Rodney Casbierd

House-builders should pay up

It is nearly four years since the tragic fire at Grenfell tower that claimed 72 lives.

Since then the lives of many more have been ruined by the cost of living in an unsafe building.

People that bought flats in such buildings are being asked to pay huge sums to implement the remedial works required to make their homes safe.

In the mean-time they are also paying high maintenance bills for fire-watch ser vices.

It has pushed some flat owners to bankruptcy.

It is completely unjust that they should have to resolve a problem that they did not cause.

When a car, washing machine, or almost any other manufactured product that we buy, is found to have a serious safety defect there is a product recall and the manufacturer is responsible for paying for and sorting out the mess.

Why are our homes any different?

Homeowners should not have to pay one penny.

Surely responsibility for the problem lays at the door of the property developers that erected the buildings?

If the components they used were faulty then, tough, they need to take that up themselves with their suppliers.

Some house-builders are taking responsibility and sorting out the mess but many others appear not to be.

And some of the developers no longer exist.

But the house-building industry as a whole should have sorted this out long before now.

Partly fuelled by taxpayers’ money through ‘help to buy’ subsidies, the top house-builders in the UK make hundreds of millions of pounds in profit each year.

It is a disgrace that their failure to act collectively is making so many of their industry’s customers’ lives a complete miser y.