OPINION
September 18th, 2023
Derbyshire County Council now looks as though it is going to trigger a section 114 action as their finances are in a dire state. It is now becoming commonplace to hear about the financial problems in local government. Of course, it is not due to the incompetence of local councillors and employed officers/senior staff. It is all down to the evil Tory government reducing the funding to local councils – due to the cutbacks imposed on financing during the austerity era. Nothing to do with councils exceeding budgets by spending on vanity projects and not concentrating on emptying the bins and providing social services.
The country is now in the middle of a discussion regarding the banning of XL Bully dogs. There has been a spate of attacks by this hybrid “breed” and Rishi Sunak has vowed to introduce legislation before the end of the year banning the ownership of these dogs. There has been a spate of fatalities and serious injuries involving these dogs, with the owners now facing manslaughter charges in a couple of instances. These are the dogs of choice for low-level criminals and drug dealers and are sometimes being built up by steroids which also has an influence on the mental stability of the dogs.
It turns out that when new schools were being built in the 50s and 60s they used a kind of concrete called Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). It is a reinforced version of autoclaved aerated concrete, commonly used in roofing and wall construction. Unfortunately, it has a limited life span and buildings are now crumbling. Many schools and hospitals appear to be affected. There is a blame game going on, with most attempts being made to fix it on Rishi Sunak who blocked repairs and rebuilds during his time as Chancellor.
Rishi Sunak blocked plans to rebuild five hospitals riddled with crumbling concrete three years ago, prompting warnings of a “catastrophic” risk to patient safety, the Guardian has learned.
Just two of the seven hospital rebuilding projects requested by the Department for Health were signed off by the Treasury at the 2020 spending review when Sunak was chancellor and Steve Barclay, now the health secretary, was his chief secretary.
The other five were finally added to the new hospitals programme in May, when the government amended the list, but it has meant a three-year delay in starting to rebuild dangerous hospitals. In their most recent risk assessments, all five have been graded at “catastrophic” risk with warnings that an incident is “likely”.
The five hospitals are Frimley Park hospital, in Surrey; Airedale general hospital, Keighley, West Yorkshire; Hinchingbrooke hospital, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire; Leighton hospital, Cheshire; and the Queen Elizabeth hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk.
The revelations will revive the row over reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) which dominated the start of the new parliamentary session, with Sunak and his education secretary, Gillian Keegan, coming under fire for uncertainty and disruption over crumbling concrete in England’s schools.
NHS bosses have told hospitals across England to be ready to evacuate staff and patients if buildings containing concrete at risk of collapse start to fall down.
NHS England issued the instruction to all 224 health trusts on Tuesday in a letter from Dr Mike Prentice, the organisation’s national director for emergency planning and incident response, and Jacqui Rock, its chief commercial officer, telling trust officers that they should familiarise themselves with a “regional evacuation plan” drawn up by the NHS in the east of England so that hospitals can implement it in the event that buildings that contain Raac start to crumble.
The 2023-4 risk register of Frimley Park hospital, which serves Michael Gove’s constituency, reported widespread crumbling across its buildings. It warned: “There is a risk of injury or death to patients, visitors, and staff due either to delamination of a roof plank whereby a part of it falls, or a sheer collapse with no warning due to limited bearing on the concrete support beam.”
Across the five hospitals, there were more than 100 incidents, according to NHS figures, where estate or infrastructure failures resulted in clinical services being delayed or cancelled in the year after the Treasury’s decision not to include them in the new hospital building programme.
Between them, they had a “high risk” infrastructure backlog – where repairs must be urgently prioritised to prevent major disruption – totalling £117m, but less than a third of that amount was spent. There were 21 patient safety incidents related to critical infrastructure risk in 2021-22 at the five hospitals.
An NAO report in July, Progress with the New Hospital Programme, suggested the risk of Raac to the five hospital buildings was known at the time of the Department for Health’s bid to the Treasury. However, the government decided against including all seven hospitals because “further assessment” was required.
Yet after a school roof collapse led to a national alert in 2019 about the risk of sudden failure, NHS England asked trusts to survey their estates for Raac. Forty-one buildings at 23 trusts contained the material, including the seven hospitals with Raac present throughout, which were at particular risk.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “Rishi Sunak and Steve Barclay are the guilty men of the crisis in our NHS. They literally failed to fix the roof when the sun was shining, putting patients and staff at risk and leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill.
“There is no image that better sums up what the Conservatives have done to our public services than the sight of crumbling hospitals and schools.”
Source The Guardian 13th September 2023.
Similar incidents are now being uncovered in schools throughout the UK and heads of schools are preparing contingency plans for rapid evacuation if crumbling happens whilst children are present in school.
Recent events have pushed this from lead stories in the news cycle.
Here are some snippets of the distractions: –
- When the prisoner escaped from Wandsworth jail, it turns out that 80 staff had not reported for work, leaving the prison staffed at 60%. The protocols that were supposed to be triggered when staff levels dropped this dramatically weren’t implemented!
- Gatwick airport suffered major delays due to Air Traffic Control staff being absent through illness.
- Hospital waiting lists reached just under 8,000,000, with Rishi Sunak laying the blame for the increase on the doctors; strikes – junior doctors are on strike for a 35% increase in pay and are refusing to negotiate.
- Shoplifting has reached epidemic proportions, John Lewis losing £12,000,000 and Iceland £20,000,000 in a year. The police take no action against shoplifting and it is now often carried out by organised gangs – often from illegal immigrants brought in by the Albanian gangs. The shoplifters are now organised and brazen about threatening the staff with violence if confronted.
And finally, the news cycle has been completely swamped this weekend with accusations of rape, intimidation and other sexual offences allegedly committed by Russell Brand. This was the result of a four-year investigation by Channel 4 TV and the Times/Sunday Times with the Sunday Times devoting seven pages to the story yesterday. As Russell Brand pleads his innocence more people and accusations are coming out of the woodwork. It looks as though a lot of people in the entertainment industry are looking for payback.
All this has pushed dire economic news from the news bulletins, with inflation still not under control, debt levels increasing and GDP stalling.
Welcome to Batshit Bonkers Britain.