Unfettered Free Enterprise Demonstrates need for Inspection and Monitoring

[studiot]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46454844

 

Large scale shoddy materials used by large (reputable ?) building firms who tried to impose gagging orders in exchange for compensation.

 

They could certainly do with some scientific emthod type (independent?) inspection and verification.

[Phi for All]

The new business paradigm says their profit is more important than the home you paid to have built. This is rampant in the US. Businesses aren't about pleasing customers anymore. I think free social media has made folks blind to the things they actually pay for.

In the US, the private road builders dictate the cost of maintaining roads, and they insist on letting us drive on fresh asphalt the day it's put down. Two years later they get paid again when the potholes become unnavigable. The customer is no longer king, hasn't been for some time, and the businesses are tailoring themselves to take advantage. In construction here, you have to bend over and take it from your contractor or else he'll go work on a bigger project. The client is at their mercy, and it only took a single generation to change. My family was in the home-building business, and the customer was treated MUCH better. It wasn't all about the profit, and there was pride in the work.

[J.C.MacSwell]

There were dishonest contractors and/or incompetent contractors a generation ago and there are dishonest contractors and/or incompetent contractors now.

There certainly is a need for a sufficient amount of inspection and monitoring to protect the public, always was, and very important that those folks are honest and competent as well.

This is not of course, exclusive to home building.

[swansont]

This came up in another thread recently. If you call them regulations, people are less likely to support them than if you call them consumer protections

And that's what most of them are. They are there to protect people from harm. When they are absent, there will invariably be some unscrupulous person willing to exploit the lack of protection.

[studiot]

Thank you each for your contributions.

We have regulations coming out of our ears in the UK

 

They are just not enforced.

Worse it seems in this case they were not even checked for compliance with the regulations.

Even worse the perpetrators appear to have sought to hide their wrongdoing by 'gagging' clauses in exchange for meagre compensation, once found out.

 

That is the result of a 'seller's market'

 

I put this in Politics because  I think that includes the science of (science ha ha) economics.

One thing 'free market economics ' assumes is that the seller and buyer have equal bargaining power which is almost never the case.

So the politics question here is how far is the balance tilted towards the sellers and is it getting worse?