Anyone can express a pointless political remark such as that.

 

The evidence shows malfeasance on a grand scale and negligence and incompetence in the supervision at every level. To suggest it was designed that way is baseless.

 

No matter what kinds of systems you have put into regulation and enforcement, if the people who manage and enforce adherence to rules and processes are systematically negligent, lazy, and corrupt, the wonderful world you thought you had designed will never come to pass.

 

It is certainly true that the system is broken. It is patently false that anyone designed it that way.

 

The answer is I believe that people whose job it is to make building regulations work must be held accountable for their failures.

 

Politicians are utterly unable to govern the construction industry or any other. They are completely dependent on well paid experts and civil servants. These people must be carefully chosen. If people like Brian Martin are in charge of building regulations they are not going to work. He was careless, hubristic and utterly negligent.

 

Remember - there were clear signs as early as 2002 during the Labour government's long period in office that dangerous material was being incorporated into buildings. Did the Labour ministers of the time know this and had it been made clear to them by the civil service? I doubt it. I don't think they knew or were even competent to understand the implications any more than those of other parties who subsequently were in power. Ministers are VERY busy people. They are not going to pick up hints unless it is made clear to them by their civil service advisers.

You need to take into account the fact that what goes on the wall is not certified because the law still allows this. The cassettes were fabricated to order so the end product is not certified like the OEM product (in this context, the ready made panels to be riveted which has been certified because of eu laws). This situation is like you shouldn't be allowed to coble together a kit from parts and have to buy the entire kit for your bike from one OEM which guarantees compliance.

There is apparently a bill in the Lords on the subject of Lithium Ion battery Safety;

 

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/LLN-2024-0050/LLN-2024-0050.pdf

 

It was reported on Radio 4 PM this morning, one bit of information mentioned as published in the report above was;

"The report said the LFB had, on average, been called to an e-bike or e-scooter fire once every two days in the first half of 2023, a 60% increase compared with the same period a year earlier"

 

Now that would be 'on average' 182 fires a year, just for London. Adjust for the population of the UK and there may be as many as 1,414 fires per year.

 

Regardless of the 'e-bike or e-scooter fire once every two days' report, there was in another Government report;

 

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fires-in-e-bikes-and-e-scooters/07948b8a-2855-4fd3-b205-b9b2f03b6a7c

 

"OPSS received information on 93 fires occurring in 2022 involving an e-bike or e-scooter. The majority of these (87) were reported by LFB".

 

However its been mentioned on here a few times that battery fires in 2023 (all UK?) were 181. It seems that the actual numbers may be very much higher.

 

They would have been a lot better off trying to outlaw the sale of petrol and fuel oil. Far more dangerous. People have been known to take petrol and set fire to things deliberately, you can't easily do that with a battery, and as everyone knows, people of retarded disposition periodically pour petrol onto smouldering barbecues and other forms of fire to get them going and set fire to themselves.

 

As we all KNOW - the very best thing we can do to protect the moronic element of society, it to ban things that morons mess up with. That's the 'British Way' of course, and as we all know from the way knife crime and gun crime has been totally eliminated from our world, it REALLY works to ban everyone from having access to dangerous things. It will especially impress the morons that we are all banned from having things morons mess up with - just like it stopped them from having guns and knives and ended the abuse the laws were brought in to stop.

 

I have crudely annotated the image below to show where in the frequency distribution of cognitive ability the REALLY thick people are. They are the ones who set their houses on fire with batteries and other things. Yes, we must all change so they don't harm themselves. .........

 

 

That utter tosser of a Lib Dem Lord was wittering on about banning kits on the radio this morning.

The cost of protection measures is small compared to the consequences of doing nothing.

pour petrol onto smouldering barbecues

Reminds me of an amusing story?! Many years ago at work I had a visitor to see how I was getting on with his project. On meeting me he said "I know I know I have no Eye brows" in an embarrased tone, then proceeded to tell me of his struggle to light his BBQ. He said he squirted more BBQ fuel onto the embers where upon it flared up in his face. He said he then ran over to the washing line to cool his face on some washing where upon he left his eye brows on said piece of washing...........

Peter Apps on Blair's response to Grenfell Fire.

 

‘This is a difficult thing to say' date=' but it’s the honest truth – however good your system is and however well-intentioned it is, and however hard people work, they’re going to make mistakes.’[/quote']

 

So said former prime minister Tony Blair on Sky News on Thursday – in response to being asked whether the Grenfell Tower fire represented ‘a failure of leadership’ by government.

