In the news

The info on this thread is pretty good https://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=2007285

This seems ridiculous, but right as @aggi said.

East Sussex curtain walling specialist Harley Curtain Wall has been placed in administration.
Assets of the firm were sold in a pre-pack deal to Harley Facades, although 11 staff were made redundant.
Harley Facades is run by former Harley Curtain Wall director Richard Bailey.

That absolutely isn't a stitch up, right.

http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2015/09/14/cladding-firm-harley-curtain-wall-pre-packed/

Ah, the far right, completely unaware of their own idiocy

“Although we will never condone or accept this kind of violent attacks here in SWNF, anyone with a right mind can see this is not a terrorist attack but a revenge attack.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/19/finsbury-park-attack-suspect-named-as-cardiff-resident-darren-osborne

Amazing.

Fire safety aside, right wingers just shouldn't be trusted with aesthetic decisions. Whilst the entire userbase of instagram are collectively creaming their pants over brutalist architecture, Kensington and Chelsea decide to "upgrade" their housing stock so that it ends up looking like something out of an industrial park in Swindon. If they had just stuck to upgrading the windows, the Greenfell Tower could have looked quite cool.

This Rockwool catalogue actually has a very easy to follow guide of what you need to do with cladding and buildings >18m tall to be fire compliant.

http://static.rockwool.com/globalassets/rockwool-uk/downloads/brochures/regulation-guides/rw16-041-routes-to-compliance-update-may16-for-web.pdf

Good article on housing policy in the FT

Outrage at Grenfell Tower is a chance to fix housing policy
The economics of sorting out the property market are straightforward

There is an old joke about two free market economists walking along the street when one spots a £20 note on the floor. “Hey, I’m going to pick that up,” he tells his companion. “Don’t be stupid,” the other says. “If it were really there, someone would already have taken it.”

The moral of the joke can be read in reverse: if the market were really going to fix something, it would have done it already. This is the story of the UK housing market.

For years it has been obvious that there is too little housing available to meet demand. In London especially, prices and rents have soared again as if the financial crisis had never happened.

Perhaps the current economic slowdown is taking the edge off, but every Londoner knows that young people cannot buy homes unless they have wealthy parents to help them, and very many people are living in sub-standard accommodation. The previous Conservative and coalition governments made the situation worse with policies to subsidise some home buyers, boosting demand even more but not supply.

This is the context in which last week’s horrific Grenfell Tower fire occurred. The causes and responsibility for the tragedy are not clear, and may not be until after the public inquiry. But this might finally be the moment when there is enough public outrage to overcome the ideological and political barriers to policy change. Because — to go back to the moral — the market is never going to fix this problem.

The reason is simple: private developers, on the whole, will never want to increase housing supply enough to bring prices down. They sell too many properties on the promise of capital gains.

Near my home in west London are some grand new-build homes in an ideal location that have been empty for two years. Why does the developer not reduce the price to sell them? Because they will not want to crystallise a reduction in the value of the asset on their balance sheet. The centre of the capital is full of empty houses bought by overseas investors, and this phenomenon is spreading elsewhere, too.

High prices at the top end of the market cascade down — and there is, contrary to popular myth, only one housing market, not a separate “affordable” one.

For those on low incomes, including London’s reserve army of cleaners, shop assistants, hospital porters and the like, the only option is a dismal private rental or social housing. Yet the local authority and social housing stock has been declining in size, and the total housing supply has increased by less than 1 per cent a year for 20 years. Savage budget cuts imposed on local authorities have hit maintenance and refurbishment.

The economics of what to do about this are pretty straightforward: build more, much more, social housing and invest properly in the maintenance of the existing stock.

Councils should be free to borrow to build as interest rates are low and there is a safe return from future rents. There could be shared equity schemes so people have a pathway to owning a home at some point, as long as the building programme is big enough — and it needs to be on a scale to bring existing prices and rents down.

The only barrier to this step is ideology, and the inevitable lobbying against it from property developers.

While we are at it, with the public anger still so raw, perhaps this is a good time to implement some other sensible housing policies, long a live, third rail in British politics. For example, give councils the power to charge a multiple of the council tax on properties empty for more than six months. Introduce a higher stamp duty on purchases by overseas buyers.

Above all, though, extend capital gains tax to people’s main homes, a policy recommended by Dame Kate Barker in her recent book Housing: What’s The Plan (and pretty much every other economist, too). Among its merits would be mitigation of the increasing inequality between those whose parents have a house to leave them and those who are not going to inherit such a big asset.

