The unequal tax laws fuelling the black economy

I have just heard an item on BBC Radio 4 about the huge increase in the cost of raw materials for the building industry. Bricks and concrete products are reportedly up 20%. While average inflation, according to the retail price index, shows a 2 or 3% rise the cost of 'trade' inflation could be much higher. The trouble is that there is no barometer for this because the cost of raw materials is only picked up when those materials go through to the retail sector. The retail price index measures a selected basket of items sold in the shops and by 'shops' they don't mean builder's merchants.

The building industry is even further out of the loop because house prices are not even included in the inflation index. I suppose there is good reason for that because houses can be sold on to people who have also benefited from price hikes but if you are trying to save up for your first house then the rate at which prices are moving away from you is the most relevant bit of inflation there is. Happily, for first time buyers, house prices are falling or at least static. But for builders faced with rising materials costs the fact that they can't pass this increase onto the customer is not quite so good. The only way that increased material costs can be absorbed is in reducing labour costs or cutting profits. You can guess which is more likely. With high unemployment and a huge army of migrant workers looking for any job they can find it is wages that end up bearing the brunt of this short fall.

For anyone looking to have work done on an existing property the fall in labour costs may also offset the rise in materials but there is another factor which distorts the market and that is vat which is not charged on new build but is charged on home improvements. It is even more unequal because small builders are sometimes zero rated for vat because their turnover is below the threshold. With vat now being 20% this can make a huge difference to a quotation. So although we have a 20% increase in materials there is a possible saving of 20% on labour costs if you find a builder who is either not vat registered or is willing to do the job for cash.

The idea of having a vat threshold is to encourage start up businesses but I know plenty of builders who have been trading for 20 years or so who still manage to keep below the vat threshold. They do this by working for cash or at least getting the customer to buy the materials. Meanwhile the honest builder (yes there are some) who is forced to charge vat loses jobs to the fly by nights.

The obvious answer here is for the government to give the same vat relief to home improvements as they do to new build or abolish that vat threshold. I, and many other in the industry would prefer them to treat new build and refurbishments equally. It would be a brave move but one which would give some real stimulus to our industry and at a time when there are skilled tradesmen stacking shelves in supermarkets while people are in desparate need of housing it is needed.

Fault finding, A plumber's tale

Fault finding.
The golden rule that I have followed through years of fault finding is ‘never assume and never jump to conclusions’. OK that is two golden rules but the basic message is never say you know something until you prove it. This has stood me in good stead where other tradesmen have come and gone from a job missing one small fact that changed everything. This is not superior wisdom just hard won experience from getting it wrong. And sometimes I still get it wrong as this job proves.

I had been called out to look at a leak around the bath. It is almost always due to a defective silicone seal but I didn’t just assume that. I checked it by spraying water all around the edge of the bath. Sure enough the water poured down. Positive proof!

The leak had been going for some while and made a real mess. We got the job to take the bath out and renew the rotten chipboard floor and cover the walls with Knauf Aquapanel before retiling. This was the fourth flat in the block to suffer from these problems and it had caused bad feelings among the owners so this customer didn’t want any further trouble from his bathroom.
He didn’t mind paying for a good job but he wanted a guarantee. Now I know there are some plumbers who would not put their name on a piece of paper that says ‘this won’t leak’ but I was 100% confident.

Firstly we were going to renew the floor, then we were going to get rid of the plasterboard at the shower end and put up some tile backer board. We were also going to beef up the stud work to prevent any movement. Then we were going to tile the floor under the bath so the tiles came right up to the wall. The Ardex shower waterproofing system would then be used to make a damp proof membrane that ran down the walls behind the bath and onto the floor so any leak would not be able to seep down under the floor.

There would be a silicone seal between the bath and the wall and then another silicone seal after the wall had been tiled.
It was near enough a week’s work to do this but I told the customer that I was sure after all that it wouldn’t leak, but if it ever did (which I doubted) he would know about it because the water would seep out from under the bath panel and appear as a puddle on the tiled floor. This might seem like belt and braces but it is actually standard practice on the Continent, we are almost alone in ending the tiles just under the bath panel.

We obviously tested the bath waste and even replaced the flexi tap connectors just for good measure. I have heard too many horror stories about flexis springing a leak and would never use them in a flat. We finished on Friday lunchtime and everything looked good. That weekend I received a text saying that a puddle had appeared on the bathroom floor.

