David Lock

Stilover. Thank you for that knowledgeable insight.

Would I be right in assuming that the client also has an obligation to inspect the work as it proceeds and is it difficult to see what has been fixed to the exterior once the cladding is in place?

And I bet you know of instances where an inspector/clerk of works has been paid to turn a blind eye?

David

Dingdongler

I see the loony left in the form of the SWP have been agitating on various marches and protests.

Back to the issue though....it beggars belief that this material was used on a council project when the very same councils have a list as long as your arm of fire requirements when you do a loft conversion in your own home.

stilover

The client (the council in this situation) is relying on the Architect, main contractor, and cladding specialist to design and build a system that is fit for purpose. It is quite wrong that the council is getting blamed for this, as they didn't specify the system, or (understandably) have much knowledge in what they were paying for. They rely on specialists, just like anyone else would wanting building work done.
What I strongly disagree with in this whole situation, is we now have political point scoring saying it's Tory cuts to blame. They are protesting wanting council chiefs to resign over the fire. I'm sorry, but the blame squarely lies with the companies hired to design and build the new cladding. All the council did was pay for it.

tony de wonderful

Only the rich should breed then?

tony de wonderful

It's my understanding that the Architect isn't quite the authority that he/she was years ago. Often materials are substituted unilaterally by contractors and sub-contractors due to availability and price, they call it 'equivalent' and that's it?

tony de wonderful

The Guardian had a flow chart of all the companies and management involved in this tower. It's such a web that's it's hard to see where overall responsibility lies. Executives on 'not for profit' social housing management companies still rake it in OFC.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...tability-issue

Kwik

iTrader: (10)

Surely the people actually undertaking the physical fitment of the cladding must have had an idea of its suitability?.

stilover

The Architect issued a specification. This would have gone out to cladding specialists who would have given a price for the project.


Any cladding specialist worth his salt would inspect the specification and flag up anything that didn't conform, or wasn't fire rated for the purpose with which it was intended.


So it could be that the cladding specialist has just priced on a specification that was just wrong, or they have given a reduction in cost for an alternative product. Even if this was the case, both the Architect and Main contractor should have checked for the suitability of any products used. Some Architects are more diligent than others in wanting to know every aspect of what is going into the construction, for requiring Technical data sheets of every fixing, seal, tape etc. But even not being this diligent, the fundamental components used, ie, insulation, rainscreen, and fire stops, should never have been passed unchecked.

Dingdongler

No, but people should have the number of children that they can afford to bring up without the need for handouts.

tony de wonderful

I've talked before how rent is largely an imposed cost on people, it isn't a natural cost.

People can't afford kids because they must pay for the idleness of a landlord class. So bad have things become that low incomes are paying 1/3 or more of their income out to these people, would be even worse without housing benefits, indeed would probably cause a social collapse.

So who or what exactly is the problem here? The poor can't afford kids because they are being effectively farmed.

neil-h

Surely the same thought process stands for everything you pay for as the concept of assigning financial value to something is fundamentally unnatural.

tony de wonderful

Financial value compensates people for work done. If someone cuts you hair they expend effort/labor time and are thus compensated.

Rent on the other hand is paid to the landlord for them not to do something, not kicking you off their land, land which they never expended effort/labor time to create since it was created by nature in the first place.

Landlords effectively farm people, and they are massive overhead on the economy since they form an idle class who contribute nothing to wealth creation.

The logic of money and property masks this cold truth and makes it look like poor people are the burden.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

So all landlords don't maintain or insure property?



What about all of those unaffordable mortgages? Paying interest on a property that will go to the bank when you default.

hodgy0_2

clearly, as the topic of this thread shows - not fvcking well enough

but maybe this has killed of the phrase "bonfire of the regulations"

and for what it's worth TDW has a point, any true capitalist will see the absurdity of the rentier class "creating wealth"

just read Adam Smiths wealth of nations

tony de wonderful

That's a bit like thanking slave-owners for feeding and giving health care to their slaves.

FYI I'm talking about the concept of ground-rent in essence, which is the majority of the total rent paid to a landlord. It's the very rent on the land itself which is unjust. Maintenance, insurance are very real yes but they only account for a small portion of the total rent.

