With Grenfell Tower, we’ve seen what ‘ripping up red tape’ really looks like

George Monbiot in The Guardian

For years successive governments have built what they call a bonfire of regulations. They have argued that “red tape” impedes our freedom and damages productivity. Britain, they have assured us, would be a better place with fewer forms to fill in, fewer inspections and less enforcement.
But what they call red tape often consists of essential public protections that defend our lives, our futures and the rest of the living world. The freedom they celebrate is highly selective: in many cases it means the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor, of corporations to exploit their workers, landlords to exploit their tenants and industry of all kinds to use the planet as its dustbin. As RH Tawney remarked, “Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.”

It will be a long time before we know exactly what caused the horrific fire in the Grenfell Tower, and why it was able to rage so freely, with such devastating loss of life. But it seems at this stage likely that the rapidity with which the fire spread was either caused or exacerbated by the cladding with which the tower was refurbished.

There have been plenty of warnings that cladding can present a severe fire risk. To give just one example, in 1999 the House of Commons select committee on environment, transport and rural affairs published a report entitled Potential Risk of Fire Spread in Buildings Via External Cladding Systems.

But both Conservative and New Labour governments have been highly reluctant to introduce new public protections, even when the need is pressing. They have been highly amenable to tearing down existing protections at the behest of trade associations and corporate lobbyists. Deregulation of this kind is a central theme of the neoliberal ideology to which both the Conservatives and Labour under Tony Blair succumbed.

In 2014, the then housing minister (who is now the immigration minister), Brandon Lewis, rejected calls to force construction companies to fit sprinklers in the homes they built on the following grounds:


Conservative MPs see Brexit as an excellent opportunity to strip back regulations

“In our commitment to be the first Government to reduce regulation, we have introduced the one in, two out rule for regulation … Under that rule, when the Government introduce a regulation, we will identify two existing ones to be removed. The Department for Communities and Local Government has gone further and removed an even higher proportion of regulations. In that context, Members will understand why we want to exhaust all non-regulatory options before we introduce any new regulations.”

In other words, though he accepted that sprinklers “are an effective way of controlling fires and of protecting lives and property”, to oblige builders to introduce them would conflict with the government’s deregulatory agenda. Instead, it would be left to the owners of buildings to decide how best to address the fire risk: “Those with responsibility for ensuring fire safety in their businesses, in their homes or as landlords, should and must make informed decisions on how best to manage the risks in their own properties,” Lewis said.

This calls to mind the Financial Times journalist Willem Buiter’s famous remark that “self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance”. Case after case, across all sectors, demonstrates that self-regulation is no substitute for consistent rules laid down, monitored and enforced by government.

Crucial public protections have long been derided in the billionaire press as “elf ’n’ safety gone mad”. It’s not hard to see how ruthless businesses can cut costs by cutting corners, and how this gives them an advantage over their more scrupulous competitors.

Grenfell Tower fire is corporate manslaughter, says Labour MP



The “pollution paradox” (those corporations whose practices are most offensive to voters have to spend the most money on politics, with the result that their demands come to dominate political life) ensures that our protections are progressively dismantled by governments courting big donors.

Conservative MPs see Brexit as an excellent opportunity to strip back regulations. The speed with which the “great repeal bill” will have to pass through parliament (assuming that any of Theresa May’s programme can now be implemented) provides unprecedented scope to destroy the protections guaranteed by European regulations. The bill will rely heavily on statutory instruments, which permit far less parliamentary scrutiny than primary legislation. Unnoticed and undebated, crucial elements of public health and safety, workers’ rights and environmental protection could be made to disappear.

Too many times we have seen what the bonfire of regulations, which might sound like common sense when issuing from the mouths of ministers, looks like in the real world. The public protections that governments describe as red tape are what make the difference between a good society and barbarism. It is time to bring the disastrous deregulatory agenda to an end, and put public safety and other basic decencies ahead of corner-cutting and greed.

The cities where exercise does more harm than good

 Nick Van Mead in The Guardian

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Monday 13 February 2017 07.00 GMTLast modified on Monday 13 February 2017 07.02 GMT

Who says exercise is always good for you? Cycling to work in certain highly polluted cities could be more dangerous to your health than not doing it at all, according to researchers.


In cities such as Allahabad in India, or Zabol in Iran, the long-term damage from inhaling fine particulates could outweigh the usual health gains of cycling after just 30 minutes. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this tipping point happens after just 45 minutes a day cycling along busy roads. In Delhi or the Chinese city of Xingtai, meanwhile, residents pass what the researchers call the “breakeven point” after an hour. Other exercise with the same intensity as cycling – such as slow jogging – would have the same effect.

“If you are beyond the breakeven point, you may be doing yourself more harm than good,” said Audrey de Nazelle, a lecturer in air pollution management at Imperial College’s Centre for Environmental Policy, and one of the authors of the report.