 

This was a system which Blair’s governments had more than a small hand in creating

 

It’s possible that Blair – who spends his time these days trotting around the world representing his modestly named ‘Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’ – doesn’t really know much about what caused the Grenfell Tower fire and what the landmark report into it revealed on Wednesday.

 

But if that is the case, he might have been better advised to avoid the question than to give a statement which is so categorically wrong.

 

Grenfell was not a result of mistakes within a good system. It was a result of a failed system, easily gamed by those acting out of dishonesty and greed and not robust enough to prevent straightforward incompetence.

 

And this was a system which Blair’s governments had more than a small hand in creating.

 

In fact, it was Blair’s government to whom the most direct warning about the looming danger of a cladding fire was delivered in 1999, and Blair’s government which disastrously failed to act.

 

A Select Committee of MPs investigating two earlier cladding fires had discovered a problem: fires were spreading via combustible plastic on the walls of the buildings and threatening residents in flats beyond the one where the fire started.

 

The committee had received worrying evidence from experts that the official standard in government guidance permitted the use of some of these materials.

 

This needed to be addressed, the MPs said, before a catastrophe. ‘We do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks,’ they said.

 

And so they recommended a change to the regulations to ban all combustible cladding materials, unless a system had passed a large-scale test. And they recommended checks on existing buildings and further monitoring and risk assessment of any cladding systems to be installed in the future.

 

But Blair’s ministers did not do this. The ‘large-scale testing route’ was implemented, but the worryingly low basic standard was left where it was. This was arguably the birth of the messy, deranged free-for-all we had before Grenfell.

 

Not only that, the further recommendation of checks on existing systems was booted out entirely. The government felt it was not right to exert this kind of control over landlords, so it advised them to check their buildings, but did not force them to do so.

 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this missed chance. In 1999, when this warning was issued, cladding was still new technology. Almost all of the thousands of buildings with cladding on, which are currently causing misery for residents around the country (not to mention billions of public money to repair), had not yet been installed.

 

Blair’s government was on duty when this chance was missed.

 

This was directly singled out in the inquiry report in its very first paragraph on the failings of government, and described as a ‘failure’.

 

At a similar time, the UK was supposed to be aligning its building standards with Europe and introducing the ‘CE’ marking – which provides additional assurance that something meets relevant safety standards. The government was warned in the early 2000s that we would become Europe’s ‘dumping ground’ for combustible materials if this wasn’t done.

 

But it wasn’t. Why not? Wednesday’s report didn’t reach a conclusion, but the evidence suggests that cladding manufacturers didn’t want the CE standard because they then wouldn’t be able to sell their combustible products anymore.

 

Foam insulation lobbyists had – for example – warned some of their products would be ‘prevented from continuing’ on the market if the new standards were implemented and said the move to European standards therefore ‘should not happen’.

 

It didn’t. In fact, the UK government only announced it was implementing CE marking for construction products last Monday.

 

Many of the products that would have been ‘prevented from continuing’ if this change had been made under Blair are now being stripped from the walls of our high rises.

 

It still does not stop there. In 2001, Blair’s government paid for a series of tests on popular cladding products – a result of the changes recommended by the Select Committee.

 

One of the materials tested was later used on Grenfell. It failed so drastically it nearly set the test lab on fire and the test had to be halted for the safety of those present. Officials were warned this product could be used under the current regulations. They did nothing to toughen the rules. Instead, this testing – according to Wednesday’s report – was ‘shelved and entirely forgotten’.

 

There is more. Which government introduced the lax system of fire risk assessment where anyone with a clipboard could sell their services to assess a high-rise building? Blair’s.

 

Which government fragmented the fire service and abolished the training college that previously provided a consistent level of professional performance? Blair’s.

 

With all this in mind, you might think the leader of this government would be rather conciliatory in his comments about the fire and report – which marks another damaging blot on his legacy.

 

The honest truth – to use Blair’s own words – is that a deregulatory government in the 1980s set the scene for Grenfell, and a deregulatory government in the 2010s missed the last chances to stop the fire from happening. But the government Blair led continued and supported this system, and missed pivotal chances of its own to put things right.

 

This was not a good system let down by human error. It was a bad system which utterly failed its citizens. If Blair wants to speak about Grenfell, the first thing he should do is apologise.

