WAR IN UKRAINE NEW CONSUMER UNIT REQUIRED

Agree 100% Grumpy. They come from the fatal rains of shot and shell, only to be greeted by a blinkin' clipboard warrior from the council. Beware the man who says "I'm from the Govt and I'm here to help........"

'Presses irony button to ON' - Still, I suppose a night on a London street is safer than the shelter of a secure domestic house with a dodgy socket outlet.

Too many coming up the Kent beaches in search of benefit cheques for there to be any free social housing left over for the really needy.

gkenyon 

When I was a kid back in the 1960’s my Dad was building new houses along with his business partner who was a Latvian guy who came over here after the Second World War bringing his mother with him, because of the complicated issues left over from the war Latvia was not a safe place for them to be,

Building houses and Eastern European refugees were part of my childhood, Uldis Pinka-Finks known as John, bottom of the page in this London Gazette link https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/43135/page/8505/data.pdf  became a British Citizen in 1963, my Dad was the other director of the company mentioned in the London Gazette, they actually traded using my Dad’s name because John thought using his name wasn’t a good business plan.

In the same year the Governments Parker Morris Committee set the standards for social housing, this became an issue for builders of new private homes for sale, because a lot of the new homes for sale didn’t actually meet the social housing standards laid down by the government.

Builders actually started advertising new build homes for sale as meeting the Parker Morris standards, because purchasers expected them to be at least as good as a council house, though many weren’t.

Over the last fifty years I have seen housing standards actually fall in many instances, particularly in student housing and shared rental homes, the Homes in Multiple Occupation that have become the cash cows for Buy to Let landlords with people paying to live in lofts and cellars that would have not met the required standards, particularly the minimum ceiling height requirements that was removed from the Building Regulations because it was originally introduced in a Public Health Act to provide ventilation for gas lighting and as people don’t have gas lights anymore it was deemed there isn’t any reason why people actually need to live in rooms they can stand up in.

I was actually doing a landlords EICR and was in the cellar of a HMO I could not stand up in testing at the consumer unit, when the landlords brought six students down to view it as their potential home for the next two years and none of them could stand up.

The local council has had a crack down on HMOs and many now have fewer people living in them or have been extended to increase communal living space.

It will be interesting if the government and councils try to apply the landlords and HMO requirements to private homes that will be used to provide shared accommodation with the home owners and Ukrainian refugees, because many of these private homes will not meet the requirements for privately rented homes and HMOs.

I would have to do things to get my own home pass inspection as a HMO, we have a high chain link fence across the bottom of our garden over and above the brick wall and wrought iron style panels a previous owner had built, we had to have it because my wife registered as a child minder around thirty years ago and the council insisted we have a more secure fence as well as a sorter flex on the kettle, protective film on windows and other “safety measures” we did not have for our own kids, yet I did not think we were bad parents!

I would guess a lot of prospective hosts will be “empty nesters” more mature people whose own children have left home leaving them with spare accommodation, it is quite possible they are told they actually need to undertake home improvements to accommodate refugees in rooms previously occupied by thrift own children.

Is low standards of Housing a failure of Government is a political discussion, on this forum it’s far more appropriate to discuss what standards should be applied to electrical installations in homes with owner-occupiers, particularly when hosting refugees and if the general standards for HMOs and privately rented homes should be applied.

It should be noted though that the housing standards established in 1963 were removed in 1980, as noted in Wikipedia:

The mandatory nature of the Parker Morris standards was ended by the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980, when the incoming Conservative government sought to reduce the cost of housing and, generally, public spending.

en.m.wikipedia.org/.../Parker_Morris_Committee

For context, has anyone here witnessed the average state of Ukrainian domestic wiring? Forget the live munitions for a moment and focus upon which might be safer, a non-compliant Uk installation - which is most of them if we are to believe the plethora of opinions from EICR 'inspectors' - or is the installation they have left behind safer (if still intact)?

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If that is the case, them all HMOs for example will be non-compliant because of the lack of those panacea AFDDs - should we be worried?

I do not see why it cannot be debated !  The issue under disussion here is not to meet every dot and comma some BS or other, it is to ensure wiring is safe for  use by visitors to a family home, and there are many ways of achieving that that, after all far more counties do not follow our wiring regs than do so, and this is first and foremost a wiring forum, not a 'praise BS7671' forum after all.

By all means use it to test against, as a convenient English  language text, but do not expect all failures to make the home un-inhabitable.

Mike

Declaring someone’s home a Home in Multiple Occupation because they are taking in refugees seems completely over the top and could involve a lot of upgrading work, such as the installation of many additional hard wired smoke alarms or even a full fire alarm system in amongst other things.

I would not be surprised if it’s been left up to individual local councils to make up a set of requirements and would also not be surprised if there is an incident that the local council ends up carrying the can rather than the Government. 

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