Grenfell shows that simple rules are safer

Reacting to a tragedy by imposing new regulations on top of the old ones often makes things worse

We’ll have to wait until next spring for Dame Judith Hackitt’s full review into fire safety after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, but her interim report has already made waves.

When a regulatory system is described as having “systemic failings”, and with such appalling results, our instinct is to complain that there simply weren’t enough regulations in place, and the solution is to introduce more of them to fix the problem. But that isn’t what Dame Judith is suggesting at all. In fact, she argues that too many bad regulations create a system so needlessly and dangerously complicated that it achieves the opposite of what it intended to do. How can this be?

Dame Judith made a telling observation yesterday. The purpose of fire regulations should be “making buildings safer”. That sounds like a statement of the obvious. And yet, as she puts it, fire regulations have become a guide to “simply doing things at least cost”. They are intended to provide a set of rules that should govern the minimum standards required for safety. But they have become a checklist of all that is required. Tick them off, however perfunctorily, and it’s job done.

This isn’t really sloppiness; it’s human nature in a system in which rules and instructions are expected to act as an alternative to human initiative and thought. The other week, my wife asked me to put some clothes in the washing machine. I did just that. An hour later, she gave me a withering look: the washing machine hadn’t been turned on. Why hadn’t I done what she wanted? But I’d done exactly what was asked of me. No one had mentioned starting the machine and washing the clothes. For all I knew, there could have been another load to go in.

But there is an even worse problem. When regulation becomes too complicated, the purpose behind it is obscured: “Rather than [complex regulations] giving people everything they need to know,” Dame Judith says, “it makes it quite difficult for people to penetrate that complexity to truly understand what they need to do.”

We have seen this time and again. It was, for example, one of the key findings of the serious case review into the death in 2007 of “Baby P”.

In his 17 months of life, Peter Connelly suffered more than 50 injuries. Over his last eight months he was seen over 60 times by social workers, doctors and the police. All of them were found to be “wellmotivated”. But the tick-box regulatory culture meant they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Collectively and individually they followed most of their rules, and the result was that Baby P died after a life filled with pain and suffering. It is a distortion of reality to believe, as so many seem to do, that we end up with tragedies like Grenfell and Baby P because the rules aren’t tough enough. It’s the complexity of the regulations that has helped cause the problem.

This is a subset of the most important of all rules in public policy: the law of unintended consequences.

Take the increasingly common speed limit of 20mph. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that slower cars mean greater safety? But evidence is emerging that it is having the opposite effect. Last year, Bath and North East Somerset Council introduced 13 new speed zones, costing £871,000. Now it has discovered that the rate at which people are killed or seriously injured has gone up. As its report surmised: “It could be that local people perceive the area to be safer due to the presence of the 20mph restrictions and thus are less diligent when walking and crossing roads, cycling or otherwise travelling”.

One of the usual features of the law of unintended consequences is that, however ruinous any new regulation may be, it remains. It is always much easier to impose a new rule than to scrap one. Sure enough, despite the evidence showing that the new speed zones have led to more people being killed, Bath council says it would cost too much to go back to 30mph.

It’s understandable that our response to tragedy is to impose new rules on top of the old ones to try to prevent a recurrence. But as the evidence shows, that may well be the worst possible course. Far better to overhaul the entire system and create a newer, simpler regulatory regime – because complexity too often kills.