That’s not how it works here. The lack of inspections by the fire dept is down to the law meaning they can’t do them, not down to the fire service cutting back. Obviously here I mean full inspections of the structure of the building, not cursory inspections to make sure there are smoke alarms, etc; the fire service does do those (often at the request of residents; I requested one once) and indeed did one at Grenfell the Saturday before it burned.
Is this true? How is such a thing possible in the 21st century? How is this not taken as straight up discrimination?
You have to wonder what the goal is here. Housing people where they are exposed to constant reminders of the cars, services, preferential treatment, better services, that they can never attain seems like a recipe for resentment and conflict, to me.
But a ‘poor door’, seems like an 18th century concept.
Because the inspectors are council employees, not servants of the councillors. And - speaking as an former council employee - if they can demonstrate their worth by finding problems, they will.
That said, if the inspectors were not employees but subcontractors then that’s a different matter and their relationships with local building companies and in particular the ones involved here should be investigated and in which case:
I expect there will be some weasel wording absolving them.
That seems a hair splitting difference, to be honest. Because if they can demonstrate worth by overlooking issues, they’ll do that too. That’s the problem with employees, they tend to curry favour with those employing them.
[Possible manslaughter charges, but that’s not all:
**casdave **- great post ( #251 ) up top there!
It is, and it isn’t.
London is a hugely mixed up place; every culture everywhere, right across the socio-economic scale. No ghettos, few particularly poor neighbourhoods, few rich.
If there were rich neibourhoods Grenfell would be in it.
The ‘poor door’ idea is relatively recent and is clearly a misstep - something not regulated for that developers have adopted, but it is a product of ensuring new developments have some social housing element contained within them i.e. maintining the mix that makes London unique.
I agree entirely.
Eek. Internet fell down, therefore not able to edit that I meant the thing with which I agreed is
Sorry. 
I have, of course, thoughts about this, and I have lived in flat in high rise multi-storey flats for many years, but I must be off now, Not quite trusting computer or connection.
BBC: “Cladding fire tests failed by 27 high-rise blocks”
In 15 different council areas in England.
Camden Council is evacuating its affected towers because it cannot guarantee the residents’ safety.
Welcome to the New Gilded Age, when we’ve forgotten why all those government regulations were put into place and all those inspectors were hired in the first place. This is the end result of de-regulation, cutting down the size of government, and why a libertarian paradise would be a dystopia.
This doesn’t just happen in the UK. New apartment buildings in New York qualify for tax breaks if they contain some affordable housing units, and some such buildings have a “poor door.”
New York actually changed the law in 2015, banning separate entrances, but buildings that had already been built or approved were grandfathered in.
The building was inspected. Did the inspectors do their jobs? That’s one question to be answered.
I disagree. This is a reach too far. In a libertarian world it would be up to the tenant to check that the building was fire-safe and decide to rent or not rent accordingly. As ever, there would be properties which would be fire-safe, and those which would not be. Caveat emptor would apply.
That’s a surprisingly - and thankfully - low number. I had feared many more.
You have a point. In some ways, this is worse than the libertarian ideal.
In a corrupt or incompetent or underfunded regulatory environment, people who rent apartments BELIEVE that those apartments have been built and maintained in a way that properly safeguards the lives of the occupants, so they feel no need to make individual checks in order to confirm things like fire safety. They are, in a very real sense, lured into the places with false promises.
And governments often do everything possible to give the illusion of regulatory security and safety without providing a sufficient amount of actual infrastructure or oversight to ensure that the social benefits of regulation are actually realized. Unfortunately, it’s not just nominally conservative governments who screw over their own people like this, although they are more committed to it.
So, in a libertarian paradise we’d all have to be fire safety experts in addition to everything else we need to be experts at? How would YOU go about determining if exterior building cladding is safe or not?
That is why we have government oversight - because we can’t all be experts in everything,
I don’t think they’re done yet. If I understand the article correctly, it’s now up to 34 failures…out of 34 samples:
[60 now. Out of 60.
Yeah, I mean we can check for smoke alarms and exit points but we wouldn’t even be able to check if any sprinklers were actually functional.
It’s incredible that all the cladding so far is failing the tests. They said at first that they were testing the most likely to be dangerous samples first, so it wasn’t as surprising when the first few failed. But now, 60 samples down and they’re still no good! This is going to cost a fortune.
In Camden residents have been told to leave their homes for a couple of months while work’s done. It’s not just the closing there but other fire risk issues, apparently. They’re going to be put up in hotels in various parts of London (at first it was just airbeds in a leisure centre). That’ll make it fun getting to work and school and getting carers in. Whole families in one room, and what do they do with their pets? It’s a farce.