Cladding crisis: ‘No end in sight’ for flat owners still trapped in unsellable homes despite major repair scheme

Published

9 months ago

July 28, 2023

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Flat owners caught up in the cladding crisis say they will remain trapped in unsellable homes despite a major new scheme to help fund repairs.

The long-awaited Cladding Safety Scheme (CSS) opened this week and will provide £5bn to fix medium-rise tower blocks with flammable external walls in cases where the developer cannot be traced.

It has been billed by the government as the “biggest intervention on building safety to date” and aims to protect leaseholders from the expensive costs of remediating their properties that have emerged since the Grenfell Tower disaster.

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But Lisa Petty, who is facing a £21,000 bill, told Sky News the announcement will “have absolutely no bearing on my situation”.

The 42-year-old lives in a building in Romford, Essex, with the same type of ACM cladding blamed on the rapid spread of the deadly fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, which killed 72 people.

Because the building is less than 11 metres in height, it does not qualify for government funding.

Lisa said: “It’s so frustrating to hear the government say all leaseholders are blameless when they have left out a whole group of us living in buildings below 11 metres.

“The government is contradicting itself because they say if you’re under 11 metres that’s a lower risk to life so you don’t need remediation, but at the same time they have acknowledged there’s a risk because they have banned ACM cladding on (new) buildings irrespective of height.”

While ministers have repeatedly insisted buildings below this threshold are safe and remediation work is not necessary, government guidance contains no restriction on repairs being required.

Officials from the Department of Levelling Up, Communities and Housing (DLUCH) have intervened over Lisa’s case, but fire engineers are standing firm in their position the works are needed in order for the building to meet safety standards.

The long-running saga resulted in the sale of Lisa’s flat collapsing and her mortgage payments rising by £450 a month – as she switched to a variable rate when she thought she would be moving.

Lisa said the problems have limited “every aspect of my life” and it feels like there’s “no end in sight”.

“I can’t begin to quantify the impact it’s had, it’s exhausting,” she said.

“I want children and I’ve thought about adoption in the past, but that’s not something I feel like I can pursue because my future and my financial stability is so dependent on this situation.

“It just feels like your life isn’t your own and you are just worried to spend any money.

“I shouldn’t be made to pay to make this building safe that I had absolutely no say in designing or signing off.”

‘Buildings will only be made half safe’

Since the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people in 2017, the cladding scandal has trapped thousands of flat owners in unsafe and unsellable homes – with many facing huge repair bills to fix them.

The opening of the CSS means that costs of fixing dangerous cladding for all buildings in England over 11 metres will now be covered either by government funding or by companies who built them.

The DLUCH said the scheme will give “tens of thousands of residents across England a pathway to a safe home”.

But the End our Cladding Scandal (EOCS) campaign group said while welcome “there are still many hundreds of thousands of people trapped in the building safety scandal, including those in buildings under 11 metres in height”.

They added the scheme will only make buildings “half safe” because it does not cover historic non-cladding fire safety issues, like internal defects and missing cavity barriers.

The government has introduced a £10-£15k legal cap on what can be charged to fix these widespread problems, but this excludes certain leaseholders, including landlords of more than three flats.

‘We are being punished’

Patsy Sweeney, who owns three small rentals in Birmingham with her husband, feels like she is being “punished” for investing into property to self-fund her retirement.

The former insurance broker said she was “accidentally” pushed into the “non-qualifying” threshold because she had wanted to sell the flat she was living in and move to a house during the pandemic – but the cladding issues made that impossible.

“I was going round the bend, getting really desperate to get out of the flat and feeling trapped, so we took a view to rent it out and get a mortgage for the house and (months later) that was what put us over the threshold.”

The 56-year-old now faces “uncapped financially liability” for the non-cladding issues, which she fears will cost tens of thousands of pounds.

“I can’t see any logic to it. You could have two flats that are worth £2m in some parts of London and be qualified, or you could have three in the north of England for £300,000 and be unqualified, so it seems really punitive.

“Whether I have one flat or 10 I didn’t make these buildings, so it’s irrelevant.”

Labour has urged the government to “rethink” the cap exclusion, arguing it will expose non-qualifying leaseholders to financially ruinous bills and delay remediation in the cases where they simply can’t pay.

Shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook told Sky News: “The millions of people whose lives are on hold as a result of the building safety crisis need the government to grip and drive the national remediation effort that is required to make all buildings safe and to reconsider their damaging decision to abandon a minority of leaseholders to extortionate non-cladding remediation costs.”

‘Human cash machines’

The government has not set a timeline for when homes should be remediated under the CSS, but said thousands of buildings will benefit “over the next decade”.

For Patsy, this casts a dark shadow over her plans for a comfortable retirement.

Her future costs are unknown, but she calculates the cladding crisis has already cost her £1m in rising building insurance, service charges, mortgage rates, extra stamp duty and landlord licensing fees.

She fears she will never see the equity from the flats as the “non-qualifying” status stays with the property’s lease after it’s sold so even if the issues are fixed, “no one will ever want to buy them”.

Patsy said: “I’m not a wealthy individual. Some people might think I am because I’ve got these properties but all we did was use our savings to look after our future for when we retired and now that money is being spent on a problem caused by developers.

“We are being treated like human cash machines that took a commercial risk and are now being told to live with the consequences. How is that right?”

Politics

UK considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers in Rwanda-type deal, leaked documents show

Published

5 hours ago

May 6, 2024

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UK considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers in Rwanda-type deal, leaked documents show

The government at one point considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers – like the Rwanda scheme – according to documents seen by Sky News.

This could have seen people sent from the UK to a country the government advises against all travel to.

