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I don’t want to distract from the tragedy itself but, even after all this, more people will continue to suffer due to the subsequent cladding scandal. The UK g

I don’t want to distract from the tragedy itself but, even after all this, more people will continue to suffer due to the subsequent cladding scandal. The UK government are trying to pass the costs of remediation for other cladded buildings on to leaseholders who didn’t have any involvement in the design, build or sign-off of their buildings. Some people are already being bankrupted through extortionate waking watches, mitigation and remediation bills and I’ve even heard that one person in my city (Leeds) has killed themselves due to the stress. According to the select committee reviewing the Building Safety Bill, “the only people who believe leaseholders should pay are the government”. The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill. We’re talking sums amounting to up to £100k being charged to people who paid similar amounts for their apartments in the first place! One affected block was built since Grenfell, so the entire ownership could effectively be in massive negative equity. The government have put together a fund of £1bn for non-ACM cladding remediation, expecting that to cover ~600 buildings, but already over 2,700 buildings have applied and the estimated cost UK-wide is upwards of £15bn. The whole thing is an utter shambles and people are stuck unable to sell their properties (stalling the first time buyer market as they can’t move up to other properties, and meaning they cannot move for work in a time when there are masses of redundancies) or even remortgage!

lmm 6y ago
> The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill. How does the amendment ensure leaseholders don't have to pay without putting taxholders on the hook? You can't make money from nowhere.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  In a Venn diagram, "not leaseholders" will be all other space on the diagram. I imagine it's meant to leave all other options on the table (taxpayers, developers and/or anyone else) rather than force a specific choice (except leaseholders).
  - lmm 6y ago
    If you legislate that it's not X and it's not Y and it's not Z, pretty soon it's no-one. Legislating that it can't be X is de facto making it the taxpayers' responsibility (or else permitting it to not be done at all).
- iso1210 6y ago
  The person that owns the actual building and land could pay. The company and officers who sold the cladding (especially the ones who cheated on the tests) could pay
- contravariant 6y ago
  The one coherent explanation I can come up with is that they want to fund it by taxing people/companies that evade taxes. Though that doesn't sound right for the current UK government.
  - lmm 6y ago
    That money would normally go into the tax bucket, so it's really still being taxpayer-funded in that case.
    - contravariant 6y ago
      Well they're not currently taxpayers at the very least, in contrast to the leaseholders who presumably are mostly taxpayers.
      - lmm 6y ago
        Are you being deliberately obtuse? Money is fungible, money recovered from tax evaders rightly belongs in the general taxation pool, funding X with money recovered from tax evaders is no different from funding X with money from the general taxation pool (unless X somehow enables recovering more money from tax evaders that wouldn't otherwise happens).
vijayr02 6y ago
I agree, here is a related story I'd submitted a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25460601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25460601 This story is about how fire watches are being organised with little to no notice and the costs charged to the flat owners. In general the leasehold system in the UK is quite unfit for purpose and a proper feudal throwback. Agency problems galore and regulatory rent seeking at it's worst. I'm surprised there is not a more sustained political movement to get rid of it!
suvelx 6y ago
> The government have put together a fund of £1bn for non-ACM cladding remediation, expecting that to cover ~600 buildings, but already over 2,700 buildings have applied and the estimated cost UK-wide is upwards of £15bn. Non-ACM over 18m tall. Shorter buildings (the majority) are up shits creek too. There's also a 30M fund for waking-watch relief... Which at 150k per alarm, you can get 200 alarms. > The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill. AFAIK It was initially rejected because it was worded in such a way that would make freeholders liable for other fire-safety things such as failsafe latches. Prioritizing freeholders paying out hundreds of pounds every decade over bankrupting thousands if not millions of people. It's a farce. The building has industry paid millions in donations to the Conservative party since Grenfell. And at every turn despite parroting "leaseholders should not pay" it has been obvious that they really meant "should pay". Meanwhile, in a fit of hypocrisy, Jenrick has been campaigning for a (Labuor) council to fix a bridge "because they own it".
- Retric 6y ago