It was Sunday morning but I went straight over. The leak appeared to be coming from the bath waste so I took it apart. There were traces of Plumber’s Mait on the underside of the waste which indicated that this had been a previous problem which someone had tried to fix. We had obviously disturbed a bad repair. Plumber's Mait is not suitable for bedding in wastes of any sort but thousands of people use it for this job every year. If you ask Evo Stick, the manufacturers, they will verify that it is unsuitable for wastes. If you need a sealant for wastes then silicone is much better.


I removed all the Plumber's Mait and, because the rubber seals looked fine left them to do the job they were designed to do. I ran the bath and it looked OK.
Monday morning I got another text ‘Bath still leaking, please fix today’. This time I decided to renew the whole pop up waste assembly. It looked fine.
Monday night text number three ‘still leaking, pissed off’. Looking on the positive side at least the idea of tiling up to the wall and sealing the wall to floor joint had paid off with an early warning of what was really a small leak. If we hadn’t done this then the people in the flat below would have been the first to know.
I went back to the bathroom and after half an hour of having the bath full of water and nothing coming out I wondered if the problem was more to do with the person using the bath than the bath itself. He was a big guy and I wondered what difference it would make if you had another 110kg in the bath. It all seemed solid but would things start flexing? My problem was how to simulate this. I certainly didn’t want him sitting in the bath while I crawled about with a torch even if he was willing. It would take a month of Sundays to get that image out of my head. I lay there, head on the floor, deep in thought. It was at this point that the torch light caught a single silver drop of water. It wasn’t coming from the waste, it was coming from the glass fibre of the bath. I pushed it with my finger and a few more drops came down. I discovered that the bath was spongy. I could actually push a blister of water around. Clearly it had leaked through the acrylic top and been trapped by the reinforcing coat of glass fibre. I shone the torch down through the water and there it was, a hairline crack. The one thing I hadn’t proved at the outset was that the bath was watertight. Because 95% of leaks on baths turn out to be from around the silicone seal I had jumped to the conclusion that it was the cause and I hadn’t looked at a secondary cause.

The task now was to remove the damaged bath (easy with a recip saw) and then fit a new bath without damaging all those lovely new tiles or the new bath. That was slightly more tricky because it was a snug fit.
The customer, obviously not expecting to lose weight any time soon, decided to go for a steel bath. Good choice in his case. When we cut that old bath in half you could see the weak spot. It was all along the edge of the chipboard reinforcing panel where the inner acrylic joined the outer glass fibre. There was a triangular void all the way along both edges. It was inevitable that it would fail fat bloke or not but the fact that the percantage of obese people in Britain has now reached epidemic proportions means that plumbers will be busier with this king of work.

Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

I have just read that the number of carbon monoxide poisoning incidents has increased over last year. The reason isn't entirely clear but I will offer two suggestions.

First the exceptionally cold winter. Nearly all carbon monoxide poisoning is from open flued appliances such as gas fires. These require a through flow of fresh air from outside. Natural ventilation, which may be tolerated, during a mild winter suddenly becomes an icy blast. I saw several incidents last year where people had taped up air bricks and tried to seal every available gap around the doors and windows.

Secondly the cost of having a Gas Safe engineer out to service the appliance has risen because many people, such as me for example, who are not specialising in gas work find the Gas Safe registration and training courses too onerous for the amount of gas work I do. At most I may install five boilers a year and service another ten. This does not justify registration so I now end up getting them done by a sub contractor.

I am all for safety but the need to keep going for refresher courses and paying out extortionate fees for registering has pushed out perfectly competent fitters and given those left in the game the opportunity to charge more. I don't blame them for this because they have to cover the cost of all those courses.
As with so many things it is the poor who suffer particularly those in fuel poverty because they either forgo the annual service or use an unregistered service engineer who may or may not know what he/she is doing.

My proposal is that the HSE lets people who prove their competence through an exam register for a small fee. We would then pay a notification fee to Gas Safe for each appliance we work on. This would mean that those who did a small amount of work would not have to pay a disproportionate fee.

All gas work would be subjected to random inspections by local safety inspectors who would be paid out of that fund. Any installation that didn't pass a safety test would be shut down and the installer sent for training or banned according to the severity. At present there is a voluntary scheme where a household can nominate their gas work for random inspection. This leaves the householder feeling as if they are snitching on the installer (because the installer is informed by Gas Safe) and the installer may therefore by reluctant to return for annual servicing.

