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.

QE: The Social Cost

The Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown [1977-2010] progressively moved from following their Tory predecessor's conservative budgetary policy to creating a deficit on government spending [the amount by which the government spent more than their income from taxes, tolls etc]. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made a very quaint use of the word 'investment'. It has been normal for a couple of centuries [at least] to use the word 'spending' [or expenditure] to mean the amount that is spent on pay-as-you-go government activity, and the word 'investment' to mean spending on projects that have a net cost as they are undertaken, but which it is hoped will yield an economic or a social dividend - ideally, both - when they have been completed. Under Labour, this distinction was eliminated. 'Investment' was just part of current spending: it just sounded better to make it seem as if some future return was in mind.

Alongside this abuse of words [and of common sense] the Labour government introduced the wildly irresponsible PFI concept, by which a school or a hospital building [which could be seen as an investment for the long term, in the conventional understanding of the term] would be built by a private contractor who could then charge a rent for the building while it was in use. This crazy system meant that the contractors, and the funders with whom they formed consortia, would be able to take a high rent from the health service or the school governing body. In addition, many such contracts gave the builder the right to undertake all maintenance work - at their own 'costing' - for several years, at the expense of the user of the building. This obviously provided a massive drain on the income of the user organisation when the premises came into use. As the premises had often been designed many years before they came into use, the designs were often very much less that state-of-the-art when they became operational. Thus taxpayers were involuntarily having to meet these charges.

Thus, when the Tory-LibDem coalition came into power they were horrified at the 'out-of-control' public spending obligations that they confronted. They decided that the burgeoning annual deficit on the national budget must be reduced: then they experienced their own brainstorm, and decided that they must cut future spending projections by the state. Hence began the regime of 'austerity'. Under that regime, public spending has been held down; almost as a matter of faith.

This policy was imposed in 2010, just after the Bank of England had become used to administering its programme of Quantitative Easing, as explained in the previous two blogs. The orderly queue of bankers was allowed each to encash approved securities for new credit, which they could then spend as they wished. This meant that they could keep in being the securities whose existence had been threatened by the market crash of 2007-8 until they came to their term dates; and an increasing proportion of them could be sold once their face-value had been restored [more or less] within the highly flexible wholesale finance market. So while people running public services were increasingly constrained by what they could spend - including on wages and social benefits - the banks could lend more money to firms and to individuals. Not many firms needed to borrow from the banks: the successful among them could derive all the investment they needed from their profits and from share issues; the unsuccessful drew in their horns and hoped to survive. Furthermore, the government provided modest funds to help some classes of start-up and developing businesses [although most of the more successful of them fell prey to overseas takeover, whereupon the technological innovation that they embodied was alienated].

In both the public and the private sectors, wages were constrained; in the public sector by the austerity rules, which included either nil or 1% increases each year. The private sector was able to import staff from less high-wage countries, and a consensus of commentators accepted that the combination of immigration with the appallingly low level of skills among the indigenous British population kept wages low; in both cash terms and real terms. Hence after 2010, most people found that the only way to increase their spending on consumption was by borrowing. Loans and credit card debts were freely available, so people borrowed; largely to buy imported commodities. So the balance-or-payments deficit burgeoned, while the government struggled to keep public spending within the limits that Osborne and then Hammond vainly aimed to enforce. Unsecured household indebtedness increased, alongside the debt that the UK owed to the rest of the wThen it became apparent that QE had another perverse effect on ordinary people. After the financial crisis, new starts in house building had reduced to a record low level; and virtually nobody was building social housing. Thus the resale prices on existing properties increased: but with interest rates set at their lowest ever level by the Bank of England the cost of borrowing [per pound] seemed affordable. Cassandra-like warnings that people who had mortgaged their property heavily might not be able to maintain payments when interest rates rose received scant attention.To get a new home, people had to borrow the money to buy expensive new properties on terms that profitable to their constructors. Mortgages were freely available for house buyers with even modest incomes, thanks to QE and government schemes to enable a minority of first-time buyers to enter the market. The majority of would-be first time buyers could not find the cash deposit they needed to enter the housing market; and anyway their incomes, especially for those burdened by student loan debt, could not support the ongoing cost of house purchase. In addition to the existing poor, there was a growing cohort of nearly-poor, including many graduates. In the next blog I will examine the pattern of poverty in Mrs May's Brexit Britain, and relate it to QE and to austerity.