Posted By: lineweightFor example, aviation. Is it because failures tend to be dramatic, and very visible?

And the car industry where (discovered) safety problems result in a recall, whereas early part failure - providing it is outside any warranty period - tend to be left for the consumer to pick up the tab, unless there is a marketing reason to do something i.e. consumers make enough noise.

Posted By: Peter_in_HungaryAnd the car industry where (discovered) safety problems result in a recall

Not so the white goods industry though. I'm thinking of tumble driers and plastic-backed fridges for example.

Lineweight

Undoubtedly the same failings could be found outside of the social sector, but i would not expect them to be as widespread as the social sector.
The stock of rented / owned flats apartments in the private rented sector will be mixed in with units owned by occupiers, majority will be leashold and managed by property companies who have an interest in doing chargeable works. In addition relatively modern blocks where units were sold will have insurance backed guarantees when newly built which will have needed levels of compliance. Though we already hear of facades of private blocks needing replacement, management companies/ leaseholders/ insurers/ builders will be negotiating how this is dealt with.
The social sector works on a funding model that generates insufficient cash flow to maintain buildings properly, we had the decent homes standard introduced in 1997 , intended to bring 1.7 million homes up to standard between 1997 and 2003 this cost around 15.6 billion to update 670,000 homes. This was funded by borrowing and central government funding. By the end of the scheme costs , based on above figures, could have been around 40 billion.
This representing the shortfall in rents the social sector had effectively accrued if the housing stock was kept in good nick. You don’t see these figures bandied about when the cost of housing in private / social sectors are compared.
As a result corners continually cut. In private sector pure greed is the issue. But there are more than enough laws to deal with the rogues should councils wish to deal with them.
More failures will be found in the nhs,mod,prison estates basically any state owned / run sector. I’d expect PFI provided buildings to be particularly problematic.
Basically the political imperative over many years and all parties has been to provide the maximum impact for minimum cost, so hardly a starting point for best practice.
Grenfell will , if the investigations and enquiries are allowed to branch out, uncover massive issues. All will have been operating in plain site, its taken a combination of failures resulting in the tradegy that unfolded to bring things to light.

Posted By: lineweightDon't you think that many of the failures in design, detailing, constructed reality, maintenance and the governing regulation that have been made visible at Grenfell would also be found in lots buildings outside the social housing sector?

Recent items about the issues with new build homes show that it is nothing to do with who the building work is done for (public private), it is simply the quality of building work (from design to construction including regulation) is woeful.

Posted By: ArtiglioUndoubtedly the same failings could be found outside of the social sector, but i would not expect them to be as widespread as the social sector.

They are to be found in any construction project. It is down to poor construction (skills & knowledge) done as cheaply as possible in all circumstances. Fueled by 'take the lowest bid' directives even when those agreeing the bid know it will end up more expensive. In a domestic environment, most of the faults are hidden and they rely on the naivety of the customer to get away with it (which is where BC should come in but don't care enough).

Schools build in Scotland - another good example. Simply poor construction done by low skilled 'cheap' workers with little or no supervision and done in the cheapest way possible hoping it is not found until the warrenty / contract period ends.

Posted By: ArtiglioIn addition relatively modern blocks where units were sold will have insurance backed guarantees when newly built which will have needed levels of compliance.

Insurance based schemes are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard and only last 10 years - does this imply the building is only expected to last 10 years?

I fully expect that most housing built in the last 20 years will be demolished before the pre/post war stock it sits alongside. In Livingston, a whole estate of 70's housing (built for the New Town) is being demolished as they are simply falling down. Poor design - poor construction.

Is it "society" that's changed or the nature of construction?

Anyone who's done work on Victorian terrace housing, for example, will have seen evidence of cutting corners and/or shoddy workmanship in the way they were built.

But buildings then were really a lot more simple than what we try and do now. There are all sorts of things we do (and thermal considerations are the main thing) that make designing and building a much more complicated business, and one where methods and materials are constantly changing too.

In those victorian houses they'd use better bricks on the outside and crappy ones on the inside of the wall, and not bother with header bricks to bond the two sides together. And because the inside would be plastered, and because problems with walls delaminating might tend to take a while to become apparent, they'd get away with it.

Now we have construction with many layers and at each of those layers there's potential to do it badly and cover it up before anyone sees. And lots of different things that can go wrong and take a while to become apparent.

In other words the "cover it up before anyone sees it" approach can apply to both forms of construction, but in modern construction the consequences are likely to be much greater. Grenfell's certainly an example of that.

Pre-post war construction is also a lot simpler than what we try and do now. New/modern materials at the time for sure, but there still wasn't much emphasis on thermal insulation and hence the complicated multilayer constructions we now have to deal with.

Posted By: lineweightalso amongst those who commission and pay for building projects

Getting warmer! Who sets the tone for that?

+1......

Latest report shows it's far worse than anyone imagined:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/25/cladding-tests-after-grenfell-tower-fire-inadequate-claims-insures-report
"Huw Evans, the director general of the Association of British Insurers, said the building control system was now “broken”."

"Why are people still living in fire-trap flats? Because we tore down the ‘red tape’ "
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/16/grenfell-red-tape-regulations-cameron-government

And who is the 'We' who have again and again voted in the red-tape strippers over the last 40yrs of UK-shrivelling?

"Cameron boasted that the corner-cutting and revocation of many regulations on building and business would save £500 per home built: a small sum in the grand scheme of things. Weighing it against the value of a potential lost human life should be impossible."

Posted By: borpinThe other cultural issue is that folk seem to object when someone points out they are not doing it correctly.

+1
along with a general reluctance to learn new things......... properly.

And as long as it lasts 1 month longer than the guarantee - then that's OK

Posted By: gravelldit has got worse and worse

all by itself, yeah sure - 'we' have allowed, indeed voted for that to happen. Let's stop this pose of helpless easy cynicism, as if it's all got nothing to do with 'us'.

We have voted, most of us, in rational self interest, and probably most of the time the self interest is borne out of a bias toward short term gratification... but we are animals at the end of the day.

Posted By: gravelldrational self interest

That is what some economists used to think. Blame it on Adam Smith (still a good read, but often misunderstood).
It has been known since the 1970s that people are not rational and vote on a combination of things that are more connected to emotions and education levels, rather than facts and knowledge.
That is why Starbucks can sell a coffee in a cardboard cup for 2 quid, and a smaller one in a china cup for £3.

Posted By: SteamyTeaThat is what some economists used to think. Blame it on Adam Smith (still a good read, but often misunderstood).
It has been known since the 1970s that people are not rational and vote on a combination of things that are more connected to emotions and education levels, rather than facts and knowledge.

Ok, I shouldn't have used that phrase, it's an alarm bell to many, and I don't even believe it myself. It's nevertheless true that in general people do vote with what they judge to be their self interest in mind, rational or not.

Posted By: fostertomJust maybe, the underlying 'distributed' characteristic of internet etc (presently so ingeniously crippled) will eventually disable this huge propaganda machine.

Not if they succeed in crippling it further.

Sorry, but I'm missing something. How is the Internet crippled?

You can argue that although some essential services of the Internet - DNS I'm thinking of in particular - are well designed, they are affected by certain administrative decisions, e.g. US control.

Furthermore the way compute, storage and publishing has become centralised with time - the former two into cloud providers, the last one toward the social media behemoths - but that's not to say things can swing back the other day and you *can* still go the old fashioned way if you like. And also that architecture fashion comes and goes, there's been at least two cycles of client-server versus peer-to-peer fashion in the short time I've been in the industry.