This week’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry report identified ‘systematic failures’ in the regulatory function of building control. Mo Baines, chief executive of the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE), calls for an end to the hollowing out of public service capacity.
The second report of the Grenfell Inquiry pulls no punches. A masterclass in forensic inquiry, it sets out in the starkest of detail what can only be described as catastrophic whole-system failure.
For decades, the UK’s public services, including social housing, have been beholden to a narrative by successive governments that markets know best; that ‘big state’ is a 1970s relic; that freedoms to use different delivery models will produce better public services that are ‘more efficient’ (cheaper) and will be more responsive to public need; that deregulation will turbo charge the economy.
The second report of the Grenfell Inquiry lays bare these supposed wisdoms. Instead, it exposes the prioritisation of profit over people’s safety. It exposes the failure of any democratic accountability over those who should have had the interests of the Grenfell tenants at their heart. Instead, legitimate questions on fire safety were belittled and ignored, within a culture which despised the audacity of tenants questioning the all-knowing tenant management organisation.
Commercial interests were not just advanced by the deception of the companies supplying the defective panels but were aided and abetted by Government, sweeping away the ‘burden’ of regulation, enabling a further loosening of checks and balances. The taunts of those decision-makers and commentators who regularly mocked ‘elf n safety’ culture rings even more hollow in the wake of the inquiry.
But at the heart of all of this is groupthink. For decades anyone challenging the narrative of fragmented models of public service delivery, that stood up for that old-fashioned concept of accountability, that promoted the case for insourcing those outsourced contracts, and that challenged the idea that, actually, some ‘community’ organisations were not best placed to deliver public services that ought to be run by professionals, were denigrated. The tragedy of Grenfell exposes how such fragmented, marketised and de-regulated systems really work. Most often, they simply do not work.
Whilst Grenfell will forever be remembered tragically as a wake-up call, the issues within the report findings could be applied to many other scenarios.
Social housing more generally has been subjected to years of fragmentation and decline with models that removed the local council in trade-offs for funding for decent home standards. The plethora of models from housing co-ops to trusts to arm’s length management organisations, have not delivered. The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation is a notable case in point.
We have the worst housing crisis since the Second World War, which includes appalling standards of mould and damp, shortages in supply as well as rocketing rents in a de-regulated private rented sector. In new homes, we have developers dictating to councils on all matters – from affordable homes to spatial standards and, with it, the privatisation of the public realm through complex urban development models.
It is not just housing that has suffered. Social care is now beholden to a market with assets owned by offshore multi-millionaires who, at a whim, can choose to dispose of a care home leaving the local authority to pick up the burden. So too in children’s homes, the lack of owned local authority provision sends the most vulnerable young people out of the area and away from any support networks. Why? Because that is the impact of market models.
In a UK beset by an obesity crisis and rampant child poverty, we have turned school meals into a commodity. Schools and academies can go to the market, and whilst there are good suppliers there is little by way of checks on what children are eating. This means local authority providers, who create better conditions of employment and comply with nutritional standards, are overlooked by school governors and headteachers who complain their services are too expensive.
In short, the ability of the state to control markets was always mythical in many ways. You cannot outsource risk. And yet concepts such as the ‘thin client’ – akin to the private sector saying we are so good we don’t need to be performance managed – and the self-interests of providers who are answerable to share-holders, is fundamentally wrongheaded. Public service capacity has been hollowed out by privatisation, austerity and deregulation.
Grenfell is sadly the wakeup call that has been a long-time coming.
