Grenfell Tower Fire: Mindless Deregulation, Senseless Harm

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/opinion/london-fire-grenfell-tower.html

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The fire that destroyed a London apartment building, killing at least 79 people, provides a grim warning about the dangers of a regulatory approach President Trump has made official policy in Washington.

One of the safety failures under investigation in the fire is the lack of sprinklers in the 24-story Grenfell Tower. High-rises built in England since 2007 must have sprinklers, but older ones, like Grenfell Tower, built in 1974, do not have to be retrofitted with them.

Why not? Arbitrary deregulation, said Ronnie King, a former chief fire officer and honorary secretary of a parliamentary group on fire safety and rescue.

“It’s one of those that if you bring in a new regulation, you have got to give three up to get it,” Mr. King said in a BBC report, referring to a British law first passed in 2011 that requires the elimination of regulations as each new one is enacted. At first, one rule had to be ended for every new rule passed. That was later expanded to “one in, two out,” a standard President Trump put forth in an executive order he signed in January. In 2015, British law became “one in, three out.”

Such a pat formula could force officials to reject crucial new rules to avoid eliminating other important protections, or to eliminate such existing protections to make room for a new one.

“The government’s mania for deregulation means our current safety standards just aren’t good enough,” said Sam Webb, an architect and fire expert, in the BBC report.

Mr. Trump’s order is similarly likely to lead to dangerous elimination of safety rules, including those for food, drugs, water, air, autos and toys, partly because many obsolete or duplicative federal rules were already purged under the Obama era’s “look back” program to systematically revise, end and update existing rules.

Supporters of Mr. Trump’s mechanistic two-for-one deregulation pretend that public health and safety would take care of themselves as business is freed of what they say are undue burdens. But this approach is not about safety or business burdens, it’s about increasing profits by reducing compliance costs.

Speaking in February 2014 during Fire Sprinkler Week, some of the members of the British House of Commons were all for sprinklers, but not for regulations to require them.

“We believe that it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the government, to market fire sprinkler systems effectively and to encourage their wider installation,” Brandon Lewis, who would later become housing minister for the Conservative government, said after praising the one-in, two-out formula then in use.

After the Grenfell Tower fire, the dangers of reflexive rejections of regulation, like Mr. Trump’s executive order, are clearer.