Exchange of the week

Grenfell Tower: the true price of cost-cutting

To The Guardian

One issue I hope to see addressed following the Grenfell Tower tragedy is the adherence of the public sector to the purchaser/provider split, which means that local authorities, the health service and others no longer directly provide in-house services, but commission them from external private sector providers, through competitive tendering. I know from many years’ experience as a senior local government housing officer that there was a time when a major technical project, such as the refurbishment of a tower block, would have been led by an in-house team including architects, engineers and other experts whose professional pride, ability to sleep at night and pension depended on getting it right.

These days, such a project will usually be led by a commissioning team, who may have unrivalled knowledge of tendering procedures, procurement law and contract negotiation, but whose technical knowledge of matters such as the fire-retardation qualities of external cladding, and preventing fire spreading through plumbing and heating ducts, can probably be written on the back of a postage stamp. As a result, they are heavily dependent on the assurances, goodwill and technical competence of the provider organisations, whose staff are under huge pressure to put in a bid that minimises costs to win the contract and maximises the financial return from running it. Effectively, the safety of those of us using public services is dependent on there being no unscrupulous private sector bidders for them. Sadly, pigs do not fly. Nigel Hamilton, London

To The Guardian

The Government’s Cutting Red Tape website makes the following boast: “Over 2,400 regulations scrapped through the Red Tape Challenge; Saving home builders and councils around £100m by reducing hundreds of locally applied housing standards to five national standards; £90m annual savings to business from Defra reducing environmental guidance by over 80%; Businesses with good records have had fire safety inspections reduced, from six hours to 45 minutes, allowing managers to quickly get back to their day job”.

The problem with regulations is that their utility and importance only become apparent when what they are intended to control goes wrong, as it did so tragically at Grenfell Tower. How many of the 2,400 regulations removed were standing in the way of other tragedies occurring? We will not know until the next tragic event. Reducing the time for fire safety inspections does not look as smart now as it did when the Government started boasting about it. Dr John Cookson, Bournemouth