If there were a duty on the householder to send off the registration card this would protect the consumer from such accusations and make sure that all gas work is subjected to random inspection.

I am sure there are reasons why this would not work and there are those out there who may think it is no better than the system we have right now but if the number of deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning are increasing then it is clear that something isn't working.

Another idea I will put up for discussion is for Gas companies to offer free service and safety checks to the elderly.

Precious Metal

Have you noticed any increase in the number of scrap men doing the rounds? I certainly have, not least because the scrap I had set aside recently on one of my jobs walked off after just ten minutes. Two hours later I had another visit from someone who was similarly interested but this time he didn’t particularly care whether the copper tube was old or new. So keen was this young man on the concept of recycling that he thought he might just cut out the middle man (me) and go from merchant to scrap dealer without the copper ever being used for plumbing.

I stopped him in the nick of time. He was not particularly bothered by being caught like this. He had, in the process of stealing things from building sites, become desensitised to physical and verbal abuse.

“It’s the Chinese” he said “They’re taking all the scrap and there’s a shortage.”

I was impressed by this immediate blame transference. He gets caught stealing and it is immediately the fault of some mythical figure from half way around the world. It seems that the Chinese are now to blame for everything from global warming to material shortages. This champion of free enterprise who was scurrying down the drive with my copper was just doing his patriotic best to help alleviate the shortage. By keeping the supply up he was also helping keep the price down which, is good for me when I have to replace it.

It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps the problem is not that we don’t have enough raw materials it is simply that these materials are not moving around the system fast enough. The 25 years (miniumum) that copper spends lying around in people’s house is way too long. We need a much faster throughput.

If you are wondering what I did with the thief having recovered my property, the answer is nothing. I could have called the police but in my experience they never turn up when you need them. I may also have ‘taught him a lesson’ but it wouldn’t have been not to steal, it would have been to run faster next time.

The serious point here is that scrap theft is now such a serious problem that millions of pounds worth of cable is being stolen from our railway lines, manhole covers are being removed from roads and war memorials stolen.Scrap dealers know they are buying stolen goods but often turn a blind eye. The Home Office is now looking to change the law to make it harder to sell scrap. They are looking at increased regulation of scrap dealers which is a typical government response. Produce another licence. This is wishful thinking because the problem starts way down the chain from the legitimate dealers who would buy the licence.

The scrap metal business at this level is run like the drug trade, small dealers to bigger dealers and always for cash. In fact there are many drug addicts who rely on scrap metal theft for their daily fix. The only way that this business will be brought into line is if the cash is eliminated from the transaction. If those people who earn their living roaming the streets looking for scrap could only receive payment through BACS you would see an immediate drop in thefts. As it is at present they turn up at the scrap dealer with a false name and give a false vehicle registration and are gone. It is so easy and lucrative it is a wonder that everyone isn't doing it.

Cracking up

If you have been drawn to this blog by the title alone I will save you wasting further time by saying from the outset that I am talking about buildings here and not a mental breakdown, though that can never be ruled out in the building game.
Certainly the owner of the house in this story needs an extraordinary degree of optimism and patience in order to preserve his sanity as his new house continues to crack before his eyes.

There are of course many reasons why buildings may crack but this blog is talking about buildings made of aircrete blocks which a few months after completion started showing a number of large cracks. As with so many of these problems everyone involved is pointing a finger at someone else. Is it the blocks, the brickies, the plasterers or the architect who is to blame?

Aircrete blocks are lightweight and have a very high degree of insulation. When introduced they seemed like the wonder product of the age and to some extent the do a job that no other materials can do. I think it is accurate to say that when they were first developed the intention was to use them on internal skins of cavity walls instead of breeze blocks which are heavier and not such good insulators. This is still where they are mostly used. There are however a growing number of buildings being built with external skins of aircrete and there are even buildings being built with solid aircrete. That is to say no cavity. The appeal of blocks over bricks is speed and cheapness. They are a good product in their way but the builder needs to understand their limitations.

There is a golden rule in the building industry that states 'mortar should never be stronger than the material it is joining'. It is a golden rule that it often broken. Having worked as a brickies labourer in my teens I can tell you from my own experience two very good reasons that this rule is broken: one is laziness and the other is ignorance. Often the two go hand in hand.

