Rosemary McLeod: Fiscal prudence the cause of tragedy

Grenfell Tower after it was destroyed by fire. Photo/AP

If last week's catastrophic London fire has any upside, it's that devotees of the cult of cost-cutting and user pays have been given a swift kick up their callous backsides. It was about the money. Of course it would be about the money.

Coverage of the disaster has given no one wriggle-room to minimise it, to summon up excuses, or to blank out the human beings who lost their lives.

If you saw the fire romp up the outside of the tower block in what seemed like seconds you'll be in no doubt that something shoddy had happened with the cladding, and so it turned out to be.

A cheaper option was chosen, rather than a fireproof one, when the Grenfell Tower was refurbished last year. No doubt it was called fiscal prudence and people congratulated themselves. Where are they now?

In an echo of what happened here with changes to building codes, the Poms cancelled their building regulations in 1986 so that exterior cladding of buildings there no longer had to be fire proof. Mad but true. To add to the triumph of Right thinking, new schools in the UK are now being built without sprinkler systems too. They might never have a fire, right? And kids run fast.

You have to be a lavishly-paid bureaucrat to make such choices. An interesting outcome of cost-cutting is that it's overpaid bureaucrats who do it, earning far more than the people who work for them, let alone the people whose lives they meddle with.

It's so much worse when a building like Grenfell Towers sits in the richest borough in the UK, run by the Chelsea and Kensington Council, whose very name implies poshness and millionaires, not refugees and minority cultures. The class message is stark.

When we decided to loosen up building standards here a sudden rush of buildings went up that looked like they were made of polystyrene. I used to marvel at the stupidity of it, rightly as it turned out.

It wasn't long before mould crept down their outside walls; you watched it over time as you walked past; and as it turned out, mould was also busy in the walls' interiors. Those houses and apartments are rubbish, and we're now told that leaky homes are still being built despite changes in the building industry.

Oh, and landlords aren't taking up a government subsidy to insulate houses they rent out. Why on earth not?

People aren't being burned to death by these shoddy buildings, but they are getting sick. They include schools, prisons, and an estimated 100,000 homes.

The full cost of this folly has been estimated at up to $11 billion, but could be more, and the health cost could be $1b on top of that. Meanwhile landlords are free to rent out substandard houses in a market of short supply, where tenants outbid each other just to get a roof over their heads.

We've just completed a house renovation that crawled with engineers, architects, tradesmen of all kinds, and council inspectors. I don't resent it. We've saved a well-built house made of solid native timber that we wouldn't be ashamed to sell on if we had to.

But why I have to comply with fiddly building codes while rental properties are allowed to be cold and grotty is something I can't understand.

Greedy landlords practically get a slap on the back and a cigar for milking substandard properties they wouldn't deign to sleep a night in themselves, and they don't maintain them either. No profit in that, right?

A new dose of landlord logic has now hit Mt Ruapehu skifields where families who used to take their kids to play in snow will now have to pay $59 for adults and $35 for children to access areas that until now were free.

Ruapehu Alpine Lifts, the company involved, says it's unfair that snowboarders and skiers carry the cost of upgraded facilities, which they use, seemingly ignoring the user pays mantra that is usually chanted, while excluding families who only want their kids to throw a few snowballs.

In contrast to the grasping ethos, what a pleasure it was to read this week about Ian Devereux, a scientist and successful Kiwi businessman who always said it was never about the money, and meant it.

Profits in his company, Rocklabs, were shared equally by all staff each year while he owned it, and he never paid the lowliest staff member less than the average wage. When he sold up in 2008 he again shared the money with his workers, friends and family.

Few though they may be, men like Devereux affirm your shaky faith in the human decency that survives in our material world. Amazingly, against the odds, they do exist.

Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.