If it ain’t broke, then don’t try to fix it

Altering something that is already working well, with the intention of improving it further, can turn out to have the opposite effect, says Professor Hugh Pennington

When we came to Scotland many years ago my wife became a student at Stirling University. My job was in Glasgow. A logical place to stay was Cumbernauld.

We were offered an executive flat (ie an unsubsidised rent) in a tower block. We stayed in one on its tenth floor for three years. It suited us. It swayed a bit in high winds, but comfort came from having been told that it had the Ronan Point strengthening.

Ronan Point in London had been built from prefabricated large concrete panels. Miss Ivy Hodge was one of its first tenants, taking up residency on the 18th floor on 15 April 1968. At 5.45am on 16 May she got up, and struck a match to light her gas cooker.

The explosion blew out the external load-bearing walls of her living room and bedroom. There had been a gas leak. A friend had fitted her cooker. He had tested for leaks using a lighted match, but had used a substandard nut. The corner walls of the flats above collapsed and fell. Their weight took out all the corners of the flats below. Four people were crushed to death.

The Public Inquiry concluded that the collapse had exposed a design weakness. “It is a weakness against which it never occurred to the designers of the building that they should guard. They designed a building which they considered safe for all normal uses; they did not take into account the abnormal” and “the general approach of Building Regulations… gving freedom for the development and use of new techniques and designs is right… but if British Standards and Codes of Practice are used in this way, they must be kept up to date, and new ones must be promulgated as necessary. This is not always so at the moment.” The design weakness was remedied Uk-wide. Our flat in Cumbernauld was all-electric as well.

Ronan Point was built with good intentions. System-built prefabricated buildings were chosen because of a shortage of skilled labour.

High-density housing using tower blocks was seen as helping to remedy the local housing problem; 8,000 were on the local waiting list.

It could even be said that the alterations done to Grenfell Tower were done with good intentions; to reduce the tenants’ heating bills and energy use. But there would have been no fatal fire if the building had been left “unimproved”.

Cecil Gordon was the first to show statistically that altering something that was working with the intention of improving it could have the opposite effect. A South African marxist geneticist, he had moved from the University of Aberdeen to do operational research for Coastal Command during the fight against the U-boats.

He demonstrated that the routine inspection of aircraft engines led to an increased breakdown rate, because things like fuses and sparking plugs that had been working fine had been disturbed.

Gordon’s analyses led to a doubling of effectiveness of anti-u-boat activity. ● Professor Hugh Pennington is an emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen. He has chaired inquiries into E coli outbreaks in Scotland and South Wales.