CEO should resign and be charged with corporate manslaughter

[Istheworldreallydonefor]

It’s time senior management event their pay or faced the consequences
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Rochdale Boroughwide Housing CEO must face the music.

www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-63641438

AIBU - you think CEO’s should not face the music

AINBU - they should be charged

@Deguster have you seen the photos? The place was disgusting. This is not the kind of damp from drying wet washing.

As someone who has lived in a rented property that had mould issues, I'm sick of hearing that the tenants need to ventilate more. My landlord wanted me to have the heating on and the windows open. I always opened the window when I showered etc but mould is drawn in my cold nights and poor insulation so it never worked.

I agree with you. But on the other hand we don’t know what the CEO was trying to do. These authorities are worryingly underfunded and this poor boy was a victim of the government generally not giving a shit.

The CEO is one person at one authority. But this issue is prevalent across the country. I believe it’s bigger than this one CEO and to charge him for it would allow the government the scape goat it needs to hide behind.

The CEO is one person at one authority. But this issue is prevalent across the country. I believe it’s bigger than this one CEO and to charge him for it would allow the government the scape goat it needs to hide behind.

This would be my concern too. In reality this could have happened in any area, to any CEO of any housing association. Its not a bad apple.

Same! Our old flat had a serious mould problem. I spent hours scrubbing with bleach. I dragged 2/3 blue IKEA bags of wet laundry up to the launderette every week and spent £££s on the driers because we had no outdoor space to dry stuff and no tumble drier (and no space to put one). I bought a large, expensive dehumidifier and one of those devices that sucks condensation off windows. We showered next to a wide open window in midwinter, and NOTHING helped. The letting agent insisted over and over that it was our fault. When we were about to move out I mentioned it to our upstairs neighbour who owned his flat, and he confirmed that it was a structural problem with building and he’d had to have loads of work done on his flat to fix it.

Our current flat has no window in the bathroom and I often dry washing indoors if the weather’s crap, and we’ve never had a single spot of mould!

The whole thing is just fucking heartbreaking.

The parents had clearly tried many avenues and just kept coming up against brick walls. The dad issued legal proceedings in the end and the boss implied that was what stalled the process!! Some defence.

The CEO can't be charged with Corporate Manslaughter. That crime is charged against the company.

If you want the CEO charged, the appropriate offence is Gross Negligence Manslaughter.

There are thousands of properties in similar or worse condition. It's a scandal. But there are so many scandals, with a common root - underinvestment in basic infrastructure. Unfortunately safe housing isn't a big ticket political policy that will gain votes.

The mould was a structural issue not a lifestyle issue.

The landlords tried to say that it was a lifestyle issue, the findings and what's been reported suggest otherwise.

Structural problems causing that level of mould are not something that a tenant could realistically sort in a rented flat

I think he should lose his job but we know for the last xx years that it's not about taking responsibility for anything these days, look at our politicians for example

I voted YABU because it is literally impossible to charge a CEO with corporate manslaughter. Corporate manslaughter is when you charge a corporation as a legal person with manslaughter.

The only criminal charges you could bring against a CEO would be for things he is suspected to have personally done or ordered to be done.

It is very different from driving a car or machine and killing someone because a car or machine is not a legal person, and it also does not consist of groups of humans with their own free will and chaos element. A machine is literally under your complete control, but a corporation isn’t literally under a CEOs complete control.

So yes, charge the housing association with corporate manslaughter and as it’s not a human, the penalties are usually damages paid to the victims or in this case the victims family.

Yes, the CEO (and anyone else in the association) should be sacked if an investigation shows any complicity or culpability on their part.

Sad as it is, this situation isn’t without precedent, I have known at least one young girl in my village who died from asthma attacks linked to mould in her rented home. She died at our GP office while waiting for an ambulance. But no inquest was done into her death.

I’m glad it an inquest was done in this case. It’s a credit to the parents really that they are fighting for justice. The hope is that this case would galvanise the government to actually enforce housing standards in the rental sector.

