Are we all aware of the potential causes of Baby Loss?
On Friday 24th September there was a debate in Parliament on ‘Baby Loss Awareness’. Losing a child around the time of birth must be one of the most traumatic experiences humans undergo. It happened to some former next-door-but-one neighbours of mine, perhaps fifteen years ago. I attended the funeral, and I’ll never forget the sight of the tiny, white coffin being carried into the service by the father.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t read reports of the debate that Friday. I suspect it was the usual political nonsense, perhaps with a nod towards the seriousness of the topic. It's quite possible that ‘poverty’ was attributed by some as being a likely cause. Sadly, some years after that sad funeral, I learned a little as to why that may, and may not, have been the whole story.
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When buying a house, do or would you pay for a full survey, independent of any survey or valuation required by your mortgage lender? According to churchill.com, over seven million UK homeowners took the risk of buying a property without any form of survey other than the lender's valuation. The article, however, only outlines the financial risk involved, in terms of the possibility of buying a property that you subsequently find to require extensive repairs. It doesn't mention other risks.
I’ve bought four properties in my life. Two were from builders where I relied upon a building society valuation and the ten-year NHBC guarantee, neither were wholly trouble free.
The third property was eight years old at the time of purchase and still covered by an NHBC guarantee. I didn’t really investigate the limitations of this, but I was lucky, a building society valuation was all I had and it worked out OK. (This was after owning a property that developed damp and roof issues so I was perhaps a little more experienced than many purchasers.)
The fourth time I did get a full survey. It was over twenty years ago, and, if I remember rightly, the survey cost £750+VAT. The property was an end-terrace Victorian property that clearly had some issues, and the survey was worth every penny. Among the checks done, one related to the type of water pipes in and around the property. The report said something like this regarding the main water pipes into the property:
‘The property has, apparently in recent times, had its incoming water pipe replaced by one of plastic construction. The original lead pipe, that would have been shared among the seven properties in the terrace, appears to still be in place and providing water to the ground floor WC (not washbasin) and garage tap. We therefore recommend that these water sources should not be used for drinking water.’
I wasn’t going to drink water from the loo pan, and the garage tap never looked very hygenic, so these words did not seem to inconvenience me greatly. There were many other, more pressing issues, with roof flashings, and electrics, that took priority.
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After moving into that end-terraced property we became friends with our neighbours, including the professional couple next-door-but-one who had moved in only a few weeks before us. We compared notes on what needed attending to our properties; I remember someone mentioning about their lead water pipes having been replaced. We concurred, and, I believe, there was a general consensus amongst all of the property owners that there was nothing to worry about in terms of the water supply pipes to the properties.
This must have been perhaps five years before the events leading up to that sad funeral, after which, all our lives moved on. After a couple of years, the couple were parents to baby twins.
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Meanwhile, I had started evening classes, not entirely unrelated to the large Victorian end-terrace house I’ve referred to. It contained a number of leaded windows, and, rather than pay money I didn’t have to get someone to restore them, I decided to learn how to do it myself. At the start of every term we all had to fill out a form, which among other things, asked if we thought we might be pregnant, with a note that should we become pregnant during the term, we were to inform the admin team immediately. I was most definitely not pregnant, and paid little further attention to the form,
It was, however, soon after the start of my fourth year that one of the female students, who had only just started, was summoned in to see the administrator and more or less frogmarched off the premises. ‘What was that about?’, someone asked.
‘She’s pregnant’, came the reply. ‘You can’t do anything to do with lead if you’re pregnant’.
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Just a few months later I had a problem at that end-terrace house. A huge fountain of water appeared in our back garden one night, appearing very much like a burst water main. I called the water board, they came out and took a look, and said it was a pipe on our land and it was our problem. Moreover, they said that if I didn’t fix it within a certain period they’d come and cut off the supply. 'That's nice of you', was one of the sentiments I wanted to express at the time.
I managed to find a plumber who knew some big strong men. They came round one day and dug down to find the leak, which was in that lead pipe, the old shared pipe that once fed water to all of the seven houses in the terrace, and was caused by a privet root pressing against it. They replaced a section of the pipe with something (I’m not sure what), fixing the leak. I was left with a £1000 bill of which, fortunately, our insurers picked up a goodly part.
The work the men did, of course, required shutting off the water supply. I had assumed this would just involve our property; however, that evening, my then wife mentioned something neither of us could understand. Our next-door-but-one neighbours had been round while the work was going on, wanting to know how long it would take, for their water was cut off too.
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Soon I moved out of the Victorian house and got on with my life elsewhere. A few years later I went back to doing stained glass work, and, as a prerequisite for insurance to undertake repairs in a home or similar setting, I had to do a few course modules in health and safety.
One related, specifically, to lead and lead poisoning, including the effect of lead water pipes. This explained why that girl had been marched out of my evening class so promptly: one thing exposure to lead can cause is miscarriage or premature birth in pregnant women.
When working with stained glass, I thought, it is possible to take steps to minimise exposure to lead, but, if the water to your property comes through a lead pipe, there ain’t much you can do.
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It was some time later that I put two and two together. I hadn’t realised it before: all of the owners of the houses in the row were so sure that they had plastic water pipes feeding the mains supply to their homes that something just hadn’t struck me. It was obvious, the next-door-but-one neighbours hadn’t had a full survey done when they bought their property, and hadn’t realised their pipe entering at the back was the old lead pipe. I had once noticed that there was no stopcock outside their front gate, unlike all the other properties, and thought that curious; another neighbour explained it to me, saying it was because the old bloke who had lived there before them didn’t want to have his front garden dug up.
What gave it away was remembering that their water pipe entered their property at the back, and that, when what we thought was ‘our’ lead pipe was being repaired, it was in fact a lead pipe we shared with them. In our case, the water from this pipe only fed our downstairs loo and garage, but it seems their whole water supply came from it.
I haven’t seen those neighbours since I put all of this together. I don’t know whether they are still in that property, whether they or their twins have since shown any further signs of lead poisoning, or whether the pipe to the property has been replaced.
If I did see them I don’t know what I’d say. No-one can say for sure what caused the tragedy of the lost baby, but now knowing the mother could have been drinking water contaminated with lead for at least four years prior to it happening has left me feeling very uncomfortable.
Thinking about the house survey I had for the end-terrace house, if I am honest, I would admit that I would have benefitted at least financially from similar surveys for the two houses I bought from builders - both had problems I did not anticipate. However, I can’t turn back the clock.
What I can do is to say, from my former neighbours' apparent experience, that the risks with old properties extend to more than just the cost of repairs. Your new home can make you ill and even kill you or those you love. (Lead in paintwork is another risk in old houses.)
And no, I’m not a surveyor, nor has one encouraged me to write this.
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I’m not sure whether issues like lead pipes would have been discussed in that parliamentary debate. One MP did mention maternal health, then related that to the 'faves' of the elite - stress, diet, drug, alcohol and tobacco use, but I couldn't see any reference to lead in the Hansard record. Certainly, knowledge of the risk lead poses is less than it should be. It is possible that the poorer people in society may be most likely to live in properties still affected by lead pipes or paint, not understand that risk, and that landlords may be more unwilling to fund work to replace lead than owner occupiers. But there may be an element of people thinking it ‘won’t happen to me’.
Sadly, it might do.
(By the way, for anyone with leaded windows, they pose little risk so long as you are careful cleaning them - wear gloves and don't use abrasives on the lead. After all, you don't consume your food off a leaded window!)
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