Mortages...pfff, if one slave-owner buys slaves off another does the transaction make ownership legitimate? Landlord mortgage = buying a right to farm people.

tony de wonderful

Yes that's right, land is a peculiar and unique 'commodity'.

JTaylor

You're wasting your time, lads. They'll never get it.

JTaylor

P.S. In Skiathos at the moment. Took the brother-in-law's boat over to Arkos yesterday, threw the anchor in and pitched ourselves at a rather exclusive little taverna. Sharing the shade with us were the owners of an impressive yacht. Clearly new money, their faux posh accents occasionally betrayed their roots and did so with more regularity as the glasses of wine despatched increased in number. Quite how I bit my tongue I'll never know, but the attitude of these people towards, and I quote, "the lower classes" was nauseating. Oh, and that "bloody grubby lefty" Corbyn would "kill us off". That the working classes would vote to maintain this is, as I said on another thread, absurd.

Fwiw the in-laws made their money in construction. Unashamed, beer swigging, football watching, sweary, working class folk who, in their words, "got lucky". Nothing wrong with getting a break, everything wrong in hating those who didn't.

neil-h

For future reference (and the education of the SN masses), this is proper lefty nonsense.

tony de wonderful

LAND MONOPOLY is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies -- it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. Unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit, but they are the principal form of unearned increment, and they are derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but positively detrimental to the general public.

Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position -- land, I say, differs from all other forms of property, and the immemorial customs of nearly every modern state have placed the tenure, transfer, and obligations of land in a wholly different category from other classes of property.

Nothing is more amusing than to watch the efforts of land monopolists to claim that other forms of property and increment are similar in all respects to land and the unearned increment on land.
They talk of the increased profits of a doctor or lawyer from the growth of population in the town in which they live. They talk of the profits of a railway, from the growing wealth and activity in the districts through which it runs. They talk of the profits from a rise in stocks and even the profits derived from the sale of works of art.

But see how misleading and false all those analogies are. The windfalls from the sale of a picture -- a Van Dyke or a Holbein -- may be very considerable. But pictures do not get in anybody's way. They do not lay a toll on anybody's labor; they do not touch enterprise and production; they do not affect the creative processes on which the material well-being of millions depends.

If a rise in stocks confers profits on the fortunate holders far beyond what they expected or indeed deserved, nevertheless that profit was not reaped by withholding from the community the land which it needs; on the contrary, it was reaped by supplying industry with the capital without which it could not be carried on.

If a railway makes greater profits it is usually because it carries more goods and more passengers.

If a doctor or a lawyer enjoys a better practice, it is because the doctor attends more patients and more exacting patients, and because the lawyer pleads more suits in the courts and more important suits.

At every stage the doctor or the lawyer is giving service in return for his fees.

Fancy comparing these healthy processes with the enrichment which comes to the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts of a great city, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing.

Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.

While the land is what is called "ripening" for the unearned in-crement of its owner, the merchant going to his office and the artisan going to his work must detour or pay a fare to avoid it. The people lose their chance of using the land, the city and state lose the taxes which would have accrued if the natural development had taken place, and all the while the land monopolist only has to sit still and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes many fold, without either effort or contribution on his part!

But let us follow this process a little further. The population of the city grows and grows, the congestion in the poorer quarters becomes acute, rents rise and thousands of families are crowded into tenements. At last the land becomes ripe for sale -- that means that the price is too tempting to be resisted any longer. And then, and not until then, it is sold by the yard or by the inch at 10 times, or 20 times, or even 50 times its agricultural value.

The greater the population around the land, the greater the injury the public has sustained by its protracted denial. And, the more inconvenience caused to everybody; the more serious the loss in eco-nomic strength and activity -- the larger will be the profit of the landlord when the sale is finally accomplished. In fact, you may say that the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done. It is monopoly which is the keynote, and where monopoly prevails, the greater the injury to society the greater the reward to the monopolist. This evil process strikes at every form of industrial activity. The municipality, wishing for broader streets, better houses, more healthy, decent, scientifically planned towns, is made to pay more to get them in proportion as is has exerted itself to make past improve-ments. The more it has improved the town, the more it will have to pay for any land it may now wish to acquire for further improvements.

