Oceans Yet to Burn

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Corbyn tried to pass law to make homes safe last year – the Conservatives rejected it

the-purity-of-nude-socialism

“Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass through a law that would required private landlords to make their homes safe and “fit for human habitation” last year – but it was rejected by the Conservatives.

Labour proposed an amendment to the Government’s new Housing and Planning Bill – a raft of new laws aimed at reforming housing law – in January last year, but it was rejected by 312 votes to 219.

According to Parliament’s register of interests, 72 of the MPs who voted against the amendment were themselves landlords who derive an income from a property.”

happinessisnotalwaysfun

Whatever you think about the man as an individual or politician, he sure is on the right side of history a lot.

voxette-vk

More regulations driving up the cost of housing <—-> Right side of history

argumate

the regulation about not cladding the outside of high rise buildings in flammable material tho

having sufficient fire escapes

for that matter fire alarms

very poor choice of example of regulatory harm

mitigatedchaos

I’m sure our dear Voxette wouldn’t mind losing the regulations in favor of requiring all landlords to carry insurance against the death or debilitating injury to occupants with a cap at $1 million per occupant, reflecting the cost to the rest of society of people dying in unsafe housing. After all, it would be terribly immoral to give the landlords a subsidy, right?

They will of course also be required to carry sufficient insurance for neighboring buildings. It wouldn’t be very fair if they got away with a huge fire burning down someone else’s property just because they were bankrupt.

argumate

Right, and the insurance company needs to prove that it can actually cover these policies, which requires them to inspect the properties and regulate their safety, such as not covering the exterior with fuckin’ inflammable cladding.

You’re going to get regulation one way or another.

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The Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, section 8, required landlords to guarantee that their homes were fit for human habitation, but only where rents were £80 or less (in London) or £52 or less (elsewhere). Jeremy Corbyn wanted to eliminate the cap.

But I’m not sure that the property in question would be “unfit” under the Landlord and Tenant Act. Section 10 indicates that the standard for “fitness for human habitation” is determined in respect of enumerated matters. Houses are regarded as unfit for human habitation if and only if they are defective in one or more of the enumerated matters:

In determining for the purposes of this Act whether a house is unfit for human habitation, regard shall be had to its condition in respect of the following matters—
repair,
stability,
freedom from damp,
internal arrangement,
natural lighting,
ventilation,
water supply,
drainage and sanitary conveniences,
facilities for preparation and cooking of food and for the disposal of waste water;
and the house shall be regarded as unfit for human habitation if, and only if, it is so far defective in one or more of those matters that it is not reasonably suitable for occupation in that condition.

If the house is not defective in one or more of these enumerated matters, the house cannot be condemned as unfit for human habitation. “Flammability” is not on this list. Nor is “hazard to human life.” It isn’t clear that the enumerated matters include anything that would have condemned this residence: If the residence was constructed with flammable materials, there was no defect of “repair.” If the residence was stable, there was no defect of “stability.”

If “repair” or “stability” under section 10 include fire hazards, then there are few principled reasons why the landlords should not also be caught under section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act, which is unaffected by inflation, which requires short-term lessors undertake to:

(a) to keep in repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house (including drains, gutters and external pipes),
(b) to keep in repair and proper working order the installations in the dwelling-house for the supply of water, gas and electricity and for sanitation (including basins, sinks, baths and sanitary conveniences, but not other fixtures, fittings and appliances for making use of the supply of water, gas or electricity), and
© to keep in repair and proper working order the installations in the dwelling-house for space heating and heating water.

If “repair” or “stability” include flammability, then the housing here should be condemned because it had failed to “repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house”.

The language of section 10 is less impressive. There is no declaration that the house is “unfit for human habitation” if the landlord fails to abide by section 11. But no one has any statutory authority to condemn the house in section 10, either. The Landlord and Tenant Act didn’t empower anyone to go around condemning houses or forbidding sales.

All it did was this:

In a contract to which this section applies for the letting of a house for human habitation there is implied, notwithstanding any stipulation to the contrary—
(a) a condition that the house is fit for human habitation at the commencement of the tenancy, and
(b) an undertaking that the house will be kept by the landlord fit for human habitation during the tenancy.

If the landlord failed to comply with section 10, he was in breach of a statutory and contractual duty. There might be some action for damages or specific performance. There might be some action for negligence if house caught flame. Do you know what else would be grounds for such a suit? If the landlord failed to keep the property in good repair.

But those actions would lie with the landlords and tenants, who have the contract, not with any public authority. You can’t sue to enforce a contract you’re not privy to. The Landlord and Tenant Act doesn’t grant any statutory authority to prevent any sale or lease from happening. It doesn’t even have an inspection regime.

Do you know what does have an inspections regime? The Housing Act 1985. In section 604, the Housing Act includes the very same language that was included in the Landlord and Tenant Act:

The difference was that section 10 of the Landlord and Tenant Act created an implied covenant between landlords and tenants. Section 604 of the Housing Act set the terms by which local housing authorities could condemn houses as unfit for human habitation, which they were empowered to do by section 606:

This was the public regulation regime to complement the private regulation under the Landlord and Tenant Act. But if you look for sections 604 and 606 in the Housing Act 2004, you won’t find them. If you look for “unfit for human habitation”, you won’t find it anywhere. Why? Because sections 604 and 606 were replaced by a regime that covered fire safety.

The House of Commons Library explains:

The ‘old’ Housing Fitness Standard
Prior to the introduction of the HHSRS housing fitness was governed by section 604 of the 1985 Housing Act. Section 604 embodied a pass or fail test of housing fitness based on similar considerations to those set out in section 10 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985. Where a local authority identified a property as unfit it had a duty to take action; it was left to the authority to decide upon the most appropriate course of action. A number of problems were identified with the Housing Fitness Standard. Some of the most serious health and safety hazards, including fire hazards and fall hazards, were not covered by the standard. In addition, it was seen by some as a blunt instrument that could only pass or fail a house, and therefore sometimes did not distinguish between defective dwellings and genuine health and safety hazards.

So there we have our answer: the amendment wouldn’t have covered flammability, wouldn’t have prevented rentals, wouldn’t have been enforceable by statutory authorities, and wouldn’t have empowered an inspection or sanctions regime. It wouldn’t have granted anything but a private right of action, which they should have had anyways.

The United Kingdom already has statutory authorities empowered to inspect houses for safety – the local housing authorities empowered by the Housing Act 2004 and the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (England) Regulations 2005 to inspect and condemn houses where “exposure to uncontrolled fire” (reg. 3(1)(24)) might result in “death from any cause” (reg. 2(1)(a)). Under section 5 of the Housing Act 2004, local housing authorities had a duty to take action.

It seems the fault here lies with the Housing Act regulators, not the unamended Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.

Source: the-purity-of-nude-socialism thx xhxhxhx

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collapsedsquid reblogged your post: collapsedsquid reblogged your…

You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“

Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”

Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.

Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.

The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.

I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.

But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.

Sen says as much:

In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social comparison and contrast.

China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.

There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel (including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable - 892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790 in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.

You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.

I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.

China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.

Look at that malnutrition table again:

Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.

So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.

Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’t socialists.

Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.