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.
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.
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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.
Image: Lisa Petty is facing a £21,000 bill to remove Grenfell-style cladding from her home
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.
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Housing developers have been told by Michael Gove to commit to repairing unsafe buildings or be banned from the market.
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.
Image: Patsy Sweeney and her husband don’t qualify for a cap on ‘extortionate’ non-cladding costs
“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?”
A group of investors with cryptocurrency custody and trading firm Bakkt Holdings filed a class-action lawsuit alleging false or misleading statements and a failure to disclose certain information.
Lead plaintiff Guy Serge A. Franklin called for a jury trial as part of a complaint against Bakkt, senior adviser and former CEO Gavin Michael, CEO and president Andrew Main, and interim chief financial officer Karen Alexander, according to an April 2 filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The group of investors allege damages as the result of violations of US securites laws and a lack of transparency surrounding its agreement with clients: Webull and Bank of America (BoA).
April 2 complaint against Bakkt and its executives. Source: PACER
The loss of Bank of America and Webull will result “in a 73% loss in top line revenue” due to the two firms making up a significant percentage of its services revenue, the investor group alleges in the lawsuit. The filing stated Webull made up 74% of Bakkt’s crypto services revenue through most of 2023 and 2024, and Bank of America made up 17% of its loyalty services revenue from January to September 2024.
Bakkt disclosed on March 17 that Bank of America and Webull did not intend to renew their agreements with the firm ending in 2025. The announcement likely contributed to the company’s share price falling more than 27% in the following 24 hours. The investors allege Bakkt “misrepresented the stability and/or diversity of its crypto services revenue” and failed to disclose that this revenue was “substantially dependent” on Webull’s contract.
“As a result of Defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages,” said the suit.
Other law offices said they were investigating Bakkt for securities law violations, suggesting additional class-action lawsuits may be in the works. Cointelegraph contacted Bakkt for a comment on the lawsuit but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is under renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe after Maltese authorities issued a major fine for violations of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) fined Okcoin Europe — OKX’s Europe-based subsidiary — 1.1 million euros ($1.2 million) after detecting multiple AML failures on the platform in the past, the authority announced on April 3.
While admitting that OKX has significantly improved its AML policies in the past 18 months, the authority “could not ignore” its past compliance failures from 2023, “some of which were deemed to be serious and systematic,” the FIAU notice said.
The news of the $1.2 million penalty in Malta came after Bloomberg in March reported that European Union regulators were probing OKX for laundering $100 million in funds from the Bybit hack.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously claimed that OKX’s Web3 proxy allowed hackers to launder about $100 million, or 40,233 Ether (ETH), from the $1.5 billion hack that occurred in February.
This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.