This is the moment when there is a broad enough public coalition for decisive moves to resolve the housing market crisis: only the very wealthy do not need to worry now about where and how they or their children will live. Will Britain’s politicians be big enough to respond with a cross-party consensus and swift action? If they do not, it is hard to believe the anger prompted by last week’s tragedy will simply fade away.

What efficiencies are the "upgrade" of cladding supposed to achieve? Are the heating savings significant, or are these "improvements" motivated more by the aesthetics?

EDIT:
OK. None.

As I said way up thread the product sheets I've found for Reynobond ACM (the cladding used on Grenfall) don't even mention its thermal properties:
https://www.arconic.com/aap/north_america/catalog/pdf/brochures/Reynobond_Brochure.pdf

I understand it there is some insulation benefit but the main benefit of the product seems to be looking better with no maintenance.

There was no Rockwool in Grenfell. Hence the statement they put out:
http://www.rockwool.com/news-and-media/news-overview/2017/2017-06-15-ROCKWOOL-on-the-London-fire-tragedy/

If only there had been as it's inherently non-combustible.

If there had been a Rockwool layer under the cladding I presume that would have provided some meaningful heat savings.

I think that Jonathan Pie sketch nailed it - a veneer of giving a shit about the disadvantaged.

Thanks, i'd assumed that was the case but just wanted to confirm.

That FT article nails it, though there is also the issue of what homes are actually being built, and british attitudes towards those homes (Chicken/Egg).

bigoted lunatic calls bigoted lunatic a bigoted lunatic

http://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/piers-morgan-accuses-tommy-robinson-of-sounding-like-a-bigoted-lunatic-in-heated-good-morning-a3568901.html

Son of the bloke who owns the van hire place says "shame he didn't use a steamroller"

https://twitter.com/RegalDoobs/status/87­6741922320207872

And he's been arrested for "displaying threatening, abusive, insulting written material with intent that is likely to stir up racial hatred."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-40347813

probably increased the level of scrutiny his pops is under with regards to his involvement as well.

Can't believe that cunt is on mainstream telly after what happened. You wouldn't see Abu Hamza in for an interview after one of the other recent terrorist attacks. Giving him any kind of platform is fucking moronic.

It saddens me that we give air time to Mr Morgan. A well constructed rebuttal of Robinson could have been constructive.

A cunt shouting cunt at a cunt doesn't really help.

They are cunts though.

Hmm,
The Maybot claims that Police funding has been reduced as 'we' are now opposing terrorism with cyber security, courtesy of MI5 & 6.
Darren Osborne follows two leaders of Britain First. Surely this should put him on some watchlist or other.
Darren Osborne hires a van. Not significant on its own, but the combination with the above should promote him up some watchlist or other.
Darren Osborne drives van out of south Wales. Not significant on its own, as he has family in Weston-super-mare. As soon as he heads towards London anpr hits in combination with the above should promote him up some watchlist or other.
ANPR would have shown he was heading towards an area of London he had no plausible reason for visiting at a notable time. Where was the police intercept?
Big Brother not as efficient as one would hope.

Contrast with the Met policy against Green activists.

Two problems with that.

I think you are vastly underestimating how many people have perfectly legitimate reasons to alter their usual patterns whilst driving a van. The number of false alarms would be immense.

Secondly, what you describe would require the most insane amount of inter system data sharing, the likes of which only exist in bullshit spy movies.

Have you not seen The Bourne Documentary?

CSI was the worst for all of that:-

"
The only clues we have are some sap let at the crime scene and a grainy CCTV image that even we can't enhance... This sap comes from a particular tree. Let's have a look in our database of trees. Ah yes, there are only two of these trees in the entire county. One is in a botanical garden that has been closed to the public for months, the other is next to a driveway at a house. Who is registered at the address of the house? Pull up the driving license and look at the photo! He's our man!
"

Secondly, what you describe would require the most insane amount of inter system data sharing, the likes of which only exist in bullshit spy movies.

There are probably simpler connections that can be made for that kind of stuff:-

Twitter account -> mobile phone : from data records from the mobile phone company
credit/debit card (from van hire) -> mobile phone : via bank accounts
mobile phone -> location : even on coarse granularity of cell tower

But still...

There are probably simpler connections that can be made for that kind of stuff:-

Twitter account -> mobile phone : from data records from the mobile phone company
credit/debit card (from van hire) -> mobile phone : via bank accounts
mobile phone -> location : even on coarse granularity of cell tower

But still...

After the fact, yes - but ahead of/in real time? No, which is why all this stuff is useless from a prevention perspective, but can be handy in nicking the accomplice afterward, if they survive.

So what does GCHQ do 24/7?