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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.

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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.”

Read more:
The post-Grenfell cladding scandal has left me penniless and about to go bankrupt’
Grenfell Tower six years on: ‘Frustration over lack of change is turning to anger’

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.

Lisa Petty is facing a £21,000 bill to remove Grenfell-style cladding from her home
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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.

Patsy Sweeney and her husband don't qualify for  a cap on 'extortionate' non-cladding costs
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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?”

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Sir Jim Ratcliffe scolds Tories over handling of economy and immigration after Brexit

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Sir Jim Ratcliffe scolds Tories over handling of economy and immigration after Brexit

Billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe has told Sky News that Britain is ready for a change of government after scolding the Conservatives over their handling of the economy and immigration after Brexit.

While insisting his petrochemicals conglomerate INEOS is apolitical, Sir Jim backed Brexit and spent last weekend with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at Manchester United – the football club he now runs as minority owner.

“I’m sure Keir will do a very good job at running the country – I have no questions about that,” Sir Jim said in an exclusive interview.

“There’s no question that the Conservatives have had a good run,” he added. “I think most of the country probably feels it’s time for a change. And I sort of get that, really.”

Read more: Sir Jim’s mission to succeed at ‘the one challenge the UK has never brought home’

Sir Jim was a prominent backer of leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum but now has issues with how Brexit was delivered by Tory prime ministers.

“Brexit sort of unfortunately didn’t turn out as people anticipated because… Brexit was largely about immigration,” Sir Jim said.

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“That was the biggest component of that vote. People were getting fed up with the influx of the city of Southampton coming in every year. I think last year it was two times Southampton.

“I mean, no small island like the UK could cope with vast numbers of people coming into the UK.

“I mean, it just overburdens the National Health Service, the traffic service, the police, everybody.

“The country was designed for 55 or 60 million people and we’ve got 70 million people and all the services break down as a consequence.

“That’s what Brexit was all about and nobody’s implemented that. They just keep talking about it. But nothing’s been done, which is why I think we’ll finish up with the change of government.”

Watch Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s full interview on the Trevor Phillips on Sunday morning programme on Sky News from 8.30am

UK needs to get ‘sharper on the business front’

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has indicated an election is due this year but Monaco-based Sir Jim is unimpressed by the Conservatives’ handling of the economy.

“The UK does need to get a bit sharper on the business front,” he said. “I think the biggest objective for the government is to create growth in the economy.

“There’s two parts of the economy, there’s the services side of the economy and there’s the manufacturing side. And the manufacturing, unfortunately, has been sliding away now for the last 25 years.

“We were very similar in scale to Germany probably 25 years ago.

“But today we’re just a fraction of where Germany is and I think that isn’t healthy for the British economy… particularly when you think the north of England is very manufacturing based, and that talks to things like energy competitiveness, it talks to things like, why do you put an immensely high tax on the North Sea?

“That just disincentivises people from finding hydrocarbons in the North Sea, in energy.

“And what we need is competitive energy. So I mean, in America, in the energy world, in the oil and gas world, they just apply a corporation tax to the oil and gas companies, which is about 30%. And in the UK we’ve got this tax of 75% because we want to kill off the oil and gas companies.

“But if we don’t have competitive energy, we’re not going to have a healthy manufacturing industry. And that just makes no sense to me at all. No.”

‘We’re apolitical’

Asked about INEOS donating to Labour, Sir Jim replied: “We’re apolitical, INEOS.

“We just want a successful manufacturing sector in the UK and we’ve talked to the government about that. It’s pretty clear about our views.”

Sir Jim was keener to talk about the economy and politics than his role at struggling Manchester United, which he bought a 27.7% stake in from the American Glazer family in February – giving him an even higher business profile.

Old Trafford stadium in Manchester. Pic: AP
Image:
Old Trafford stadium in Manchester. Pic: AP

Push for stadium of the North

He is continuing to push for public funds to regenerate Old Trafford and the surrounding areas despite no apparent political support being forthcoming. Sir Keir was hosted at the stadium for a Premier League match last weekend just as heavy rain exposed the fragility of the ageing venue.

“There’s a very good case, in my view, for having a stadium of the North, which would serve the northern part of the country in that arena of football,” Sir Jim said. “If you look at the number of Champions League the North West has won, it’s 10. London has won two.

“And yet everybody from the North has to get down to London to watch a big football match. And there should be one [a large stadium] in the North, in my view.

“But it’s also important for the southern side of Manchester, you know, to regenerate.

“It’s the sort of second capital of the country where the Industrial Revolution began.

“But if you have a regeneration project, you need a nucleus or a regeneration project and having that world-class stadium there, I think would provide the impetus to regenerate that region.”

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Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris will not stand at next election

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Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris will not stand at next election

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris has said he won’t be standing at the next general election but will keep campaigning for the Conservative Party.

In a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, which he posted on X on Saturday night, Mr Heaton-Harris said after 24 years in politics, it had been an “honour and a privilege to serve”.

He thanked the people of Daventry, Mr Sunak and former Tory leaders, including Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, “for putting their trust in me”.

Mr Heaton-Harris, who has been serving as Northern Ireland secretary since September 2022, said: “I started as a campaigner and I’ll be out campaigning for @Conservatives at the next election because we are the only party that has and can deliver for the whole of the United Kingdom.”

He joins an exodus of Tory politicians who have announced they will be leaving Westminster at the next general election.

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More than 100 MPs from across the Commons have said they will not be standing.

Those who have announced their intention to leave parliament range from the longest-serving female MP, Labour’s Harriet Harman, to one of those only elected at the last election in 2019, Conservative MP Dehenna Davison.

Of the more than 60 Tory MPs stepping aside, high profile names include former cabinet ministers Ben Wallace, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab and Kwasi Kwarteng.

Back in March, Mrs May, 67, said she too had taken the “difficult decision” to quit the Commons after 27 years representing her Maidenhead constituency.

The last possible day for a general election is Tuesday 28 January 2025.

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Trader turns $3K into $46M in PEPE, Ethereum gas overhaul, Tornado dev guilty: Hodler’s Digest, May 12-18

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Trader turns K into M in PEPE, Ethereum gas overhaul, Tornado  dev guilty: Hodler’s Digest, May 12-18

Trader makes millions after PEPE price soars, a new gas model for Ethereum, and Tornado Cash developer convicted.

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