the snap general election thread

kabayiri

ThinkingOutLoud wrote: »

...
The need to properly re-evaluate building regulations and fire safety for tower blocks and act is self-evident as is the independent Public Enquiry to get underneath how this came about at every level.

There is possibly a bigger problem developing with so called sheds with beds, and slum rentals.

A friend works for a LA environmental health department. There are clearly growing numbers of substandard dwellings.

Bad boiler installations can easily lead to Carbon Monoxide poisoning. It's a silent killer.

ThinkingOutLoud_2

kabayiri wrote: »

There is possibly a bigger problem developing with so called sheds with beds, and slum rentals.

A friend works for a LA environmental health department. There are clearly growing numbers of substandard dwellings.

Bad boiler installations can easily lead to Carbon Monoxide poisoning. It's a silent killer.

Agreed - there is a huge risk every available resource is put to a single highly sensitive event, hence my support for a broader, more balanced strategy above.

GreatApe

ukcarper wrote: »

This is just another arrogant point by greatApe, the majority of people know you can't mitigate risk completely but it's where you draw the line, as you say £30 million is a small about in terms of public spending.

without looking at the risk you mitigate its pointless pretending £30 million is small or large. If £30 million one off system lasts 50 years and saves 1,000 people per year its a bargain. If the same £30 million one of system saves 1 person per 1000 years then its grossly uneconomic even though in both cases the cost is the same £30 million



Here are the figures for domestic fires in the UK

'39,600 were fires in dwellings which caused 258 deaths and 7,758 injuries' This is for 2014

'The cost of adding a full fire sprinkler system to an average 3 bedroom family home is in the region of £3000- £9000 depending on the system type' So lets go for the mid point of £6,000 per house

28 million properties in the UK thus equals £168 billion a huge sum of money.
If the system lasts 50 years and we use a discount rate of 4% the cost is £7.8 billion per year

Lets say sprinklers save 80% of people (its unlikely to save 100%) that £7.8 billion annual cost buys you 206 saved lives. Which is £37.9 million per saved life
By comparison the NHS is unwilling to spend more than £25-30k per quality life year saved.
It appears sprinklers cost some 30-40 x more than what the NHS is willing to spend to save a life. Or another way to put it is you can save 30-40 x as many lives spending a pound on the NHS than you can spending a pound on sprinklers

What people should be pushing for is for someone to come up with a much cheaper but still effective sprinkler system. So instead of it costing £6000 to fit a house it should cost £200 or less which is more or less impossible. So domestic fire is a risk we have to accept and live with and put any spare money into other more effective life saving and extending areas like the NHS

ukcarper

ThinkingOutLoud wrote: »

Well I guess that might be a small sum - but if we don't focus that pound from everyone working well - we will be asking for another and another...

You need a coherent overall plan and a total cost - not an incremental cost along the way never knowing when it will stop.

More of an issue is you can't and maybe don't need to spend £6k on every tower block and fix it. They are either already clad OK or they are not clad or they are clad in this stuff so it has to be removed and ...

And that money doesn't fit a sprinter system to a single one...

Seems to me like you need a well-thought through totally costed and funded plan and that the project should rightly compete for funding with say road safety near schools , NHS life-saving drugs / care needs.

Unless anyone has a magic wand - investing to fix "years of neglect" won't be an overnight solution however much money you have.

And all the parties will have to add something to their next manifesto that spells out what they will commit to ongoing! Nothing in the last one's about this, so it is all extra.

I agree the money needs to be spent wisely and you can't mitigate risk completely the point I was making is the majority of people know that, it just where you draw the line.

ukcarper

GreatApe wrote: »

without looking at the risk you mitigate its pointless pretending £30 million is small or large. If £30 million one off system lasts 50 years and saves 1,000 people per year its a bargain. If the same £30 million one of system saves 1 person per 1000 years then its grossly uneconomic even though in both cases the cost is the same £30 million



Here are the figures for domestic fires in the UK

'39,600 were fires in dwellings which caused 258 deaths and 7,758 injuries' This is for 2014

'The cost of adding a full fire sprinkler system to an average 3 bedroom family home is in the region of £3000- £9000 depending on the system type' So lets go for the mid point of £6,000 per house

28 million properties in the UK thus equals £168 billion a huge sum of money.
If the system lasts 50 years and we use a discount rate of 4% the cost is £7.8 billion per year

