Engineering ‘Value’

To help dispel some of that plausible deniability, the Inquiry has meticulously catalogued every decision and action that led to the fire. But the complexity of the system, and its attendant jargon, also makes it hard for most people to follow how it all came to pass. The first idea to be understood is a ‘Design and Build’ contract. This means that the client—an owner of a building—initially hires an architect to design a project. However, they don’t hire that architect to see the project through to its completion, only to outline the broad remit of the design, with lots of opportunities for later changes.

At this point they take that architect’s design, and offer the contract out to construction firms, who will each make a bid saying how much they think it will cost to do the job. The looseness of the architect’s design allows them lots of leeway to make changes: substituting expensive materials for cheaper alternatives and laying out opportunities for cost-cutting. With many clients, the point of this process is to award the contract as cheaply as possible. It certainly was the case for Grenfell and the TMO, who were having legally ill-advised meetings with the contractor Rydon about the potential for cost-cutting before the tendering process had even finished.

The process of making construction cheaper through altering designs and changing materials from the initial architect’s design is called ‘value-engineering’. In the case of Grenfell, the architects suggested Zinc cladding panels for the exterior, which were replaced by Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) panels to cut costs. These panels are made from polyethylene insulation sandwiched between thin layers of aluminium which burned as fiercely as solid petrol on the night of the fire.

While the proposals for the Grenfell renovation were going through planning permission, RBKC lost more than half of its Building Control surveyors due to local government cuts under austerity. This left the caseworker for Grenfell, John Hoban, responsible for providing oversight on more than 130 projects. This would be a totally unsustainable workload in any situation, but outright dangerous when the designers and contractors working on Grenfell all claim to have believed that John Hoban was ultimately responsible for ensuring that their work was compliant with regulations.

This failure of Building Control under austerity takes a similar form to the privatisation of the material regulators, who were historically publicly funded, but now fund themselves through contracts with manufacturers. This means they are competing with one another for the custom of the firms they are supposed to be regulating. This competitive marketplace for certification enabled insulation manufacturers like Celotex and Kingspan to use sleight of hand when presenting their highly flammable products like ACM panels to market. This is the have-your-cake-and-eat-it mindset of neoliberalism: rabidly underfund and defang public bodies and regulators, protect private entities from the costs of self-regulation, then act nonplussed when the inevitable result is the avoidable deaths of innocent people.

These huge, abstract trends can seem very nebulous, but there’s a potent, insistent materiality to them when they manifest themselves in your home. This was the experience of the residents of Grenfell Tower who, even before the fire, could see first-hand these systemic failures. They manifested themselves in shoddy workmanship: gaps in panels which let in the wind and exposed insulation which ultimately contributed to the spread of the fire. These dangerous materials dangerously installed were the inevitable result of value-engineering, cost-cutting, and the de-skilling of labour that are the tacit function of contract tendering as it exists today in the UK construction industry.

This is where the best laid plans of architects meet the reality of the construction site, of procurement, of faulty surveys or improper, dangerous, and unsuitable materials. When that happens, there is no substitute for the skill and craft of the workers who put together materials by responding to the reality of the site, and to build something not by bodging, but through thoughtful and reactive work. Unfortunately, these skills cost money to build up and sustain, and everywhere we look in the British construction industry there is an interest in minimising cost at the expense of quality.

Indeed, the failures at Grenfell were particularly egregious, not least because of the disdain with which RBKC treated its social housing tenants. But they are by no means unique in the sector. The downward pressure on quality caused by Design & Build, aggressive tendering processes, and value engineering are endemic. From the supposedly ‘luxury’ high-rise residential blocks that have cropped up all over London in the past decade, to the serried ranks of new build developments which increasingly dominate the fringes of Britain’s towns, a shocking proportion suffer from major defects in construction and design.

Looking for the Snags

New Home Quality Control (NHQC) originated when one of its founding partners, John Cooper, was working at a new-build development site in west Wales. He was a carpenter at the time, working for a company contracted by a major housing developer. One day the site manager told him to disguise serious defects in the construction of a house, ahead of a viewing by potential buyers. Cooper begrudgingly covered over the mistakes, afraid of losing his job if he didn’t. But he couldn’t live with the deception and after waking in the middle of the night some days later, he revealed the problems to the buyers, ahead of a National House Building Council inspection. That day he quit his job and set up NHQC with his colleague Lee Challenger, to start a business dedicated to inspecting the quality of new build homes, a process known as ‘snagging’.

