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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"This chiefly means three products: the actual cladding panels (thin aluminium sheets bonded to a core of polyethylene, a plastic with similar properties to solid petrol) and two forms of combustible foam insulation which were fitted behind it."

Cough, cough, cough.

Does anyone know the state of liability laws in Britain? Here in the states, the companies involved would be going down in a hail of lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance itself.

I wonder what the software development industry would look like under that kind of investigation.

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> ...the companies involved would be going down in a hail of lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance itself.

I think this is essentially what will happen here. One of the problems is that the remediation work to correct the dangerous cladding runs in to billions of pounds and is a bill none of the individual companies involved can afford, so working out exactly who to sue (with everyone denying liability, of course) is kinda tricky.

I’m not a legal expert but here’s my understanding of the process: If a person or group of people take civil action, liability will be determined in the specialist construction courts, typically in construction cases many entities are held jointly liable, so the liability could be shared between the client, architect, fire testing laboratories, fire engineers, contractors and the fire brigade. The court will determine the total damages to be paid. There is a generally agreed amount for loss of life, everything thing else is determined based on the actual cost e.g things like electric wheelchairs for life, temporary accommodation costs, the rebuilding costs etc. Unlike the US, there are no punitive damages in the UK the liability is purely the cost of putting things right. The plaintiff’s lawyers have to be careful not to ask for unreasonable damages as this can negatively affect their case. The court will then apportion the liability to each party. As you can imagine, these cases go into a lot of detail and take years to resolve.

Not a lawyer - think the main issue will be whether the companies are shown to have manipulated safety testing.

If not, then it will be a case of bad rules allowing a bad product to have been used.

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