Lets say sprinklers save 80% of people (its unlikely to save 100%) that £7.8 billion annual cost buys you 206 saved lives. Which is £37.9 million per saved life
By comparison the NHS is unwilling to spend more than £25-30k per quality life year saved.
It appears sprinklers cost some 30-40 x more than what the NHS is willing to spend to save a life. Or another way to put it is you can save 30-40 x as many lives spending a pound on the NHS than you can spending a pound on sprinklers

What people should be pushing for is for someone to come up with a much cheaper but still effective sprinkler system. So instead of it costing £6000 to fit a house it should cost £200 or less which is more or less impossible. So domestic fire is a risk we have to accept and live with and put any spare money into other more effective life saving and extending areas like the NHS

This is just another example of you using unappropriate figures to try and back your argument. You don't need to fit sprinklers everywhere just in high risk properties.

GreatApe

ukcarper wrote: »

I agree the money needs to be spent wisely and you can't mitigate risk completely the point I was making is the majority of people know that, it just where you draw the line.

The majority of people dont know that the majority just like the majority of the media think why the hell wasn't £200,000 sprinklers fitted to save this flat and the 100 people killed or hurt from it. The ignorant left also want to somehow link this to the government budget and blame it on May and her government.

My best guess/calculation right now is fire sprinklers would save lives at a cost of about £38 million per life saved. That means fire risk is one of the risks we can not economically reduce further so it is a risk we simply accept and move on and allocate resources to other areas.

Also uk fire deaths are very low about half what they are in France/USA/Canada/Finland etc

LHW99

An issue with any sprinkler system is that actually most deaths are as a result of smoke inhalation.
Sprinklers, as with fire extinguishers, are only useful if they can actually put a fire out.
It appears that a major issue was that there was only one escape stair, and that was filled with smoke, hence reports of people collapse and worse on the stairway out.
Sprinklers would not have solve that issue.
Adding an external stirway might, but it would need to have been secure, and useable by very small children, the elderly and people carrying babies - so not fixed ladders.

A question that the enquiry needs to answer is, if flats are supposed to have 1 hour fire resistance, how did flames reach the external cladding for it to catch in the first place, since we hear (but don't actually know for sure) it began with a fridge inside a flat.

GreatApe

ukcarper wrote: »

This is just another example of you using unappropriate figures to try and back your argument. You don't need to fit sprinklers everywhere just in high risk properties.

I couldn't find data for the uk but in the USA it looks like high rise buildings are at lower fire risk than houses with high rise buildings seeing about 1/3rd as many fires propagate more than one room and 1/3rd as many fires propagate more than one floor. I suspect the same is true in the UK that high rise buildings are designed to be more fire resistant than normal homes

So while our gut feeling seems to be that flats are more risky it is probably the opposite

Another interesting bit is that of the fire deaths in the uk about 1/3rd are down to fires started by smokers gear (matches lighters cigarettes). If you ban smoking you would save about 100 fire deaths each and every year so a grenfell could be avoided each and every year if everyone quit smoking.

ukcarper

GreatApe wrote: »

The majority of people dont know that the majority just like the majority of the media think why the hell wasn't £200,000 sprinklers fitted to save this flat and the 100 people killed or hurt from it. The ignorant left also want to somehow link this to the government budget and blame it on May and her government.

My best guess/calculation right now is fire sprinklers would save lives at a cost of about £38 million per life saved. That means fire risk is one of the risks we can not economically reduce further so it is a risk we simply accept and move on and allocate resources to other areas.

Also uk fire deaths are very low about half what they are in France/USA/Canada/Finland etc

No that's just your view,

Herzlos

GreatApe wrote: »

'The cost of adding a full fire sprinkler system to an average 3 bedroom family home is in the region of £3000- £9000 depending on the system type' So lets go for the mid point of £6,000 per house

You keep banging on about the cost of fitting a sprinkler system to every house, and people have pointed out at least 3 times that it's not relevant - you do not need a sprinkler in your average 2/3 story house.

You need a sprinkler system in a 4+ story dwelling*, which cuts your number of installations down drastically.

Do you fancy trying to run the relevant numbers?


*i.e. the ones where you have no option but to go down a huge central stairwell. You don't need a sprinker if you can climb out of the window or can be reached with a ladder.