Sprinklers: A Key Indicator of Economic and Social Wellbeing

I have rabbited on about sprinklers in buildings on several occasions in the past, most notably in the context of the Grenfell Tower disaster in Kensington. I do it today in the context of another issue that has surfaced in the media in the past 24 hours: namely the fact - as officially recorded - that fewer new schools are built with sprinkler systems than in past decades.

Sprinklers are devices to produce a heavy shower of water inside a building that is on fire, and if they are properly installed to a good design [and an appropriate specification of devices used] they massively reduce the risk of destruction of the contents of the building and of death and serious damage to people and animals. There are advanced techniques for drying-out water-damaged assets.

The aspect of the prevalent free-markets dogma that is most directly damaging to human beings is the reduction and removal of controls that prevent dangerous structures and situations from being permitted. There was an almost-golden age of safety in factories and public buildings, when the local fire brigade had the power to insist that safety systems like supplementary escape staircases and sprinkler systems had to be installed in a building before it was granted a 'fire certificate' that permitted a range of uses of the premises. Buildings with fire certificates were usually acceptable to be insured - with their contents, including liabilities to people and to other entities than the owner or operator of the building - but nevertheless the insurance companies employed their own Inspectors who could enter the premises and check that safety systems, including sprinklers, were appropriate and properly maintained and fully functional. That last sentence is important, because it is possible to have a well-designed system that is regularly inspected but which can be switched off [or the water turned off] by human oversight or negligence: or as part of the preparations for a fraudulent insurance claim for loss of goods kept in the building which were burned in a fire where the sprinklers 'failed to operate'.

The free marketeers have been dominant in the United Kingdom since the Labour government submitted to the International Monetary Fund [IMF] in 1976: in return for being allowed a loan which was intended to 'stabilise' the external value of the pound sterling during a period of extremely high inflation and 'industrial strife', the Callaghan government accepted [very reluctantly] the free-market dogma that the Thatcher regime was to embrace after their election victory in 1979. On that reckoning, the free markets dogmatists - the Econocracy - have dominated society and the economy for forty-one years [though I have pointed out several times that 364 then-practicing Economists signed a letter to the Times in 1982 rejecting the dogma that was to gain hegemony by 2002].

The period since the autumn of 1976 is exactly the period of Britain's absolute decline as a manufacturing country. We have wantonly destroyed coal mining, most steelmaking, large-scale commercial shipbuilding, our separate aircraft industry, the mass production of textiles and most of the armaments industry [including even the capacity to supply uniforms for a mass military]. The economy has grown because new industries have arisen in high technology such as pharmaceuticals and microprocessors, and in the games and the entertainments industries; due to the brilliance of British inventors, some of them in the university system. The balance of payments deficit has been mitigated by sales of much of the new intellectual property to aliens.

At least equally important for the growth of the economy has been the expansion of government and personal debt. Some of the government's debt has been hidden from the official balance sheet, for example in the PFI schemes by which schools and hospitals have been built and funded by businesses on the understanding that the government [or agencies including the NHS and local authorities and their semi-independent social housing departments] will pay for the use of those buildings when complete. Those charges will for decades to come be paid out of the users' annual budgets; and the debt that would otherwise be required to build them is not listed in the public accounts.

In order to pare bits of expenditure off the public accounts, both from the admitted debt for construction and from the the running costs of premises, devices like sprinklers have been made optional. Building operators - including providers of social housing and free schools and the trusts that manage [and profit from] 'academies' - are exempted from costly requirements such as installing and maintaining sprinklers. Thus the 'economic burden' of building and operating the facilities is reduced: and so is the safety and utility of the premises.

The extreme shabbiness of this policy has rightly been attacked by the Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, Dany Cotton. Human lives - even those of children is school and in care - are at unnecessary risk: due to the implementation of policies directly derived from Econocratic dogma. Thus has Economics become directly and fundamentally inhumane.