The study, originally published in the journal Preventive Medicine before the World Health Organization’s latest global estimates, modelled the health effects of active travel and of air pollution. They measured air quality through average annual levels of PM2.5s, the tiny pollutant particles that can embed themselves deep in the lungs. This type of air pollution can occur naturally – from dust storms or forest fires, for example – but is mainly created by motor vehicles and manufacturing.

Breathing polluted air has been linked to infections including pneumonia, ischemic heart disease, stroke and some cancers. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease study ranks it among the top risk factors for loss of health.

The report in Preventive Medicine assumed cyclists moved at speeds of 12/14kph, with health benefits calculated in a similar way to the WHO’s Heat assessment tool. It also assumed cyclists used roads with double the background levels of air pollution, which may underestimate how poor air quality is in many developing world cities: for example, a study in Lagos found five out of eight sites exceeded Delhi’s annual PM2.5 concentration.

People commuting to work along busy roads in a city with average annual background PM2.5 levels of 160 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m3) or above will pass the breakeven point at just 30 minutes a day, the study found. Using the WHO’s latest global estimates, published in May, those levels are only reached in Zabor, and in Allahabad and Gwalior in India – although many large cities in the developing world do not accurately measure air pollution so were not included in the WHO database.

Fifteen cities (see map above and table below) have annual mean PM2.5 levels of 115μg/m3 or above, according to the WHO data, so the breakeven point is reached after an hour of active travel. Fine particulate levels above 80μg/m3 were found in 62 cities, making cycling more harmful than beneficial after two hours.

The study found people in western cities such as London, Paris or New York would never reach the point where PM2.5 air pollution’s negatives outweigh exercise’s positives in the long term.

“The benefits of active travel outweighed the harm from air pollution in all but the most extreme air pollution concentrations,” said Nazelle. “It is not currently an issue for healthy adults in Europe in general.”

London’s annual average PM2.5 pollution was estimated at 15μg/m3 by the WHO – above the WHO’s guideline of 10, but still at a level at which the study estimated active travel would always be beneficial. Paris had ambient PM2.5 levels of 18μg/m3, while New York had 9μg/m3.

However, the study did not consider the health impacts of short-term spikes in PM2.5 pollution, or take into account the effect of exercising in air containing larger PM10 particulates, ozone, or toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel cars.

London mayor Sadiq Khan issued his first “very high” air pollution alert last month when air in the UK capital hit the maximum score of 10 on the Air Quality Index, equivalent to PM10 in excess of 101μg/m3. NOx pollution causes 5,900 early deaths a year in the city, and most air quality zones across Britain break legal limits.

“This is the highest level of alert and everyone – from the most vulnerable to the physically fit – may need to take precautions to protect themselves from the filthy air,” Khan warned.

The point at which air pollution becomes so bad that the harm from cycling to work outweighs the health benefits

City	Country	PM2.5 annual mean, micrograms/m3, from WHO 2016	Minutes spent cycling per day for harm to outweigh benefits
Zabol	Iran (Islamic Republic of)	217	30
Gwalior	India	176	30
Allahabad	India	170	30
Riyadh	Saudi Arabia	156	45
Al Jubail	Saudi Arabia	152	45
Patna	India	149	45
Raipur	India	144	45
Bamenda	Cameroon	132	45
Xingtai	China	128	60
Baoding	China	126	60
Delhi	India	122	60
Ludhiana	India	122	60
Dammam	Saudi Arabia	121	60
Shijiazhuang	China	121	60
Kanpur	India	115	60
Khanna	India	114	75
Firozabad	India	113	75
Lucknow	India	113	75
Handan	China	112	75
Peshawar	Pakistan	111	75
Amritsar	India	108	75
Gobindgarh	India	108	75
Rawalpindi	Pakistan	107	75
Hengshui	China	107	75
Narayangonj	Bangladesh	106	75
Boshehr	Iran (Islamic Republic of)	105	75
Agra	India	105	75
Kampala	Uganda	104	90
Tangshan	China	102	90
Jodhpur	India	101	90
Dehradun	India	100	90
Ahmedabad	India	100	90
Jaipur	India	100	90
Howrah	India	100	90
Faridabad	India	98	90
Yenbu	Saudi Arabia	97	90
Langfang	China	96	90
Dhanbad	India	95	90
Chittagong	Bangladesh	95	90
Ahvaz	Iran (Islamic Republic of)	95	90
Doha	Qatar	93	105
Bhopal	India	93	105
Khurja	India	90	105
Dhaka	Bangladesh	90	105
Kaduna	Nigeria	90	105
Gazipur	Bangladesh	89	105
Karachi	Pakistan	88	105
Cangzhou	China	88	105
Baghdad	Iraq	88	105
Al-Shuwaikh	Kuwait	88	105
Tianjin	China	87	105
Raebareli	India	87	105
Kabul	Afghanistan	86	105
Zhengzhou	China	86	105
Barisal	Bangladesh	85	105
Beijing	China	85	105
Al Wakrah	Qatar	85	105
Kota	India	84	120
Udaipur	India	83	120
TETOVO	The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia	81	120
Alwar	India	81	120
Wuhan	China	80	120

The Observer view on corporate cheats

“If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen” ran the slogan of one of VW’s most iconic ad campaigns. Last week’s revelations that VW deliberately and illegally cheated emissions tests will rightly do irreparable damage to a global brand that has traded off its reputation for quality and reliability.