The two countries already have a returns agreement – but only for people that are from Iraq.

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According to leaked correspondence between high-ranking officials, the Iraqi returns commitments were made with a “request for discretion” and no publicity.

The country was willing to move forward but did not want a formal or public agreement.

The current travel advice to Iraq on the Foreign Office website simply advises against “all travel to parts of Iraq”. However, according to the document, negotiations were fairly advanced and described in one table as “good recent progress with Iraq”.

Other government aims included enhancing cooperation with the Iranian Embassy in order to enhance returns arrangements for migrants and potential asylum seekers.

Returns agreements are also in the works for Eritrea and Ethiopia, according to documents about work undertaken by the Home Office and Foreign Office that relates to countries with the highest number of nationals arriving to the UK by small boats.

In a tranche of internal government documents seen by Sky News, even from the earliest stage of the Rwanda policy, Downing Street advisers knew there were serious problems with their proposals.

There are even private admissions that many people arriving here on small boats did so without the assistance of criminal gangs – despite their communications strategy.

Comparisons were also made to Australia’s response – to what Downing Street officials understood to be a comparable “smaller problem” than in the UK and admitted it had cost billions of Australian dollars in order for their returns processes to be fully operational.

In one document submitted to the Home Office, some of the highest-ranking officials at the time wrote that their guidance was to be “prepared to pay over the odds” to get the policy up and running. And that the initial offer from Rwanda was a “modest sum”.

Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has priced the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda at £1.8m per person for the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali.

It also disclosed that since April 2022 the Home Office has paid £220m into Rwanda’s economic transformation and integration fund, which is designed to support economic growth in Rwanda, and will continue to make payments to cover asylum processing and operational costs for individuals relocated to Rwanda.

It will also pay further amounts of £50m over the next year and an additional £50m the following year.

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A government source said: “The Home Office is spending millions every day accommodating migrants in hotels – that’s not right or fair. We’re taking action to put an end to this costly and dangerous cycle. Doing nothing is not a free option – we must act if we want to stop the boats and save lives.

“The UK is continuing to work with a range of international partners to tackle global illegal migration challenges. Our Rwanda partnership is a pioneering response to the global challenge of illegal migration, and we will get flights off the ground to Rwanda in the next nine to eleven weeks.”

Politics

Bitfinex database breach ‘seems fake,’ says CTO

Published

1 day ago

May 5, 2024

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<div>Bitfinex database breach 'seems fake,' says CTO</div>

Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino explained that if the hacking group was telling the truth, they would have asked for a ransom, but he “couldn’t find any request.”

Politics

Labour taking ‘Tory crown jewel’ feels like a momentum shift

Published

1 day ago

May 5, 2024

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Labour taking 'Tory crown jewel' feels like a momentum shift

It was a wafer-thin victory, but a huge win.

The symbolism of Labour taking the West Midlands mayor, a jewel in the Tory crown, could be felt in the room as Labour activists gathered in Birmingham to celebrate the win with their new mayor Richard Parker and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

There are moments on election journeys when the momentum shifts – and this win felt like one of them.

“We humbly asked [the voters] to put their trust and confidence in a changed Labour Party and they did. And that is a significant piece of political history that we’ve made here today,” said Sir Keir at his victory rally.

“So the message out of these elections, the last now the last stop before we go into that general election, is that the country wants change.

“I hope the prime minister is listening and gives the opportunity to the country to vote as a whole in a general election as soon as possible.”

This win gave them the boost that was missing when they won the Blackpool South by-election on a massive 26-point swing, but then failed to pick up the hundreds of council seats they were chasing.

This win, on just 1,508 votes or 0.25 per cent of the vote, was a body blow for a Conservative party that believed they could just about cling on. Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor, is now the last Tory standing.

For Labour, then a moment to bookmark.

Just as Boris Johnson’s Hartlepool by-election win in 2021 was a low point for Sir Keir – he told me this week that he considered resigning over the loss because he thought it showed he was the barrier to Labour’s recovery – this too will feel devastating not just for Andy Street but for the PM too.

Labour has beaten him in a street fight. He’s bloodied with Sir Keir now emboldened.

“This was the one result we really needed,” said one senior Labour figure. “It’s been our top focus for the past week and symbolically a very important win.”

And Labour needed the boost, because, as Professor Michael Thrasher pointed out in his Sky News’ national vote share projection calculated from the local election results, Sir Keir was not picking up the sort of vote share that Tony Blair was winning in the run-up to the 1997 Labour landslide.

His latest calculation of a 35% vote share for Labour and 26% for the Tories, put Sir Keir winning a general election but short of a majority.

What the West Midlands mayoral win did for Sir Keir was to give him a clear narrative that he is coming for the Tories and will do what he needs to take them down.

It raises inevitable questions about what is next for Rishi Sunak. The prime minister had nowhere to go today, not one win to celebrate. The worst performance in council elections in 40 years, was already pretty much as bad as it gets before the loss of Andy Street. The former Conservative mayor was magnanimous towards the prime minister, saying the loss was his alone.

But colleagues will not be so generous. One former cabinet minister said this loss was “devastating”. “We’re done and there’s no appetite to move against him,” said the senior MP. Many Tories tell me they are now resigned to defeat and believe Mr Sunak and his team needed to own it, rather than the rest of the party.

The coming days might be bumpy, the mood will be stony. But Tories tell me not much will actually change for them.

For Sir Keir, he now needs to sell not the changed Labour Party, but his vision for changing the country. The West Mids mayor’s win was dazzling, but it could have so easily gone the other way. And as Mr Sunak fights to survive, Labour still has to fight hard to win.