Bureaucracy gone mad we tell ‘ee
An underlying and fundamental part of our analysis of what has gone wrong with this sceptered isle is that we simply have too much bureaucracy. Too many rules about who may do what and when. Too many veto points over anyone being able to do, well, anything.
As with this story:
Teachers describe conditions in the room where he’s expected to study today as “often unbearable, unacceptable, sweltering” in summer. “In winter,” says Dumitrescu, “it gets so cold that children regularly receive lessons togged up in hats, gloves and coats.”
The reason? Single-pane glazing throughout the Hertfordshire county council’s Grade II* listed 1950s building (the asterisk is important – it introduces an extra level of protection which means the owner must consult Historic England over any proposed changes).
Despite three decades of campaigning for double glazing from a long line of head teachers, Historic England has insisted that features of the original, award-winning architecture must be preserved. That includes the single-glazed doors and windows, which mean the school now has to spend £45,000 a year on heating a thermally inefficient building.
It is not, clearly, a good building, it doesn’t fit the purpose well. But someone, somewhere, has decided that it’s one of those glories of modern archtecture that muc be preserved, as is, in aspic. This:
Really? This is such a glory of the architectural art that it must be preserved, unaltered, to freeze and boil continued generations of children?
Or have we allowed the single issue fanatics to take over another part of life?
Which brings us back to one of our constant refrains. The grand advantage of markets is that they destroy mistakes. School buildings that are not fit to be schools get changed, reworked or destroyed. Bureaucracy insists upon preserving those mistakes. So, more markets and less bureaucracy seems a damn good idea to us. A minor but still valuable side effect would be that the children of Welwyn Garden City will no longer clutch their protractor sets in freezing hands.
Seriously, why are we preserving a school building that does not work as a school? However many medals the architect gained for producing something unfit for either form or function?