Towering inferno in England ( Archived) (258)

I'm going to echo Soph's words, Lookin.

You idiot.

Thank you again for an up date
Holding your own there


Sohie

Have you Hex always lived in New Zealand?

You're welcome, Soph.

It depends on your perspective, Ooby.

By US standards, it's in my neck of the woods, I'm guessing about 100 miles East.

By UK standards, it's miles away in another country.

I'm fortunate in living in semi-rural Wales, but I do privately rent and always have done.

I have never lived in a property which I have considered safe.

In the last property I rented for myself and my daughter, I found a nail in the floor boards which had gone through a gas pipe. It had been there for so long, there had been a catalytic reaction between the nail and the pipe. We had lived with it for four years before I discovered it.

I thought the gaseous whiff which I kept smelling was from the boiler, which also turned out to be illegal, carbon monoxide fumes coming back into the property from a flue which didn't meet legal standards.

I suspect the only reason my daughter and I weren't blown to kingdom come along with our neighbours, is my propensity for leaving windows open in all weathers.

That was nearly twenty years ago and I still wake at the slightest wiff of smoke, whether that's a garden fire, a neighbour's log burner, or more recently a factory which burned down about 10 miles away.

Yesterday I started out of sleep at the smell of my daughter making toast when she came home from work. I have become a human smoke alarm, the type which goes off if you so much as burn a crumb.

I taught my granddaughter how to get out of the house in the event of a fire long before this Grenfell disaster.

If none of this sounds like regular behaviour, I'm pretty sure it's the new normal.

I guess you were right after all - this disaster is in my neck of the woods and so many others' as well.

You:re right Ooby, the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has the highest disparity of wealth of any borough, most of the population in the top 10th percentile and the many living in the Tower block area in the bottom 10th percentile.

Grenfell Tower will have originally been entirely council owned for the benefit of low income families being able to rent affordable, lifelong, accommodation.

Margaret Thatcher decided to sell off the council housing stock and made it illegal for the councils to use the money to build more social housing.

My parents benefitted from this scheme, rent paid being taken into consideration in the asking price. They were quite cross that the condition of the property was also taken into account and having scrimped and saved to do work on the property, they ended up paying more for it. The increase in the property's worth since they bought it however, is obscene. If they had chosen to sell up, they would have made a killing.

So, Grenfell tower at the time of the fire consisted of a mix of properties. Some were still council owned, some were privately owned probably by elderly people like my parents who bought when the properties were going for a song.

I suspect a good sized proportion were privately rented, however. These properties were recently selling for around the quarter of a million mark. Anyone who has that kind of money isn't going to buy a property of that price in that area for themselves. They buy to rent and as an investment.

The private rents were around £400 a week. Some of the tenants survived the fire because they were working night shifts, but in the kind of jobs where they would likely rely on benefit subsidies to meet the extortionate rent.

People living in poverty are so often derogated for sponging off the state, but any housing benefit paid by the government for privately rented properties is in effect a payment to rich people.

If you have tenants in receipt of housing benefits, the government in effect pay your mortgage, pay you a nice income after the mortgage is paid off for doing next to nothing and you get the capital of the property at the end of it.

If you don:t earn enough to obtain a mortgage, you get to rent sub-standard properties for more than the cost of the mortgage, have short-term contracts and over a lifetime probably pay out enough to buy two properties, or more, but have no capital at the end of it.

Grenfell Tower will have been a money spinner for the rich feeding off the poor and the government. The refurbishments were penny pinching to the point of possibly not meeting building and fire safety regulations.

There has also been much criticism of the refurbishment planning records where the emphasis was not on the ecological value of the insulating cladding, but on improving the aesthetics of the building for the benefit of Kensington and Chelsea's wealthy residents.

But hey, that's business and the art of rolling with collateral damage is underway.