Book Review: Show Me the Bodies - Peter Apps
Harrowing tales of negligence, but can Labour fix the broken system?
I can’t really believe that this has happened again, but my nemesis Morgan Jones has come out with a review of this book just as I was about to publish. And again, the professional journalist manages to make more eloquent and interesting points than me. In an attempt to make some original points, I have tried to refocus this blog on why social housing is so complicated, and the challenges facing Labour.
Last year, I listened to Peter Apps chair several panels at an Inside Housing conference. Within the social housing sector, there are those people that really get social housing, and Apps is certainly one of them. Housing is complex, because it requires expertise across a huge variety of areas. Politics, economics, construction, regulation, immigration and culture all sit right at the heart of this issue. Tom Harwood might think he has the solution - deregulate to increase supply - but this is outright silly, especially in the context of tragedies such as Grenfell. Lisa Nandy has said she wants to “build a fuck ton of council houses”, again hitting at that supply issue, but when councils and housing associations continue to fail tenants again and again, this won’t solve the cladding or damp & mould problems plaguing tenants daily.
On the legislative side of things, there is no easy solution. Labour have been pushing a nice line about ‘a planning system designed to meet housing need’, but I fear this is almost a juxtaposition.
To come back to the book, the hardest part to read is the story of the Lakanal House fire in 2009, where a the flames spread rapidly up the tower block due to the exterior cladding panels. Eight years would go by where nothing was done about towers like Grenfell, and ultimately 72 people would lose their lives as a result. Even when concerns were raised, the incompetency or carelessness of civil servants was clear:
‘I put the following to [Martin]. If [Approved Document] B wasn’t rewritten in clear language, as the Lakanal Coroner had recommended to the Minister in her Rule 43 letter, then another fire like Lakanal was inevitable.
‘If it happened in the middle of the night when people were asleep then the death toll was likely to be 10 to 12 times the six people who died in the 10 Lakanal fire. Brian Martin’s reply to me was: “Where’s the evidence? Show me the bodies.” This was over a year before the Grenfell Tower fire.’
Who is to blame? Do providers not care? Do legislators not care? Are they underfunded or underpaid? Does bigotry against people in social housing lead to negligence? Can individual civil servants really be single points of failure?
Apps expertly switches between analysis of regulation and harrowing tales of the night of the fire. This stylistic choice serves as a consistent reminder that all the talk of cladding and building safety is fundamentally about people, and the fatal travesty they suffered in 2017.
To return to Labour and their prospective government, the ‘Take Back Control Bill’ would see funding and powers devolved to Local Authorities. Then, it falls to councils to decide which providers to fund and how much stock to build. The instinct that local government often have a better grasp of the issues in their area is a good one, and a move away from a top-down approach is popular, but regulation remains Westminster’s responsibility.
With a real push to become the ‘party of business’, will Labour have the political capital to tighten housing red tape? The trilemma of maintaining fiscal responsibility, housing delivery and building safety is going to be a difficult one for Labour.
Yes, they can end the ‘hunger games’ bidding for levelling up funding, but the money will need to come from somewhere if Nandy is to make social homes the second-largest tenure. Labour will lose their mantle as the party of business if they raise corporation or capital gains tax, so the real risk is that they end up sacrificing safety in an attempt to drive investment. And a generation of social homes will be low quality, health risk or even unsafe properties.
One would hope that politicians have learnt their lesson. But as Apps says “we cannot yet say that another Grenfell is impossible”. Cladding was a blind spot for fire safety, and a lack of proper regulation only makes other blind spots more likely and more dangerous in the future.