Grenfell was not a result of mistakes within a good system. It was a result of a failed system, easily gamed by those acting out of dishonesty and greed and not robust enough to prevent straightforward incompetence.

according to some caller to yesterday's BBC Any Answer, when Margaret Thatcher started her revolution of 'cutting red tapes', the building regs book was apparently 200 pages thick. When she resigned, 80%-90% of it has been cut. 25 pages were all what was left.

Peter Apps on Blair's response to Grenfell Fire.

 

 

 

So said former prime minister Tony Blair on Sky News on Thursday – in response to being asked whether the Grenfell Tower fire represented ‘a failure of leadership’ by government.

 

This was a system which Blair’s governments had more than a small hand in creating

 

It’s possible that Blair – who spends his time these days trotting around the world representing his modestly named ‘Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’ – doesn’t really know much about what caused the Grenfell Tower fire and what the landmark report into it revealed on Wednesday.

 

But if that is the case, he might have been better advised to avoid the question than to give a statement which is so categorically wrong.

 

Grenfell was not a result of mistakes within a good system. It was a result of a failed system, easily gamed by those acting out of dishonesty and greed and not robust enough to prevent straightforward incompetence.

 

And this was a system which Blair’s governments had more than a small hand in creating.

 

In fact, it was Blair’s government to whom the most direct warning about the looming danger of a cladding fire was delivered in 1999, and Blair’s government which disastrously failed to act.

 

A Select Committee of MPs investigating two earlier cladding fires had discovered a problem: fires were spreading via combustible plastic on the walls of the buildings and threatening residents in flats beyond the one where the fire started.

 

The committee had received worrying evidence from experts that the official standard in government guidance permitted the use of some of these materials.

 

This needed to be addressed, the MPs said, before a catastrophe. ‘We do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks,’ they said.

 

And so they recommended a change to the regulations to ban all combustible cladding materials, unless a system had passed a large-scale test. And they recommended checks on existing buildings and further monitoring and risk assessment of any cladding systems to be installed in the future.

 

But Blair’s ministers did not do this. The ‘large-scale testing route’ was implemented, but the worryingly low basic standard was left where it was. This was arguably the birth of the messy, deranged free-for-all we had before Grenfell.

 

Not only that, the further recommendation of checks on existing systems was booted out entirely. The government felt it was not right to exert this kind of control over landlords, so it advised them to check their buildings, but did not force them to do so.

 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this missed chance. In 1999, when this warning was issued, cladding was still new technology. Almost all of the thousands of buildings with cladding on, which are currently causing misery for residents around the country (not to mention billions of public money to repair), had not yet been installed.

 

Blair’s government was on duty when this chance was missed.

 

This was directly singled out in the inquiry report in its very first paragraph on the failings of government, and described as a ‘failure’.

 

At a similar time, the UK was supposed to be aligning its building standards with Europe and introducing the ‘CE’ marking – which provides additional assurance that something meets relevant safety standards. The government was warned in the early 2000s that we would become Europe’s ‘dumping ground’ for combustible materials if this wasn’t done.

 

But it wasn’t. Why not? Wednesday’s report didn’t reach a conclusion, but the evidence suggests that cladding manufacturers didn’t want the CE standard because they then wouldn’t be able to sell their combustible products anymore.

 

Foam insulation lobbyists had – for example – warned some of their products would be ‘prevented from continuing’ on the market if the new standards were implemented and said the move to European standards therefore ‘should not happen’.

 

It didn’t. In fact, the UK government only announced it was implementing CE marking for construction products last Monday.

 

Many of the products that would have been ‘prevented from continuing’ if this change had been made under Blair are now being stripped from the walls of our high rises.

 

It still does not stop there. In 2001, Blair’s government paid for a series of tests on popular cladding products – a result of the changes recommended by the Select Committee.

 

One of the materials tested was later used on Grenfell. It failed so drastically it nearly set the test lab on fire and the test had to be halted for the safety of those present. Officials were warned this product could be used under the current regulations. They did nothing to toughen the rules. Instead, this testing – according to Wednesday’s report – was ‘shelved and entirely forgotten’.

 

There is more. Which government introduced the lax system of fire risk assessment where anyone with a clipboard could sell their services to assess a high-rise building? Blair’s.

 

Which government fragmented the fire service and abolished the training college that previously provided a consistent level of professional performance? Blair’s.