The general advice is that a cavity wall is brought up more or less equally on both sides rather than building the inner skin and then the outer. Again this isn't always done but if it is done then it is highly likely that the mortar being used is sometimes the same strength inside and out. Labourers just can't be bothered to chop and change mixes or throw stuff away. At best they may put it back in the mixer and add a bit more cement but even that is a hassle so they tend to mix a fairly strong mortar for the bricks and serve it up for the blocks as well.

Another bit of advice is that aircrete blocks should ideally be laid with a sand/cement/lime mix of around 12.1.1. If you look at how much lime a builders merchant sells compared to the number of aircrete blocks he shifts you will see that very few people follow this recipe. It is far more likely that they will weaken the mortar with a plasticisers or (in some cases) washing up liquid. This gives them a lightweight mix with plenty of room for movement but the problem here is that the amount of cement is not sufficient to cover all that sand. I would argue that for this reason alone lime is always better than plasticiser because it mixes with the cement and spreads it further to form a more consistent mix.

That is the ideal scenario but, as I have said, the reality is that the labourer will often knock up a 4 or 5 to 1 mix of sand and cement with a squirt of plasticiser which is then used throughout the build.

If the aircrete blocks are used on the internal skin only and that is later dry-lined with plasterboard then the subsequent shrinkage cracks will never be seen and in any event will probably do no harm.If the blocks are used on the external skins then the cracks cannot be covered because they will almost invariably show through the render.

Even if the build mortar is the right strength to allow for movement in the blocks, tbis good work can be undone by applying render that is too strong. Getting the render mix right is absolutely critical but once again there are plenty of plasterers out there who struggle to keep a good coat of render on an aircrete wall and to make matters worse their answer is to use even more cement. The real answer is to apply a slurry coat to the blocks and then when this is dry apply the scratch coat.

The block manufacturers are painfully aware of all these problems and issue guidelines to avoid cracking. This involves the use of movement joints which must come all the way through the render. You only need to look around at rendered houses to see how rarely this is done. People just don't like the look of them.

The other measure to avoid cracking is to use bed joint reinforcement at vulnerable points. This is typically around and below windows. The fact that there is no load directly beneath a window means that the blockwork can simply pull apart in the middle. Again you only need to ask a builders merchant for bed joint reinforcement to see that it is rarely used. Very few stock it and some merchants have never heard of it.

What this means is that block manufacturers can simply point to these omissions or errors and wash their hands of any problems. "If you don't follow the guidelines you only have yourself to blame." they will say. I would say they could help a lot more by printing the guidelines on the packs but I suspect they don't really like the word 'cracking' to appear too close to their brand name.

There is another little point that can also help prevent cracking in rendered walls (this applies to brick as well) and that is the use of serpentine curves in the scratch coat. It seems like such a small and insignificant thing but it can make all the difference. If the first coat of render is lined through with horizontal lines then the top coat will grab it along these lines. As that top coat shrinks it will pull on those horizontal lines and hold the wall in tension as the render dries out and tries to shrink. The problem is that all the tension is in a vertical direction so the natural tendency is for the wall to move in the opposite direction which is horizontally. So, as strange as it may seem, a horizontal scratch coat will produce vertical cracks.

Again I see hundreds of jobs where the scratch coat is horizontally lined often with a notched tiling trowel. In fact the whole approach of plasterers to rendering aircrete is often completely wrong. They assume that the wavy lines which are put on the blocks at the factory are a key for their plaster or render which is wrong.

If you walk around many aircrete buildings a few weeks after they have been rendered and tap the walls you will often here a hollow sound. Shortly after that come the cracks and after that the solicitor's letters.

Built to last?

Guildford Cathedral needs more money for repairs. The cathedral, built in the 1930.s and 1950's, is a brick structure sitting on a small mound. Apparently this 'exposed' position is responsible for water ingress through and around the windows which are falling in. The roof is also leaking. Not so much due to the exposed position as bad design perhaps. Did nobody notice it was in an exposed position when they built it?

I am not at all religious but I think great religious buildings are always worth a visit and ought to be saved. They were and are built not just as a place to gather but to give substance to an abstract idea. To quite literally set it in stone. To do this they have to inspire and give those who enter them a sense of awe and wonder. If you sit in the pew with rain dripping on your head it tends to dilute the experience somewhat.

