Our cultural heritage is more important than foreign aid

I wept bitter tears of loss as I watched Notre Dame burn and in pain pleaded to God for his mercy.

It is early, but this morning the structure still stands, the photographs suggesting the rib-vaulted roof over the crossing had gone, and a further part of the stone vaulting over the Chancel. However, the roof over the Nave is still at great risk - the fire will have inflicted extremes of heat and streams of molten lead from the roof covering, the cold water used to extinguish the flames then likely to crack the stone. The timber roof structure dated from 1220 - 1240 and is alas now wholly gone.

Notre Dame's 13th century timber roof over the rib-vaulted Nave

When the Germans reduced the historic centre of Warsaw to rubble in the last war, the Poles swore to rebuild it exactly as it was, and even under a repressive and authoritarian Communist regime they did so. Every roof tile and window exactly as it was before the Teuton barbarians subjected it to HE. And this was exactly the right thing to do - for our European cultural heritage has a value above rubies; our nations and our peoples, our forbears and ancestors live in these stones and in this wood and in the craft and art and love with which they proclaimed for the world to see our being, our Sein.

Here's a clear message to government and to our pathetic failure of a Parliament, both antithetical to the interests of the People. Our cultural heritage is more important by a factor of magnitude than pissing away billions of our taxes to corrupt third-world tyrants in the name of modish liberalism. Notre Dame is a warning to you; you have a duty to use every effort, take every measure, spend whatever is needed, to secure our own cultural heritage from damage, neglect, negligence or malicious damage. Your failure will not be tolerated.

PFI - it's all about risk

PFI consortia are being lined up by the government's spin machine as the next cohort of bad boys who are robbing the taxpayer; operating costs of the PFI schemes now live are running at some £8bn a year, and the government wants to see reductions. 


One of the most fundamental problems with PFI is that the contracts were all written by civil servants who have little or no knowledge of the way in which the private sector prices risk. Their explicit aim was to transfer risk from the public to the private sector, get the costs of risk off the Treasury's books, and this they have done - but at a cost. Take the example of a student's Hall of Residence procured under a DBFO (design, build, finance, operate) PFI framework. The consortium has two partners, a construction firm and a facilities management organisation. The contract period is 25 years. 


First, development risk. Given an adequate outcome specification (the Employer's Requirements) D&B is a highly cost effective way for clients to develop assets. Unless of course, as is the case with our example Hall, the government were a year late in letting the contract but still insisted on the original completion date, resulting in a cost per square meter some 40% higher than it could have been. The government are utterly crap at programming an adequate lead-in time for major capital projects, and internal client delays rather than site delays are invariably the major reason for development cost over runs for such schemes. 


Secondly, operating risk. And this is where the risk-transfer is most poorly understood. The contract is 25 years, about the same as the economic life of the Hall's building systems and roof. If the private sector is taking the risk of no down-time to the building, it will cost-in some expensive mid-term major repair and replacement work whilst maintaining occupation. Ker-chink. The private sector is also taking income risk; the government's forecasts are based on a simple 95% occupancy during the life of the facility. The private sector may estimate 75% occupancy and add something for irrecoverable bad-debts. Ker-chink. The private sector takes the risk of highly specified cleaning and maintenance standards with severe financial penalties, so costs-in the standard it thinks it can achieve consistently plus an allowance to cover the cost of the penalties. Ker-chink. The government has also transferred large parts of inflation risk to the private sector, so the FM contractor makes 'safe' estimates of cost increases; if these are just 0.75% higher each year than the reality, the contract becomes highly profitable after just three or four years. Ker-chink. And don't mention window-cleaning; the civil servants have warranted the contractor's window-cleaner access to the students' bedrooms from 8am. Ker-chink Ker-chink.


In every case, the private sector has made perfectly reasonable allowances for the risks the government is seeking to transfer; the government's desire for cost-certainty has outweighed commercial sense. The only way to claw-back costs is to re-allocate risk. Simple, no? Er, no. If the government takes back risk, the potential cost of the risk is a liability that must appear in the government's accounts. 