 

With all this in mind, you might think the leader of this government would be rather conciliatory in his comments about the fire and report – which marks another damaging blot on his legacy.

 

The honest truth – to use Blair’s own words – is that a deregulatory government in the 1980s set the scene for Grenfell, and a deregulatory government in the 2010s missed the last chances to stop the fire from happening. But the government Blair led continued and supported this system, and missed pivotal chances of its own to put things right.

 

This was not a good system let down by human error. It was a bad system which utterly failed its citizens. If Blair wants to speak about Grenfell, the first thing he should do is apologise.

 

His response to Cameron's statement

 

His response to Cameron's statement

 

 

 

Interestingly he said Gove at least tried

 

The Americans have a vulgar term which covers this kind of event - cluster something - I forget...

 

Point is it is utterly futile to keep blaming an old woman who has been out of office for thirty years and it is entirely stupid to keep headlining our least favourite politicians whoever they are. They all fked up big time and none of them has any excuse - except maybe that the people advising all of them didn't really do their jobs. I am sure that some of us know what it is like to work a very busy management job and if we did, we probably know just how hard it is to keep on top of everything that we have to do and just how much we depend on the diligence, veracity and intelligence of those who tell us what is going on. There was massive failure in that / those chain/s of information. And there was a huge cultural element of failure too - it affected various administrations. It happens to generals too who just refuse to consider certain possibilities in war until reality hits them. Hitler's blind pursuit of 'Vengeance Weapons' while starving more effective wings of his forces won us the war.

 

I think Peter Bridge's point the other day about Pickles blindness is important, but his side was not the only one who should have sensed that change was needed - which is why I posted that quote of Peter Apps about Blair. I think some of us would like to gloss over the responsibility of some.

 

EDIT:

 

Someone at work a long time ago quipped something to me which covers this a bit:

 

"The higher a man climbs up the ladder of life, the more he exposes his a r se to the crowd.'

 

It's true.

It just shows how psychopathic that guy is. All those people killed in the Iraq war was nobody's fault that the weapons of mass destruction didn't exist. It was just a mistake, so nobody's to blame.

 

Now it's all those lives destroyed in Grenfell were just a mistake. Move on and forget

according to some caller to yesterday's BBC Any Answer, when Margaret Thatcher started her revolution of 'cutting red tapes', the building regs book was apparently 200 pages thick. When she resigned, 80%-90% of it has been cut. 25 pages were all what was left.

The BBC pre-select their callers, so your only see or hear the ones that bleat the BBC narratives, or they select thick nutters so that they can destroy them and their arguments if there is any truth in them. Many of the so called "members of the public" that ask questions are actually selected extreme left wing activists, and likewise the concerned citizens that appear "randomly" at hospitals, etc.

The BBC pre-select their callers, so your only see or hear the ones that bleat the BBC narratives, or they select thick nutters so that they can destroy them and their arguments if there is any truth in them. Many of the so called "members of the public" that ask questions are actually selected extreme left wing activists, and likewise the concerned citizens that appear "randomly" at hospitals, etc.

that guy is an electrician. He said that practically all the buildings he's worked in are defective as far as fire prevention is concerned. The tories hang on to Thatcherism as far as I can remember and still do. They want smaller goverment, less spending, less tax and less regulations. Nobody looks after maintenance of public services anymore. After a while, everything government does become inefficient and expensive because the support structures are all broken. If you want something done, you have to bring in people from abroad. 1.2 millions immigrate into the UK last year.

What? Why is this still standing?

 

 

These tinder boxes should have been all knocked down hundreds of years ago if governments were up to the job.

 

God knows what thatcher's must have to pay for product and third party liability.....

 

Oh no - did I type the word thatcher? I knew she would be at the bottom of it somewhere. Now I will feel obliged to try and defend her again.

that guy is an electrician. He said that practically all the buildings he's worked in are defective as far as fire prevention is concerned. The tories hang on to Thatcherism as far as I can remember and still do. They want smaller goverment, less spending, less tax and less regulations. Nobody looks after maintenance of public services anymore. After a while, everything government does become inefficient and expensive because the support structures are all broken. If you want something done, you have to bring in people from abroad. 1.2 millions immigrate into the UK last year.

 

Oh dear - have you got some special goggles? Is that what it is that only lets you see one side?

It just shows how psychopathic that guy is. All those people killed in the Iraq war was nobody's fault that the weapons of mass destruction didn't exist. It was just a mistake, so nobody's to blame.

