Safe as houses

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Hodkinson
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Service ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Housing Provision ◽  
Private Companies ◽  
Private Finance Initiative ◽  
New Model ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
Comprehensive Account

As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on different examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation that have enabled developers, banks, and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect, and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation for good. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.

After Grenfell: safe and secure homes for all

2019 ◽  
pp. 227-244
Author(s):  
Stuart Hodkinson
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Service ◽  
Housing Provision ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Phase Out

This chapter is the conclusion of the book. It sets out a vision of immediate and gradual reforms needed for ending the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision in the outsourced state. A first section sets out the scale of the housing safety and insecurity crisis that confronts us. A second section then sets out three policy lessons raised by Grenfell and my own research on outsourced regeneration under PFI still being ignored by government to ensure that all homes are secure and safe to live in and that residents’ voices are democratically enshrined in housing governance: the need to restore accountability and power to residents; the need to re-regulate construction and housing provision in the interests of safety; and the need to end the privatisation disaster through a programme of gradual reforms that will gradually phase out PFI and outsourcing, push back the financialisation of housing and land, and restore a reinvented public housing model based on the Bevanite principle of treating housing as ‘a social service’ and not a commodity that is democratically accountable to its residents.

Privatisation and the death of public housing

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-55
Author(s):  
Stuart Hodkinson
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
For Profit ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Building Safety ◽  
Neoliberal Policies ◽  
And Control

This chapter charts the death of public housing from its emergence as part of a wider collective resistance to the social murder of unregulated capitalism to its planned demise under neoliberal policies of privatisation, demunicipalisation, deregulation, and austerity. A first section explains how public housing represented both the partial decommodification of shelter and the protection of residents’ health and safety through a wider system of building regulation and control. A second section argues that these qualities made public housing a target for privatisation and demunicipalisation policies that have recommodified and financialised housing and land for profit-seeking corporate interests. It was in this context that ‘outsourced regeneration’ featured in this book was born with the launch in 2000 of New Labour’s Decent Homes programme to bring all social housing in England up to a minimum decent standard by 2010. The chapter ends with an explanation of how the assault on public housing has been accompanied by the rolling back of building regulations and the rolling out of self-regulation that has weakened building safety and residents’ ability to hold their landlords to account.

Outsourcing on steroids: regeneration meets the Private Finance Initiative

2019 ◽  
pp. 56-92
Author(s):  
Stuart Hodkinson
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Private Finance Initiative ◽  
Risk Transfer ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
The Face ◽  
Corporate Takeover

This chapter introduces the controversial background and evolution of the PFI model in public housing regeneration. A first section outlines the basic workings of PFI and how it emerged as part of the wider corporate takeover and financialisation of public services. A second section debunks official claims that the inflated cost of private finance is justified by the superior ‘value for money’ delivered through PFI’s ‘risk transfer’ and ‘payment by result’s model. A third section provides an overview of the origins and evolution of PFI as the ‘only game in town’ for local authorities during the 2000s that wanted to retain ownership of public housing and access the desperately-needed finance for home and estates in need of major regeneration and refurbishment. It introduces the twenty public housing PFI regeneration schemes now operational in England, introducing the three London local authority case studies which form the evidence base of the book: Islington’s Street Properties, Camden’s Chalcots Estate and Lambeth’s Myatts Field North estate. A final section reveals the controversy on the ground that met the undemocratic imposition of many housing PFI schemes – sometimes in the face of resident opposition – and the problems that engulfed the procurement of these contracts.

scholarly journals Accumulation of Knowledge by Strategic Public Procurement through Public-Private Partnerships for Service Innovation in Japan

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taeko Suehiro ◽  
Kumiko Miyazaki
Keyword(s):  
Tacit Knowledge ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Public Procurement ◽  
Service Innovation ◽  
Public Private Partnership ◽  
Waste To Energy ◽  
Private Companies ◽  
Private Finance Initiative ◽  
Private Partnership ◽  
Private Finance