Which is why the government is adopting the only tactic that it can see - to bully the consortia into surrendering profits at the threat of being black-listed from public sector work. 

Risk and safety are not antonyms

If Cameron, as reported, wants to look at the 'Health and Safety culture' and 'compensation culture' he needs to ensure that he looks in the right places. It could be that more than one area needs reform.

The compensation culture is primarily a product of the deregulation of the legal services market, under which lawyers were permitted to advertise for the first time. From this grew tele-market firms of ambulance chasers flooding the public with a simple message; if you've had an injury of any sort, it must have been someone else's fault, and we can get you compensation. Most claims will be made under the tort of negligence; that the other party had a duty of care, were sufficiently proximate, were negligent in the discharge of their duty and the plaintiff suffered loss and injury as a result. So everyone tripping over an upstanding paving stone sues the council, everyone slipping on a grape on a supermarket floor sues Tesco and so on. The tightening of the balance of liability under the tort is down to the higher courts making new law; they could extend the doctrine of contributory negligence to anyone not looking where they were walking, or extend the defence of volenti non fit injuria to anyone walking out of their own front doors into the big, dangerous world. The latter defence should at least be strong enough to protect the organisers of cheese-rolling events and suchlike from being sued by participating competitors who may break a leg chasing a Cheddar down a hill.

The second issue is the scaremongering around the H&SAWA. The relevant word in this legislation is 'work'. It is designed to protect employees from losing limbs in unguarded machines, being buried in unpropped trenches, falling from heights and so on. It's nothing to do with conkers falling on passing pedestrians. But it has an enforcement body - the H&S Executive - and guilty employers are fined heavily and sometimes jailed, so 'Health and Safety' is often used as a vague bogeyman warning with an implied jail cell at the end of it. The defence to anyone trying to stop anything 'on Health and Safety' is to ask 'Let me see your risk assessment, please', which brings us onto a third point.

You cannot carry out a meaningful risk assessment on any proposed innovation or activity in isolation of the risks we already accept. I have to make this point time after time at work and my greatest allies are canals and gas. You see, even though two to five drunk persons each year drown in canals, no one seriously suggests that all canal tow-paths should be fenced, and they remain, with no protective barrier between path and water, a triumph of common sense. And if you prepare a risk assessment for piping a highly explosive substance into every home in the country the use and control of which is given to completely untrained persons including the very young and very old that says anything other than that this is fine and dandy then you're a fool.

You see, under a risk assessment, the consequences of an event may be extremely 'high' - death, multiple deaths, serious damage and injury - but if the probability of it happening is extremely low than it's fine. The entire population of the West Midlands might all fall into the unfenced canals producing a human catastrophe on a holocaust scale, but because this is extremely unlikely to happen we can leave them unfenced. Too often, the improbable consequence overcomes good judgement and conker trees are cut down, hanging baskets are banned and every puddle in the public realm is encircled with a steel palisade fence.

I don't understand it, but I wouldn't ban it

News that a fit, healthy, bright 28 year-old had to be left to die on the slopes of Everest when he encountered retinal problems shouldn't surprise anyone. I believe that something like one in eight of those who attempt the climb die in the attempt. Yet there is still a long waiting list. I guess everyone believes they will be one of the seven who make it, and can dine out for the rest of their lives on being one of the (relatively) few who have climbed the tallest mountain.

The odds seem lousy to me, and I don't need the kudos, so I can't really understand the drive that tempts otherwise sane people to take the risk. And although the premature death of another young man is to be deeply regretted, I certainly wouldn't ban anyone from making that choice.

But for anyone so tempted, may I suggest an alternative? Those who have swum the Channel are still relatively rare, the accomplishment is highly mentionable, and probably rates at least 50% of the kudos of having climbed Everest at a tiny fraction of the risk.