The manufacturer proposing to start a new industry, proposing to erect a great factory offering employment to thousands of hands, is made to pay such a price for his land that the purchase price hangs around the neck of his whole business, hampering his competitive power in every market, clogging him far more than any foreign tariff in his export competition, and the land price strikes down through the profits of the manufacturer on to the wages of the worker.

No matter where you look or what examples you select, you will see every form of enterprise, every step in material progress, is only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream for himself, and everywhere today the man or the public body that wishes to put land to its highest use is forced to pay a preliminary fine in land values to the man who is putting it to an inferior one, and in some cases to no use at all. All comes back to land value, and its owner is able to levy toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry. A portion, in some cases the whole, of every benefit which is laboriously acquired by the community increases the land value and finds its way automatically into the landlord's pocket. If there is a rise in wages, rents are able to move forward, because the workers can afford to pay a little more. If the opening of a new railway or new tramway, or the institution of improved services of a lowering of fares, or of a new invention, or any other public conven-ience affords a benefit to workers in any particular district, it be-comes easier for them to live, and therefore the ground landlord is able to charge them more for the privilege of living there.

Some years ago in London there was a toll bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings offended the public con-science, and agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the taxpayers, the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week, but within a very short time rents on the south side of the river were found to have risen about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted!

And a friend of mine was telling me the other day that, in the parish of Southwark, about 350 pounds a year was given away in doles of bread by charitable people in connection with one of the churches. As a consequence of this charity, the competition for small houses and single-room tenements is so great that rents are considerably higher in the parish!

All goes back to the land, and the land owner is able to absorb to himself a share of almost every public and every private benefit, however important or however pitiful those benefits may be.

I hope you will understand that, when I speak of the land monopolist, I am dealing more with the process than with the individual land owner who, in most cases, is a worthy person utterly unconscious of the character of the methods by which he is enriched. I have no wish to hold any class up to public disapprobation. I do not think that the man who makes money by unearned increment in land is morally worse than anyone else who gathers his profit where he finds it in this hard world under the law and according to common usage. It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the State which would be blameworthy if it were not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice.

We do not want to punish the landlord.

We want to alter the law. - Winston Churchill

ditchmyster

iTrader: (7)

Speculate to accumulate, it's as old as mankind, a theme that runs through all species of animal and even plant life... in short... it's the way of the world.

You can't just pick on one particular aspect of mankind and jump on your soap box... unless of course you're willing to put your money where your mouth is and allow complete strangers to move in with you and live at your expense indefinitely.

No doubt you'd have a different view had you been born a member of the landed gentry... sour grapes / bitter and twisted are phrases that spring to mind.

P.S, I'm not a landlord... neither was I born with a silver spoon or had anything handed to me... I was born into a family that lived in one room with a parrafin heater and a radio in a shared accommodation rented house... and very pleased we were too that someone let us be there for a fee, beats the hell out of a drain in a sewer or a sandstone cave.

Dingdongler

Interesting that in this particular copy and paste of yours the services of a doctor are put forward as 'healthy' and 'productive' when in previous posts you have accused doctors of operating a monopoly. You argued that point quite ferociously with myself and John Banks. I can dig those posts up if you like...

I'd also be interested to know why you have very recently become a landowner

Btw, fwiw I actually agree that rentiers do not create wealth and have to some extent contributed to social inequality

andy97

iTrader: (1)

TDY do you own a property?

I own several properties and decided to invest our families 'earnings' in bricks and mortar. We could earn more from playing the stock market.

I feel I'm a decent landlord who charges a fair rent for nice properties which I keep up in maintenance and decor.


You do talk some rubbish, either you're in a capitalist society or not. Don't complain if you don't want to be whilst others do

Dingdongler

So mayor Sajid Khan says that any survivors of the fire who were here illegally should be given an amnesty.

How does SN feel about that?

ditchmyster

iTrader: (7)

I don't think they should be given anything if they are here illegally... so then what if an illegal immigrant gets run over by a car they should be given amnesty.

Tuff titty, if they weren't here illegally then they wouldn't have been in the fire.

dpb

Boris promised an amnesty anyway if tories got re elected , and afaik they did

!

dpb

They should be all be given whatever they want really , up to the time at which compensation for criminal negligence comes through

Dingdongler

How about the crime that they have committed by being in this country illegally?

dpb

Is it a crime ?

neil-h

Depends how you feel about the combination of multiple wrongs really doesn't it.