I first discovered NHQC on TikTok, where their charismatic employee Orlando Murphy showcases the worst examples of shoddy workmanship on new build houses; melodiously calling out ‘absolutely shocking’ brickwork, plastering, joinery, and roofing. The firm started their campaign by publishing a PDF of common construction mistakes to empower people to check work for themselves: fake weep vents, insecure roof bracing, abandoned construction mess. All make regular appearances on their TikTok account.

John Cooper’s choice, to refuse the demands of developers that substandard work be disguised in the pursuit of profit, was grounded in a sense of duty, but also a broader critique of the construction industry. Firstly, the scales at which major developers operate allow them to put pressure on contractors to lower their bids on tenders. Cooper commented:

‘They get contractors to haggle over the tender for weeks and weeks on end. [The contractors] have to give things for free to get the contract, so to win contracts, carpentry companies have to give things away for free. They say, x amount for the roof, x amount for doing the doors, but we’ll throw the skirting in for nothing. There’s no money for the contractor, and in turn there’s no money for the tradesmen.’

This downward pressure on bids for contracts manifests itself in the working culture on developers’ sites. The constant time pressure, the cost of skilled labour, and the willingness of site managers to cover up mistakes or look the other way create a market for ‘snagging’ firms, like NHQC, to check for errors in construction to protect buyers from dodgy workmanship. For Cooper this is inherently connected to the loss of skilled labour inured by the developers’ oligopoly:

‘Take ten, eleven carpenters of a new build site today and get them to do something other than build that developer’s houses and they couldn’t do it, they’re just solely trained in what they do on site. It’s so easy to get on site, they never ask for your qualifications and your work is very rarely checked… These boys that are out on site, the prices are driven down so much for companies to win jobs from these developers that things have got to be done too quickly, corners are cut. Targets have to be met, so you get anybody in to come and finish the job for you.’

There is something compelling about the viral moments of shoddy workmanship on NHQC’s TikTok. I think at least part of their appeal is that they tear the mask from the insane shared delusion of the British housing market. When you’ve spent your adult life being unable to afford a house, paying through the nose for poorly maintained rental property, there is an intense schadenfreude to seeing that even people who can afford to buy new houses are also getting ripped off. People are fixated by it because it reveals the truly bizarre fact that house price growth continues to outstrip wage growth twentyfold, and yet these assets are visibly unsound, incomplete, and often made from an ersatz mix of value-engineered flammable plastics.

For Jerry Swain, National Officer for Construction at Unite, the unwillingness of developers to properly invest in skills and training for construction workers is at the core of this problem:

‘The idea of people being taken on for a two-year or three-year apprenticeship has been done away with in housing. Developers aren’t interested in it. But it is what their profits should be invested in. They’re not investing in the future of the industry because of this quick-buck attitude, creating a lower skill base.’

Indeed, developers are so unwilling to properly invest in training that they have to be cajoled into it by local authorities though Section 106 agreements. A Section 106 agreement is a deal between a developer and local government, essentially giving planning permission on certain conditions. This might be investment in local transport infrastructure, provision of social rent housing as part of the development, or training people from the local community to work on the construction site. Swain is dubious of the long-term results of such agreements: ‘they allegedly train local people on sites, but there is no record of how many have been sufficiently trained to go on and earn a living in construction. I suspect that would tell a disastrous story.’

Britain’s construction industry has come to a point of crisis, exacerbated over the last few years by skilled labour shortages and supply chain breakdown through Brexit and the pandemic. These failures of design, construction, and logistics are not universal in the sector, but they are worryingly prevalent. They are overwhelmingly driven by the profit motive and enabled by the opaque and inadequate system of aggressive contract tendering and inadequate regulation which continues to dominate the market, despite the tragic and inevitable results at Grenfell Tower. Unless we can overturn this way of building and start again, we will continue to watch avoidable tragedies, wastage, and negligence dominate our built environment.