 

Now it's all those lives destroyed in Grenfell were just a mistake. Move on and forget

 

The BBC pre-select their callers, so your only see or hear the ones that bleat the BBC narratives, or they select thick nutters so that they can destroy them and their arguments if there is any truth in them. Many of the so called "members of the public" that ask questions are actually selected extreme left wing activists, and likewise the concerned citizens that appear "randomly" at hospitals, etc.

 

I actually think of all the venal, and useless politicians we have seen in a long time, Blair's messianic self belief, made him the most evil of all of them and probably the only one who really was an absolutely evil influence.

 

When self belief and hubris come together as they did in him, and when you combine that with religious belief that he was somehow being guided by God in a messianic way, it allows men and women to decide that whatever the other evidence, you can just shut it off and go ahead and act in terrible ways.

 

There was no way that Bush was not going to go into Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, but Blair gave him more than a fig leaf of respectability by joining us into that war.

 

The hubris could be seen as Reid started wittering on about how we would bring our friendly soft hatted soldiers into Iraq to bring them democracy - an unalloyed good thing - despite there being no history of much in the way of democracy there, or any belief in the kinds of view of humanity that underpins democratic values.

 

But we were handed our ar ses big time, ending up with our troops, no longer wearing berets, but hiding in their compounds. Not enough men, not enough decent kit, soft bodied vehicles being blown to smithereens every time they ventured out from behind their walled enclosures.

 

All of that was avoidable. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and most of them ordinary people.

 

ISIL ending up in charge of large parts of the country - immeasurably worse for all, including us.

 

That part of the world stands to a man for the exact opposite of everything modern western society stands for. You are not going to change ANY of it by trying to impose western values. Same but on steroids for Afghanistan. Now women must not only hide under a black sheet, but must not speak outside and only quietly inside.

 

And to reopen another sore of mine here - and we are seeing more and more of these people arriving here, un-vetted, unopposed and un-deportable. Most or at the very least, many of them are steeped in the same moral code.

 

Oh what a lovely thing multi-culturalism is.

 

that guy is an electrician. He said that practically all the buildings he's worked in are defective as far as fire prevention is concerned. The tories hang on to Thatcherism as far as I can remember and still do. They want smaller goverment, less spending, less tax and less regulations. Nobody looks after maintenance of public services anymore. After a while, everything government does become inefficient and expensive because the support structures are all broken. If you want something done, you have to bring in people from abroad. 1.2 millions immigrate into the UK last year.

What tories? There were none left last time I looked.

The Americans have a vulgar term which covers this kind of event - cluster something - I forget...

 

Point is it is utterly futile to keep blaming an old woman who has been out of office for thirty years and it is entirely stupid to keep headlining our least favourite politicians whoever they are. They all fked up big time and none of them has any excuse - except maybe that the people advising all of them didn't really do their jobs. I am sure that some of us know what it is like to work a very busy management job and if we did, we probably know just how hard it is to keep on top of everything that we have to do and just how much we depend on the diligence, veracity and intelligence of those who tell us what is going on. There was massive failure in that / those chain/s of information. And there was a huge cultural element of failure too - it affected various administrations. It happens to generals too who just refuse to consider certain possibilities in war until reality hits them. Hitler's blind pursuit of 'Vengeance Weapons' while starving more effective wings of his forces won us the war.

 

I think Peter Bridge's point the other day about Pickles blindness is important, but his side was not the only one who should have sensed that change was needed - which is why I posted that quote of Peter Apps about Blair. I think some of us would like to gloss over the responsibility of some.

 

EDIT:

 

Someone at work a long time ago quipped something to me which covers this a bit:

 

"The higher a man climbs up the ladder of life, the more he exposes his a r se to the crowd.'

 

It's true.

The thing that struck me was there was multiple warnings from very credible and experienced people before the tragedy that were ignored

The thing that struck me was there was multiple warnings from very credible and experienced people before the tragedy that were ignored

 

It is true Peter and none of them will accept a word of it.

 

It will be interesting to see what charges are brought and whether many of them can even be brought to court in this country. Lots of them are foreign - some French. Some Irish. Woosh will blame BREXIT.

 

The merry go round continues to rotate. Not a lot changes.

It just shows how psychopathic that guy is. All those people killed in the Iraq war was nobody's fault that the weapons of mass destruction didn't exist. It was just a mistake, so nobody's to blame.