  > Shorter buildings (the majority) are up shits creek too. Under ~18m tall building are much easier to escape from in a fire and thus have different fire safety rules. People can normally exit the building quickly. Worst case jumping from the 3-5th story is likely to result in serious injury but is often survivable. Start talking 6+ floor things get exponentially worse with every additional floor increasing the risks. This is of course an arbitrary line, I would have a lower limit but the tradeoffs are complicated.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    > Worst case jumping from the 3-5th story is likely to result in serious injury but is often survivable. A brief web search suggests to me that about 50% of people who fall from 15 meters (approx 4th floor) will die. Those are awful odds, and most survivers of falls from that height probably aren't landing on the sort of pavement you might expect to be surrounding a high-rise building. And how many of the survivers ever walk again? How many can even feed themselves again? Seriously, 50% is worse than even russian roulette, a 'game' generally recognized as suicidal.
jonatron 6y ago
I keep seeing sums like £50k and £100k per flat for cladding. How is that possible? Isn't that multiple times what a new roof would cost on a house? Or a substantial extension.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  Generally the entire exterior walls of a tower now needs to be removed and replaced. While residents remain resident in the tower. It’s not easy to cheap to retrofit the buildings. Or maybe it is and the building industry is run by scumbags who having created this issue, are now double dipping. Or maybe it’s a little bit of both. I don’t know myself.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tgv 6y ago
  True, that looks like a substantial amount. The outside of an average flat is a few square meters (45m2 already seems a lot). It surely can't cost upwards of £1000/m2 to replace cladding? A (Australian) price quote on the web says £12k for a house of 400m2.
itronitron 6y ago
What is a leaseholder in the UK?
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  The UK, for historic reasons, doesn’t believe in private property for the common man; almost all property in the form of land belongs to the government or someone with a legacy from the ruling class of nobility. Thus most homeowners don’t own the land their home is on, they just own a very long term lease from the actual landowner (not sure precisely what is customary these days, but imagine a 99-year lease) with N decades left on it. This is a leasehold. Owning the land is called a freehold, and the owners are called freeholders instead of leaseholders. Contrast the US where a lease of a home is typically paid monthly and contracted on a year to year basis.
  - iso1210 6y ago
    > almost all property in the form of land belongs to the government or someone with a legacy from the ruling class of nobility In terms of acres the land is owned by descendents of friends of Henry 8th, sure. Majority of houses though aren't leasehold - although many new houses are being sold as leasehold for the last 20 years or so.
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      Thank you for the clarifications. I never personally got anything beyond a shorthold while in the UK.
  - dboreham 6y ago
    Pretty sure this is not the case in Scotland (still part of the UK) since some time in the 70s and definitely since 2000. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc._(Scotland)_Act_2000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_e...
  - joosters 6y ago
    > The UK, for historic reasons, doesn’t believe in private property for the common man On the contrary, the UK is deeply obsessed with house ownership! The key word though is 'house', the Grenfell related scandals have all been about large blocks of flats, where the residents will almost certainly be leaseholders, with the actual building owned by someone else (probably a company)
sanp 6y ago
Leaseholders / Owners should be the on the hook for bringing their buildings up to the right safety standards. This is a risk they should bear. Who gets the upside when lease / property values go up in general? This is their responsibility.
- buckminster 6y ago
  I absolutely agree. Non-owners are typically paying more in rent than a mortgage would cost, yet they can't get a mortgage because of the absurd rules brought in after the 2008 financial crisis. Even after paying for this expensive remediation, the flat owners will still be ahead of renters. Why should tax-paying renters bail them out?
- hyko 6y ago
  Well if we’re going down that road, technically whoever did the conveyance and survey should be on the hook as they provided the advice that formed the basis of the purchase. They won’t be though.
- bennyelv 6y ago
  That is a very basic analysis and it misses the point. There is a system of building regulation in the UK that makes it illegal to build a building or to carry out building work which does not comply. The building regulations in the area we're talking about here are very simple. They don't specify how, just what. E.g. The cladding material must not be flammable (simplified). There is a system of building inspection and certification, and you cannot buy/sell/insure a building that does not have a certificate to prove that it complies with building regulations. The issue is that at some point some complete genius said "if you're a large enough housebuilder, you can self certify". All of the effected properties were bought in good faith with completion certificates that stated that they complied with building regulation. The properties with flammable cladding that needs replacing do not comply with building regulations. You can't sue the builder/developer in most cases, because this will have happened more than 10 years ago. The system of regulation is there to protect the public from unsafe buildings, and it has failed them. Why shouldn't the government pay, after all it was their promise that has been broken.