When the State doesn't trust us we don't trust eachother

The central State doesn't trust us at all. Every single day of this Labour shambles brings yet another message from the Statists that we can't be trusted, and only the State knows best. They don't trust us to eat, drink, walk, drive, shop, sleep, read, cook, wash or own a pet without a blizzard of official guidance backed by intervention and enforcement powers if we continue to get it wrong. And they certainly don't trust us to interact with one another; they've destroyed the social spaces where we meet, the intermediate institutions that maintained local norms and even the opportunity to interact with our children.

In 1976 we were encouraged to organise street parties. Today there would be a hurricane of official discouragement; all adults would have to undergo CRB checks, £5m public liability insurance would need to be in place, and no-one would be allowed to bake a cake or make a sandwich for the party unless they had undergone food hygeine training and the environmental health had certified their fridge. There would need to be a risk assessment, a health and safety policy in place, an application to the council to stop-up the highway complete with traffic management plan, and if anyone wanted to sing, a temporary events licence, entertainments licence and police licence would be needed. If the street party involved a rum punch for the adults, then a whole spectrum of liquer licences would be needed. The licence conditions would specify bouncers, fire marshals and first aid and fire fighting equipment to be on hand; there would also need to be temporary toilets (with a sewer connection licence) as popping indoors for a pee wouldn't satisfy the statutory requirements. In short, in the space of thirty years the State has erected barriers of such formidable complexity that it has robbed the nation of any trust in ourselves.

And if the State doesn't trust us, we don't trust eachother. We're growing used to the State eliminating risk from our lives, to the extent that if something untoward happens - we slip on an icy pavement - it's the State's fault, not an accident. So who's surprised when the State's reaction is to close the pavements in icy weather? To close the schools in case a child slips in the playground? To close the entire southeastern train network for two days in case a passenger (sorry, 'customer') slips on an icy platform?

Yes, after every icy spell the A&E departments will be plastering fractured scaphoids. And thousands will be nursing bruised hips, knees and elbows. That's weather. Accept it.

Government policy increases extreme weather risk

OK, the arboreal defaecation habits of Ursidae may be more astonishing, but it's sometimes worth stating the bleedin' obvious.

The costs of extreme weather events have been rising exponentially over the past few decades. Partly this is due to there being more Extreme Weather because of climate change, but it's also due to changing living patterns, population increase, increased global asset values and increased vulnerabilities of modern technologies and environments. Societies can't do much about climate change, but steps to mitigate risk by changing development patterns and behaviours are within their power. Here in the UK government policy has been perverse in that not only does it not mitigate the risk of increased costs, it actually works to increase risk.

Not building new towns on flood plains is a start. Not building new towns in areas without enough fresh water would be good policy as well. Not encouraging mass immigration into a region without the sewers, gas or power infrastructure to cope might also be a good idea. If Joseph Bazalgette had been constrained by the Treasury's Green Book rather than the genius of his own vision, London would now be knee-deep in sewage. Building-in resilience with a factor of safety of 7X and a design life of 100 years rather than our modern 1.5X and 25 years might cost more in the short term but may pay dividends in the long term.

Pratchett once remarked that a man dressed in copper armour standing atop a mountain during a thunderstorm shouting "All Gods are bastards!" was tempting fate. He might also find some difficulty in getting life insurance.

Living 100 feet above sea level in a solid Edwardian brick and slate home perhaps I can afford to be just a bit complacent; all my rain and sewage falls down the hill to the new housing estates in the river valleys, where it will now burst through manhole covers and flood homes rather than running into the Thames. But it would be mistaken to be complacent.

The number of failures it would take to get to Cholera, Typhoid, Typhus and Diptheria, to famine and lawlessness, from our present state are growing fewer and the risks greater. The freeze in the new-build housing market in the south-east may actually be a blessing in disguise. London's population not reaching 9m by 2016 may actually be a good thing. And insurers refusing to insure homes built on the flood plain may bring some sense to government policy.