Michael Gove was, without a doubt, the most able secretary of state produced by the last 14 years of Conservative government. This sounds like praise, and of course it is. But great ability is a two-edged sword. When an able individual sets themselves to good purposes, they can do great things, as Gove did at Education. When they turn to the dark side, however, they can do terrible things in equal measure – as Gove did at Housing.
No Conservative housing secretary was likely to be good, of course; Boris Johnson’s dismissal of Robert Jenrick and abandonment of planning reform put paid to any hope that the Tories might actually do something substantial about the housing crisis. But if good legislation was not to be had, it would have been best to have a lethargic minister who did little with the brief.
Instead, we got things like the Renter’s Reform Bill, a populist crackdown on the private rented sector which has already made thousands of people homeless. Or the Leasehold Reform Act, a straightforward shakedown that made an egregious assault on property rights without even dealing properly with the abuses that supposedly justified it.
Then there was the two-staircase rule. Proposed as a response to Grenfell, this mandated that any residential block taller than 18 metres must have two staircases. It was touted in the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects as ‘a huge win for the RIBA-led coalition of built-environment and fire safety groups and a vital step towards safer residential buildings’.
It ought not to surprise any reader familiar with British policymaking if this turned out to be nonsense. It is pretty much a golden rule that little good legislation comes from a knee-jerk response to a particular tragedy. Lo and behold, new research from the United States finds that buildings up to 18 metres with single staircases can have safety records on par with their double-flighted counterparts, a finding which blunts the case that second staircases are an obvious win above that height as well:
A first-ever analysis of fire death rates in modern four-to-six-story buildings with only one stairway shows that allowing these buildings to have only one staircase does not put residents at greater risk: Single-stairway buildings as tall as six stories are at least as safe as other types of housing.
Pew, the charity behind the research, highlights several points that undercut the simple idea that two-stairs safe, one-stair not, beyond the blunt data, such as that in many double-flight buildings residents have to walk farther to reach an exit than in a building with a central stairwell.
It also highlights a big potential drawback of one of the main arguments for the scheme, i.e. allowing the fire brigade to segregate a ‘rescue stair’, down which people flee, from an ‘attack stair’ up which firefighters tackle the blaze. That problem is that if you do that, suddenly a lot of residents are much farther from the only safe exit – and if they don’t know that one stair is unsafe, it can get people killed.
Just as importantly, however, Pew highlights the other critical factor which one-eyed regulation always overlooks: trade-offs. All the worst elements of the building regulations, such as our rightly-infamous tiny windows, are the result of the system turning the dial up to 11 in pursuit of a single goal – usually safety, sometimes environmental – without regard to anything else.
In that case, we have banned large, fully-openable windows in order to prevent people falling out – although there is no evidence of any significant number of people doing so – and to make new-builds energy efficient – at the expense of turning new-builds into dingy hutches, while turning century-old properties (in which you can bet most of the policymakers live) into luxury goods.
The opportunity costs of the double-staircase rule may not be quite as visually apparent as the window regulations, but they are very real.
A building with two stairwells will, on a given plot of land, have less square footage left over for residences, meaning smaller (and likely more expensive) flats. At the lower margin, this will make developments on smaller plots unviable. This directly undercuts the Government’s policy of trying to incentivise development of so-called ‘Grey Belt’ sites, because urban infill is precisely the sort of development where a project might otherwise seek to deliver relatively high density on a smaller square footage.
Then there is the impact on design. The diagram at the top of the Pew report highlights an obvious issue: that a building with two staircases lends itself to single-aspect flats (that is, flats with windows that open only on one side) much more than a building with a single, central staircase.
This isn’t insurmountable in larger developments, which can more easily build around a dual-core structure – and it would be remiss not to note that the window regulations already militate against double-aspect flats. But it is another thing that will make smaller developments rarer, more expensive and less pleasant to live in.
Not that larger developments get away scot-free. Even the architects that RIBA Journal sought out to praise for embracing the ‘opportunity’ of the new rules were only able to increase useable floor space ‘by 5% over a typical two-stair design’. It might add up to a lot over 50 floors, but unless you’re buying the building, that is little consolation for a smaller apartment in a more crowded building.
The need for an additional staircase, and perhaps in practice a lift as well, will also make taller buildings much more expensive. Ironically, this could result in more very tall towers, with more storeys (of smaller flats) needed to offset the additional costs (spatial and financial) of the second core. Alessandro Chiola, of the architecture practice RBTW, writes that ‘seven to ten-storey buildings will be much less desirable from a development and particularly a viability perspective’.
Lifts are also one of the biggest factors that create high service charges, another significant cost pressure that will be borne, in perpetuity, by residents of blocks built under the new rule. (Labour ministers might note that this will have a disproportionate impact on social housing developments, tenants of which are understandably most sensitive to service charges.)
Nor will it only be residents who are exposed to the downsides. Chiola also notes that:
Buildings over 18 metres will now have bulkier massing and larger footprints. There will be fewer opportunities to create a transition from the base to the top because the core will occupy a larger portion of the floorplan.
With such a large share of a building’s square footage committed to lift shafts and stairwells, the greater interior mass requirements of dual-core buildings will produce not just taller buildings but blockier, more uniform ones too. Classical techniques – such as terracing or tapering upper floors – which both lend buildings character and minimise the obstruction of natural light, will become economically unviable.
Is it worth it? Despite the implications, Chiola declares that the rule is ‘a very necessary step towards safer buildings which is the most fundamental thing to consider’. But both of those statements are eminently contestable. For the rule to be ‘very necessary’, for example, the improved safety would need to be not only proven (contra Pew) but also on a scale sufficient to outweigh all the opportunity costs – costs which are seldom even considered by regulators or campaigners with a singular focus on safety.
The subtlety of this trap is perfectly illustrated by the second claim, that ‘safer buildings [is] the most fundamental thing to consider’. This sounds so reasonable that it should hardly need stating. Yet while it is obviously fundamental that buildings should be a baseline level of safe, the elevation of pursuing ever-safer buildings is a direct invitation to regulatory monomania. Sometimes, the opportunity costs of an extra margin of safety simply outweigh the benefits.
Individuals make informed decisions about balancing risk versus comfort all the time. Some choose to live in historic centres with pedestrian-only streets, despite the fact that emergency service vehicles won’t be able to get to them. Others buy a house with steep steps to the front door, accepting the danger that they might have to sell if they end up in a wheelchair. Most people do not install heavy fire doors throughout their homes, for all that the fire brigade would like them to.
The systems that produce our ever-more-onerous regulations do not, will not and perhaps cannot make such trade-offs. Campaigners and officials alike have a singular focus and aim to maximise their particular objective, be it energy efficiency, safety or whatever else.
Responsibility for taking an holistic view should fall to the government, but it is a rare politician who takes an interest and an even rarer one who takes action. Who, after all, wants to be the minister who overruled officials if tragedy strikes? Even if, as is often the case, overruling the officials was the right thing to do, there would be no thanks for it – the broad benefits of regulatory restraint are seldom as tangible as the narrow, occasional costs.
‘More safety’, like ‘higher standards’, is just one of those things that seems so self-evidently good that it short-circuits many people’s ability, or at least willingness, to contemplate trade-offs. And so, in the name of letting unreflective regulators feel like good and useful people, British homes will continue to trend ever towards the expensive, the ugly, the dingy and the small.
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