is a direct consequence of unrelenting credit creation by central banks (QE, Shadow Banking) seeing an ever increasing supply of money chasing a finite asset (land) in search of an inflation-hedge in a ZIRP environment;
2) Linked to 1) - Agency. Again picked up by Hank, there are so many 'agents' involved in the property market that unaffordability would seem almost inevitable once the various agents have taken their cut. Given it is unlikely that we will see meaningful new housing supply being delivered directly from local authorities, planners need to be resourced adequately to be able to challenge the farcical viability assessments the house-builders fob them off with. What other business model can consistently get away with a guaranteed 30% profit margin (other than perhaps Apple)?
3) Poor asset utilisation, most obviously demonstrated by the widespread acceptance of (mostly East Asian) BuyToLeave investment, predominantly in London, but spreading to other cities in the UK. There is no point building new homes if they are simply going to sit vacant as a means of protecting against inflation, or laundering money;
4) [Linked to 3)] Distribution of ownership. Some people have more than one home (e.g. holiday cottages)
We need to consider the above against a government of MPs who benefit directly from increasing property prices (owing to most having at least two addresses, one subsidised through general taxation) and that many are BTL landlords themselves with meaningful property portfolios. Former housing minister Brandon Lewis said on Radio 4 in 2013 that house prices couldn't be allowed to fall. He's intelligent enough to know that the Conservatives' core vote comes from the older, asset-owning demographic and their reelection prospects are inextricably linked to how well-off this segment feel, which in turn is dependent on how much their property (ies) have increasing in 'value'.
Until we address issues of money supply and the encouragement of a rentier society, we won't solve the 'housing crisis'. The solution would appear to lie in a Land Value Tax.
I disagree. Housing has become unaffordable because local authorities have consistently not allocated enough land to meet the need. This apparently rather popular idea that what is needed is for the state to step in and compulsorily purchase land for housing conveniently ignores the fact that it is the state which has caused the problem in the first place by not allocating enough land. This is fundamentally a political problem, in that the older middle-class property-owners who are the most likely to vote are precisely those most opposed to an expansion of housebuilding.
Hank is 100% right – especially when he writes that “the third mistake was to rely on the private house building market to solve the problem”.
If you google “Housing an Ageing Population (England)”, a Briefing Paper published on 9 December 2015 by the House of Commons library, Figure 1.1 in that document shows vividly how the shortfall in new housebuilding since the 1970s is almost entirely due to Governments of all stripes phasing out the building of Council housing.
Until present and future Governments do a U-turn on this policy, a drastic shortage of housing will continue, and grow, with all the harmful social consequences flowing therefrom.
Maritz Vandenberg.
Commented on:
2017-06-27T13:45:36.153
I don't think they're worried about the skyline. The higher they build the more money they make, that's all.
A decent skyline would be dominated by Big Ben, St Pauls, Wren spires etc. and enjoyed from within the city.
The utilitarian blocks you see are not a decent skyline at all, and can only seem more tolerable from about 10 miles away.
Commented on:
2017-06-27T11:33:53.163
Contrary to what you say Hank I think there is also a failure of building type.
If you choose to build higher than the reach of a fireman's ladder you must assume that anyone in a room without access to a window below that height is at risk of dying in the case of a fire.
Of course measures could be taken with sprinklers, second staircases etc. to reduce the risk, but if systems are down there is no escape.
Photos of the burnt-out building show that if it had been 6 floors high only half of the top 2 floors would have been burnt, and firemen might have been able to do something with those.
I would tend to agree with the position taken by Simon Jenkins in his Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/15/lessons-grenfell-tower-safer-cladding-tower-blocks
There are a lot of brilliant comment above but the one that feels most pertinent is Henry Scutt's line about "the older middle-class property-owners who are the most likely to vote are precisely those most opposed to an expansion of housebuilding'. Have a look what happened last week in Northumberland CC. A core strategy years in the making to increase the number of homes and build a well planned development near the airport where you can expect it to be built out quickly (rather than 37 homes average a year) has been voted down by minority Conservative councillors who promised their constituents in the May elections that 'their communities will stop growing'. Disaster. And it's been repeated all over the country since the 1990s which is why there is so little land made available which in turn means housebuilders compete to buy it by building cheaply. Disaster.
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