about a billion pounds of it, I'd guess
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Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)
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A total of 181 high-rise buildings across 51 local authorities have now failed fire safety tests on their cladding.
Not a single sample has so far passed the urgent tests being carried out on high-rise residential blocks following the fire that killed at least 80 people. This is absolutely incredible, in a push to "save energy" the entirety of the UK has seemingly clad its council housing in fire-prone material. Could easily have come from some dystopian parody, except we now actually have over 80 people delivered as a burnt offering to Saving The Environment.
An offering to greed you mean. The company who was in charge of changing the cladding had severall choices, and they chose the one that was fire-prone instead of the slightly more expansive one that was safe. They put the price of 80 lives at 200k pounds (the difference in price between the cladding they chose and the safe one). That's greed at its worst.
Cladding in 51 other councils has now failed also fire-testing, it's not just those guys. Of course, imprison everyone is always an option (and would just be the perfect Stalinist ending to the entire story), but one may wonder whether there's actually a system problem here, and some irreconcilable objectives.
Of course the councils went for the cheapest options, they've been seeing their funding cut for years. I was more surprised that there was that much council housing left in Britain.
Edit: also, when you look at why Camden council evacuated the towers there (missing fire doors, blocked stairwells) and that there has been no obligation to install sprinklers in older buildings, despite being required on newer buildings, I think it's obvious that for the last 30 years or so, Britain has been trying to do social housing on the cheap. If you're looking for irreconcilable objectives it's the Thatcher/Reagan ideological drive to cut government spending as much as possible with the post-war consensus in Britain for a welfare state. (July 2nd, 2017, 12:59)Bacchus Wrote: They are not a for-profit business, the 200k which didn't go to cladding did go to schools, housing subsidies, and various other missions councils are meant to pursue, I don't really see how greed figures here. No they didn't, they sat on the nest egg and used it as a rebate in an attempt to buy the vote of the constituents that needed it the least. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017...lood-money 
Ugh, I didn't know about the rebate, that actually is pretty criminal.
EDIT: Equating Thatcher with Reagan always struck me as pretty shallow. Thatcher came to power to what was near enough a communist country -- all major industries nationalised, almost all banking was done on a "building society" basis, a lot of financial activities were actually criminalized (for example, international trading in UK sovereign debt), and 42% of people lived in council housing. Thatcher's reforms weren't aimed at curtailing things like free healthcare or free education, or even housing construction, they were aimed at taking Britain closer to what's understood today as a "normal" welfare state -- a market economy with a supportive government. For example, Thatcher government continued to build over 17k council properties per year -- for comparison, Labour then built less than 8k in thirteen years. |