The way this has played out on both sides of the Atlantic raises two critical and related questions about corporate accountability. First, VW is only the latest in a series of global corporates to be caught breaking the law, a sure sign that, even where regulations exist, they are often not fit for purpose. Second, VW’s law-breaking has highlighted the extent to which powerful industry lobbying has watered down European testing to the extent it can be manipulated without illegal action, and at terrible cost. Air pollution accounts for some 50,000 premature deaths a year in the UK – three times as many as liver disease. But in the face of corporate lobbying, EU and government efforts to address it have been utterly inadequate.

“It was not an accident… a lot of work has gone into this,” was the verdict of John German of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the NGO that uncovered VW’s use of sophisticated software to flout US emissions tests. It’s a textbook case of predatory capitalism: a global business deliberately flouting regulations to harm the environment and cause unnecessary deaths in the name of profit.

The business community reacted with outrage when former Labour leader Ed Miliband condemned predatory businesses, accusing him of unfairly tarring the whole private sector with this brush. But each new corporate scandal makes this response more untenable. Scandals in banking, energy and food show that a serious misdemeanour at one global firm is often indicative of poor practice across a whole industry. Other car firms have already been found guilty of illegally manipulating tests, albeit not on the scale of VW.

The common lesson from these scandals is that capitalism is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. But unless they are rooted out, poor cultures that permit bad individual behaviour can and will develop in businesses. Companies such as VW employ the equivalent of a small city’s worth of people: in a company that size, there may well be employees with criminal tendencies. What’s critical is whether company cultures root out these bad apples, or whether they allow them to set in train a corporate race to the bottom. This is not an insight limited to business: the MP expenses scandal and widespread doping in athletics show what happens when people feel able to police themselves.

The financial crisis should have served as a warning of how imperfect our regulatory systems are at rooting out criminal practices within business. But the debate about reforms to corporate accountability has not been commensurate with the scale of the challenge. This is partly because there are no easy solutions. There is a consensus that regulators need to focus more on firm cultures, but little understanding about what an effective approach might look like. Greater personal liability undoubtedly has a role to play, but is no magic fix, as poor organisational cultures can encourage people to take risks regardless of the consequences.

The German system of corporate governance – often held up as an exemplar for its employee representation – has failed to prevent scandals afflicting big German companies such as Siemens, Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Telecom: a system designed to work for modestly sized, community-rooted businesses has not worked in holding global giants to account. But corporate governance is an imperfect lever through which to try to change corporate culture.

The VW case shows how a relatively small NGO running independent tests was eventually able to get US – if not European – regulators to take action. It demonstrates how independent civil society organisations can play an important role in holding corporates to account: but to do so, they need to be properly resourced.

This is particularly true given the way in which global companies have wielded their huge power to get regulations watered down, perhaps the most shocking aspect of how this has played out in Europe.

Air quality is a serious killer. But addressing it is easier than other public health challenges because it relies more heavily on changing corporate than individual behaviour. It is much more localised than climate change policy: unlike with carbon emissions, action to improve air quality in the UK overwhelmingly benefits the UK. Yet the immense lobbying power of the German car industry has knocked air quality down the agenda both in Brussels and Westminster. As a result, EU emissions tests are far laxer than in the US. There are even legal loopholes that allow car manufacturers to use the type of software that VW was found to be using in the US.

The European Commission and the government have both been warned about the implications: some diesel cars that have passed European laboratory tests have been found to be producing seven times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide emissions. But as reported by this paper today, the government has been seeking to block EU legislation to toughen up emissions tests. And it has ignored European legal limits for nitrogen dioxide levels altogether. It has taken a legal case by the NGO Client Earth to force Defra even to consult on proposals to reduce air pollution, proposals that experts believe fall far short of what’s needed. The scale of government inaction in the face of heavy industry lobbying is staggering even in relation to other public health challenges such as obesity and smoking.

As well as tougher European vehicle testing and a properly resourced plan from government to improve air quality, there needs to be a more holistic approach to environmental policy. Diesel has been promoted as a greener alternative to petrol as a result of its lower carbon emissions, but it performs much worse on air quality. There are similar issues with biomass. Yet climate change policy sits with the department of energy and climate change, while air quality is the responsibility of Defra.

VW’s behaviour has had terrible consequences for global human health. It is only the latest warning that business regulation remains unfit for purpose, and a powerful reminder that corporate lobbying has too often stopped governments taking action to prevent avoidable human suffering. It must not take another corporate scandal on this scale to get governments to act.