 

Now it's all those lives destroyed in Grenfell were just a mistake. Move on and forget.

 

It will be interesting to see what charges are brought and whether many of them can even be brought to court in this country. Lots of them are foreign - some French. Some Irish. Woosh will blame BREXIT.

I am against the rhetoric of the prominent brexiters. I wasn't particularly in one camp or the other on brexit although I voted remain at the end.

On Grenfell, I doubt that we could sue Arconic France for supplying the ingredients such as infills and paints. They didn't fabricate the cassettes. We could sue their uk agents but I doubt that the same charges would stick. The fundamental issue is lack of building regs on facades.

On blaming brexit, my view is if we don't want to do the work, we'll have to find someone who will. EU workers are on average much better trained compared to rest of the world and they don't stick around when their roles are no longer required.

I'm not so sure that Arconic executives and workers are safe. We know they hid details of fire tests which would had they been known, have made it hard to sell their product. The email trail shows they were well aware of the risk and conspired to disguise it. I am not a lawyer, so I do not know where conspiracy becomes criminal, or actionable when foreign citizens are concerned. I suspect that had the victims been American, and the conspirators were foreign, some people would already be in jail. Look what happened to Mike Lynch of Autonomy fame.

Mike lynch was accused of fraud and wirefraud. The two situations are like Apple and pear.

Grenfell [...] was a result of a failed system, easily gamed by those acting out of dishonesty and greed and not robust enough to prevent straightforward incompetence.

 

A direct parallel is happening now, under our gaze, with Lord Redesdale's Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill. The Bill's on its way through the Lords and seeks to regulate ebikes, kits, batteries and chargers.

 

The ‘large-scale testing route’ was implemented, but the worryingly low basic standard was left where it was.

 

The similarity to large-scale testing is the clause forbidding sale of an ebike unless the vehicle (as a whole) has a certificate of conformity. Construction standards exist but the Bill proposes whole vehicle testing despite its chilling effect on the ebike industry.

 

Not only that, the further recommendation of checks on existing systems was booted out entirely.

 

The existing systems are the million or so ebikes already in the UK. A proportion of these are more likely to fail through fire at some stage, some already have and this will continue until that stock is depleted. Ebike technology is maturing fast meaning fires in new goods will become rarer, leaving this stock as a significant risk ignored by Lord Redesdale's Bill, as with Grenfell.

 

lobbyists had – for example – warned some of their products would be ‘prevented from continuing’ on the market if the new standards were implemented

 

This worries me the most. Battery design for safety continues to mature fast and now is not the time to set standards based on current industry practice as this will lock out future improvements and lock in existing dangers. The Bill provides an example in pressing to require weak protection for battery interfaces - tomorrow's deficient products from major brands that would be prevented from continuing on the market in a sane world.

 

If you have a high horse write to your MP, we should be being heard about this before it reaches the Commons.

It does not matter much which measures will be imposed, we need to kill as many possible causes as possible to restore confidence.

A direct parallel is happening now, under our gaze, with Lord Redesdale's Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill. The Bill's on its way through the Lords and seeks to regulate ebikes, kits, batteries and chargers.

 

 

 

The similarity to large-scale testing is the clause forbidding sale of an ebike unless the vehicle (as a whole) has a certificate of conformity. Construction standards exist but the Bill proposes whole vehicle testing despite its chilling effect on the ebike industry.

 

 

 

The existing systems are the million or so ebikes already in the UK. A proportion of these are more likely to fail through fire at some stage, some already have and this will continue until that stock is depleted. Ebike technology is maturing fast meaning fires in new goods will become rarer, leaving this stock as a significant risk ignored by Lord Redesdale's Bill, as with Grenfell.

 

 

 

This worries me the most. Battery design for safety continues to mature fast and now is not the time to set standards based on current industry practice as this will lock out future improvements and lock in existing dangers. The Bill provides an example in pressing to require weak protection for battery interfaces - tomorrow's deficient products from major brands that would be prevented from continuing on the market in a sane world.

 

If you have a high horse write to your MP, we should be being heard about this before it reaches the Commons.

 

Who is Lord Redesdale? Rupert Mitford.

 

Oh - yes - He is a left over hereditary peer still there as a result of an unholy conniving scheme by lib dems and labour to keep some of these interfering, undeserved fkers in Parliament.

 

Maybe the French had it right after all with their cutting off the aristocracy.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Mitford,_6th_Baron_Redesdale