<p>This study focuses on how governments strategically procure public service through Public–Private Partnership (PPP) – or more specifically, Private Finance Initiative (PFI) arrangements. PPP/PFI is recognised as a key element of demand-oriented innovation policy in the field of social infrastructure.  However, owing to the considerable uncertainty of each project, the benefits of PPP/PFI are subject to debate, as is the role of public procurement in fostering public service innovation. The purpose of this study is to examine how governments strategically procure public services from construction firms in Japan. We conduct a comparative case study of two waste-to-energy PFI projects to clarify how governments improved the public procurement.</p><p>The results suggest the following: first, municipalities utilise a greater extent of other municipalities’ experience through external experts (i.e. Ministry of Environment, advisors, committee members and potential bidders) and standardised service criteria. Second, the codification of tacit knowledge, which both public and private entities have gained from previous projects, is important for securing a robust and routinised service level and reaping the benefits of the scale of repetition. Third, interaction with private companies in the bidding process with an appropriate manner would foster public service innovation. Governments' capability development through the use of internal and external resources can create space for private companies to provide better service by accumulating tacit knowledge within the projects.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p>Keywords: Public procurement; Public–Private Partnership; Private Finance Initiative; Service innovation; Construction firm; Waste-to-energy</p>

Risk Transferin Public Private Partnership/Private Finance Initiative Procurement Documents:The Differencebetween The United Kingdom and Malaysia

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Nooriha Abdullah ◽  
Darinka Asenova ◽  
Stephen J. Bailey
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Public Procurement ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Public Private Partnership ◽  
Private Finance Initiative ◽  
Private Partnership ◽  
Risk Transfer ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Uk

The aim of this paper is to analyse the risk transfer issue in Public Private Partnership/Private Finance Initiative (PPP/PFI) procurement documents in the United Kingdom (UK) and Malaysia. It utilises qualitative research methods using documentation and interviews for data collection. The UK documents (guidelines and contracts) identify the risks related to this form of public procurement of services and makeexplicittheappropriateallocation of those risks between the public and the private sector PPP/PFI partners and so the types of risks each party should bear. However, in Malaysia, such allocation of risks was not mentioned in PPP/PFI guidelines. Hence, a question arises regarding whether risk transfer exists in Malaysian PPP/PFI projects, whether in contracts or by other means. This research question is the rationale for the comparative analysis ofdocumentsand practicesrelatingtorisk transfer in the PPP/PFI procurements in both countries. The results clarify risk-related issues that arise in implementing PPP/PFI procurement in Malaysia, in particular how risk is conceptualised, recognised and allocated (whether explicitly or implicitly), whether or not that allocation is intended to achieve optimum risk transfer, and so the implications forachievement ofvalue for moneyor other such objectivesinPPP/PFI.

scholarly journals Organisational support and safety management: A study of shipboard safety supervision

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-565
Author(s):  
Conghua Xue ◽  
Lijun Tang
Keyword(s):  
Safety Management ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Disciplinary Action ◽  
Shipping Industry ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Safe Place ◽  
Real Risk ◽  
Psychological Pressure ◽  
Operational Errors

Shipping is a safety critical industry where operational errors may lead to maritime accidents involving property damage, loss of lives and environmental pollution. As part of the trend towards self-regulation, the International Maritime Organisation has adopted a worldwide International Safety Management Code which made ship managers responsible for workplace health and safety. This study, based on interviews in two Chinese shipping companies, examines how ship managers use ship visits to monitor shipboard safety management. Interviews with managers from company offices and crew members indicated that managerial ship visits mainly take the form of inspections that focus on low-trust surveillance and disciplinary action rather than genuine support, being based on the safe person rather than the more effective safe place approach. From the perspective of crew members, because the managers visited ships only occasionally, they were unlikely to have sound knowledge of the specific situations and work routines on their ships. Consequently, managers’ interventions for safety compliance were seen by crew members as failing to address real risk factors, and leading instead to increased workloads, psychological pressure and fatigue, the very antithesis of safety management. Meanwhile a coherent, supportive system for reducing risk remains underdeveloped in the shipping industry. JEL Codes: J81, J83, L91, M54, N75

The Private Finance Initiative in the UK

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Ball ◽  
Maryanne Heafey ◽  
Dave King
Keyword(s):  
Private Finance Initiative ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
The Uk
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