That’s why proper regulations are needed to actually hold landlords to account. Be it corporate or individuals.

However. Michael Gove and fellow MPs voted down such legislation and this is why we have the situation of countless tenants having to put up with shit homes.

Like it or not, call it red tape/bureaucracy or whatever, regulation is needed when the power imbalance puts too much power in the hands of corporations.

And it has to be regulation with teeth. That tenants can use to hold landlords to account.

The problem with that approach is that action is only taken if things get to the stage of children dying.
There’s a big gap between homes which are fit for human inhabitants and homes with killer mould, so I can imagine housing associations will skirt that line.

Regulations would improve the state of housing without people needing to die.

This is what “red tape” is. And we need it.

My partner and I were talking about this, the pictures are horrendous and apparently there was no ventiliation. I think one of the pictures was of a radiator with the mould right above it, this often happens when drying wet things on them without a source of ventilation somewhere.

He works in housing and checks often reveal that ventilation has been shut off, and its not always clear whether its bad contracting or whether the tenants do this for warmth (and what with high costs of fuel this isnt surprising)

The shocking thing for me is what was the housing officer doing, how were they supporting?

Given the report states the mould was caused by structural a building design issues, then block was obviously negligently designed and then built by cowboy developers. No window in the bathroom. Only venting window going to a communal hallway(not an exterior). That’s the architect firms fault, and the developer’s fault that built the damn thing. Send them corporate manslaughter charges too.

Cavity wall insulation does not suit some buildings. Housing associations wont listen though. They get funding for it and the insulation companies get paid. Both are winners and secure in the knowledge that if mould occurs they can blame the tenant in the culture that we live in.

I cant stand properties with 'inside' bathrooms as I call them, so many properties being built like that these days, usually 'luxury' houses where you cant actually fit a bathroom, where does the ventilation go?

Extractor fan

They're hardly ever effective, we rent a lot of properties for holidays, we always go self catering, the ones with extractor fans always have that dampy mouldy smell about them.

@EdgeOfACoin DH and i live in a one bedroom flat There is nowhere to dry clothes. The social housing model seems to be that if you dont have kids you dont need to wear wash and dry clothes.

The report stated that the kitchen window opened up on to a “communal walkway”, not an enclosed corridor, so most likely one of those blocks with external walkways. It’s understandable that it might make a resident less likely to want to open the window for security reasons though.

Internal bathrooms needn’t be a problem, if properly insulated and with a good extractor. Most of the flats I’ve lived in have had them, and the only time I’ve had a problem with mould was in the flat that did have bathroom windows! Unfortunately most high-density housing wouldn’t get built if naturally ventilated bathrooms became a requirement.

Obviously it’s hard to tell without exterior photos, but I’d guess that the block of flats was cheaply built and very poorly maintained, and the issue was structural rather than to do with layout.

I'm not actually going to vote on this because you've put resign and be charged together. Yes the CEO should go, whether that is resign or be sacked, along with others down the line. The CEO was responsible for procedures that said do nothing when faced with a court case despite knowing the building had a design fault. Someone should have looked at that flat and had an extractor fan fitted in the bathroom.

The problem is that as has been seen recently in protests etc, there are calls for insulation and there is a lack of critical thinking about it becuase not all properties are suitable for it

Can you imagine a HA saying 'no we cant put insulation in because its not been recommended' - they'd have people super gluing their hands to their properties and all sorts

Each property is individual and its not as straight forward as that. If this property had never previously suffered with damp and mould, what happened, did the extractor fan stop working, was there a problem in neighbouring flats that affected this one?

Posters asking what went on (because those details are not in the inquest, an inquest only finds a cause of death and the circumstances around the death - its not going to find out about the history and individual decision making) have been shouted down, this is why we as a society never learn and move forward because people asking questions are told to shut up

I know they are crap and loud, we had an "inside bathroom" (love this phrase BTW - you could be an estate agent) in our previous home.

The level of damp looked like a leak.