I am sure there are many catholics in Liverpool who know this only too well. Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral, known locally as Paddy's Wigwam developed a leaking roof shortly after it was built. We aren't talking about a bit of lead flashing but a major design fault. The water was pissing in if you will excuse the ungodly expression. It resulted in the architect, Sir Frederick Gibberd, being sued and a subsequent settlement of £1.5M being paid. Almost half this money was spent on consultant's fees just to work out how to go about fixing the roof which is another story. The eventual bill was around £5M


Why is it that builders nearly a thoushand years ago could get it right and we can't?
Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is not only remarkable for its magnificent windows but the fact that it has needed relatively little repair and maintenance in nearly a thousand years. Admittedly it doesn't stand on a hill but it is exposed on all sides simply because it is the tallest thing for miles around. It is certainly a lot more exposed than Guildford Cathedral.

I am not getting all 'Prince Charles' about this because I love a lot of modern architecture but, leaving aside aesthetics, cathedrals should be desinged to stand up and remain standing with minimal intervention. Surely that is page one of the book on architecture?

Masking the truth

Masking tape
I was in my merchants the other day and an experienced decorator was at the counter buying masking tape. Mick behind the counter asked him whether he wanted 3 day, 7 day or longer. The decorator stood making a mental calculation about how many days it was likely to be on and then added a margin for safety. It was likely to be on for 5 days. If he bought 3 day tape and left it on for 5 days he was likely to have a residue to clean off but if he went for 7 day he was paying extra for the sake of 2 days. Was it worth the risk? Decisions, decisions. It prompted me to ask why all masking tape is not made to allow the maximum time of 60 days. Mick didn’t know the answer and neither did the decorator. Neither of them had asked the question but now they were wondering why we need all these different tapes. I took it upon myself to find out.

I phoned a manufacturer who told me
that it costs a lot more money to make an adhesive that will stick but not dry out. The longer it stays tacky without setting the more it costs to produce. So the tape increases steadily in price as the days get longer and of course tape also has a shelf life. Most of us have picked up a roll of masking tape only to find it is all stuck to itself. Merchants know this so even in a large decorating merchants they stock a very limited range of tapes. So even though there is the theoretical choice of tapes up to 60 days it is something you have to order and pay through the nose for.
So it is all about the price. Now I have another bit of information to bore people with and you are another unsuspecting victim.

Hitting the deadline

Against all odds I managed to get the room completed in time for Christmas with a little help from my friends and family. We all had a great time relaxing in the luxury of our new living room. With the 3 kids bagging a sofa each to stretch out we were still a bit short on furniture at times but who needs furniture when there room to stretch out on the floor in front of the woodburning stove.

The Building Regs. required me to put insulation under the new floor and I took the opportunity to add more elsewhere so we exceeded the requirements. This has paid dividends because, even in the coldest weather when it was minus 9 outside and the snow lay all around we were toasting in our room. The wood burner had always worked well in the old room but with the extra cubic capacity of the new space it looked a little under-powered. We thought about getting a bigger one to cope but increasing the insulation turned out to be the better investment. The central heating is now on tick over as background heat.

Now I know that all this extra insulation costs money and when you start putting huge amounts of insulation into a building, as they always seem to do in Grand Designs, there are diminishing returns. The first 100mm will return the investment in 2 or 3 years but when you get to 300mm that last 100mm will not get you your money back in less than 20 years. Those figures, by the way, are actually just wild guesses because there are so many variables in heat losses that I didn't even make the calculation.

For me he insulation is more about comfort levels than saving on heating bills and that warm floor and extra insulation in the walls has made it very comfortable indeed. The icing on the cake is that I got most of the insulation for nothing.
It was pure fluke. Just when I was about to buy it from the merchants I drove past a building site and noticed this guy putting sheets of 100mm thick Celotex on the skip. He had so much of it that he has to pile it up beside the skip. Some were small off- cuts but most of it was plenty big enough to fill the space in between the floor joist.
It had been so badly cut that I doubted he even used a tape measure when putting the pieces in. It was almost as if he had just cut one strip off an 8 x 4 sheet and then chucked the rest away. There was hardly a straight line on the offcuts which meant that the bits he had put in probably didn't fit that well. If insulation doesn't fit snugly you might as well not bother because the cold air gets around to the warm side and it's game over. The unsuspecting house owner will have no way of knowing unless they hire a thermal imaging camera.

The guy loading the skip was very happy because I had suddenly created a lot of space in the skip and he had a load of wood to go in it. "Stop right there" I told him. I would make another trip or two and take the timber as well. Free insulation and now free firewood.

My wife laughs at the way my head always turns when we drive past a skip. It used to be pretty women that turned my head. Now it is the prospect of recycling building materials. A sure sign that I am getting old and mean.