lmm 6y ago

> The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill. How does the amendment ensure leaseholders don't have to pay without putting taxholders on the hook? You can't make money from nowhere.

dijksterhuis 6y ago
In a Venn diagram, "not leaseholders" will be all other space on the diagram. I imagine it's meant to leave all other options on the table (taxpayers, developers and/or anyone else) rather than force a specific choice (except leaseholders).
- lmm 6y ago
  If you legislate that it's not X and it's not Y and it's not Z, pretty soon it's no-one. Legislating that it can't be X is de facto making it the taxpayers' responsibility (or else permitting it to not be done at all).
iso1210 6y ago
The person that owns the actual building and land could pay. The company and officers who sold the cladding (especially the ones who cheated on the tests) could pay
contravariant 6y ago
The one coherent explanation I can come up with is that they want to fund it by taxing people/companies that evade taxes. Though that doesn't sound right for the current UK government.
- lmm 6y ago
  That money would normally go into the tax bucket, so it's really still being taxpayer-funded in that case.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Well they're not currently taxpayers at the very least, in contrast to the leaseholders who presumably are mostly taxpayers.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Are you being deliberately obtuse? Money is fungible, money recovered from tax evaders rightly belongs in the general taxation pool, funding X with money recovered from tax evaders is no different from funding X with money from the general taxation pool (unless X somehow enables recovering more money from tax evaders that wouldn't otherwise happens).

vijayr02 6y ago

I agree, here is a related story I'd submitted a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25460601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25460601 This story is about how fire watches are being organised with little to no notice and the costs charged to the flat owners. In general the leasehold system in the UK is quite unfit for purpose and a proper feudal throwback. Agency problems galore and regulatory rent seeking at it's worst. I'm surprised there is not a more sustained political movement to get rid of it!

suvelx 6y ago

> The government have put together a fund of £1bn for non-ACM cladding remediation, expecting that to cover ~600 buildings, but already over 2,700 buildings have applied and the estimated cost UK-wide is upwards of £15bn. Non-ACM over 18m tall. Shorter buildings (the majority) are up shits creek too. There's also a 30M fund for waking-watch relief... Which at 150k per alarm, you can get 200 alarms. > The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill. AFAIK It was initially rejected because it was worded in such a way that would make freeholders liable for other fire-safety things such as failsafe latches. Prioritizing freeholders paying out hundreds of pounds every decade over bankrupting thousands if not millions of people. It's a farce. The building has industry paid millions in donations to the Conservative party since Grenfell. And at every turn despite parroting "leaseholders should not pay" it has been obvious that they really meant "should pay". Meanwhile, in a fit of hypocrisy, Jenrick has been campaigning for a (Labuor) council to fix a bridge "because they own it".

Retric 6y ago
> Shorter buildings (the majority) are up shits creek too. Under ~18m tall building are much easier to escape from in a fire and thus have different fire safety rules. People can normally exit the building quickly. Worst case jumping from the 3-5th story is likely to result in serious injury but is often survivable. Start talking 6+ floor things get exponentially worse with every additional floor increasing the risks. This is of course an arbitrary line, I would have a lower limit but the tradeoffs are complicated.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  > Worst case jumping from the 3-5th story is likely to result in serious injury but is often survivable. A brief web search suggests to me that about 50% of people who fall from 15 meters (approx 4th floor) will die. Those are awful odds, and most survivers of falls from that height probably aren't landing on the sort of pavement you might expect to be surrounding a high-rise building. And how many of the survivers ever walk again? How many can even feed themselves again? Seriously, 50% is worse than even russian roulette, a 'game' generally recognized as suicidal.

jonatron 6y ago

I keep seeing sums like £50k and £100k per flat for cladding. How is that possible? Isn't that multiple times what a new roof would cost on a house? Or a substantial extension.

oarsinsync 6y ago
Generally the entire exterior walls of a tower now needs to be removed and replaced. While residents remain resident in the tower. It’s not easy to cheap to retrofit the buildings. Or maybe it is and the building industry is run by scumbags who having created this issue, are now double dipping. Or maybe it’s a little bit of both. I don’t know myself.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tgv 6y ago
True, that looks like a substantial amount. The outside of an average flat is a few square meters (45m2 already seems a lot). It surely can't cost upwards of £1000/m2 to replace cladding? A (Australian) price quote on the web says £12k for a house of 400m2.

itronitron 6y ago

What is a leaseholder in the UK?

fennecfoxen 6y ago
The UK, for historic reasons, doesn’t believe in private property for the common man; almost all property in the form of land belongs to the government or someone with a legacy from the ruling class of nobility. Thus most homeowners don’t own the land their home is on, they just own a very long term lease from the actual landowner (not sure precisely what is customary these days, but imagine a 99-year lease) with N decades left on it. This is a leasehold. Owning the land is called a freehold, and the owners are called freeholders instead of leaseholders. Contrast the US where a lease of a home is typically paid monthly and contracted on a year to year basis.
- iso1210 6y ago
  > almost all property in the form of land belongs to the government or someone with a legacy from the ruling class of nobility In terms of acres the land is owned by descendents of friends of Henry 8th, sure. Majority of houses though aren't leasehold - although many new houses are being sold as leasehold for the last 20 years or so.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Thank you for the clarifications. I never personally got anything beyond a shorthold while in the UK.
- dboreham 6y ago
  Pretty sure this is not the case in Scotland (still part of the UK) since some time in the 70s and definitely since 2000. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc._(Scotland)_Act_2000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_e...
- joosters 6y ago
  > The UK, for historic reasons, doesn’t believe in private property for the common man On the contrary, the UK is deeply obsessed with house ownership! The key word though is 'house', the Grenfell related scandals have all been about large blocks of flats, where the residents will almost certainly be leaseholders, with the actual building owned by someone else (probably a company)

sanp 6y ago

Leaseholders / Owners should be the on the hook for bringing their buildings up to the right safety standards. This is a risk they should bear. Who gets the upside when lease / property values go up in general? This is their responsibility.

buckminster 6y ago
I absolutely agree. Non-owners are typically paying more in rent than a mortgage would cost, yet they can't get a mortgage because of the absurd rules brought in after the 2008 financial crisis. Even after paying for this expensive remediation, the flat owners will still be ahead of renters. Why should tax-paying renters bail them out?
hyko 6y ago
Well if we’re going down that road, technically whoever did the conveyance and survey should be on the hook as they provided the advice that formed the basis of the purchase. They won’t be though.
bennyelv 6y ago
That is a very basic analysis and it misses the point. There is a system of building regulation in the UK that makes it illegal to build a building or to carry out building work which does not comply. The building regulations in the area we're talking about here are very simple. They don't specify how, just what. E.g. The cladding material must not be flammable (simplified). There is a system of building inspection and certification, and you cannot buy/sell/insure a building that does not have a certificate to prove that it complies with building regulations. The issue is that at some point some complete genius said "if you're a large enough housebuilder, you can self certify". All of the effected properties were bought in good faith with completion certificates that stated that they complied with building regulation. The properties with flammable cladding that needs replacing do not comply with building regulations. You can't sue the builder/developer in most cases, because this will have happened more than 10 years ago. The system of regulation is there to protect the public from unsafe buildings, and it has failed them. Why shouldn't the government pay, after all it was their promise that has been broken.