Staggering failures that left 4m lives on hold over fire-trap flats
ON DECEMBER 16, Hayley Tillotson entered her bank in Leeds to return the keys to her flat. Days earlier, she had filed for bankruptcy.
Her mistake? Going to work, saving, and buying her first home in April 2019 for £101,750 with a £10,000 deposit. It took just 20 months for her to lose everything.
In July 2019, her building was found to be covered in dangerous cladding, similar to that found on the Grenfell Tower in west London.
In October, Miss Tillotson, 28, was told the block would need to be patrolled by fire wardens 24 hours a day, the cost of which often exceeded her mortgage payments. She would also be facing a £15,000 bill to replace the cladding, as well as costs to install fire breaks and replace wooden balconies.
‘I’ve no idea what the total figure is,’ she says. ‘I just know it’s unachievable.
‘I’ve worked hard and didn’t do anything to deserve going bankrupt. I thought I’d feel sad or angry, but I just feel broken and empty. Time and money ran out for me.’
So how on earth, three and a half years after the Grenfell tragedy, did we get here? Why have just 202 out of nearly 12,000 dangerous buildings been fixed, while more than a million flats are now unsellable?
And how has the Government allowed hardworking homeowners to go bankrupt through no fault of their own?
The answers reveal a breathtaking tale of ministerial inertia, incompetence and denial, which has put four million lives on hold.
Insiders say the Government’s first mistake was its failure to grasp the scale of the scandal. In the immediate aftermath of Grenfell, it insisted that the aluminium composite material (ACM) that spread the blaze was banned and the task was to identify a few outliers. But ACM had been permitted by regulators for decades and has since been discovered on 460 buildings.
The Government tripping over its own rules has been a hallmark of its response. Dr
‘Breathtaking tale of ministerial inertia’
Jonathan Evans, chief executive of cladding supplier Ash & Lacy, was part of an advisory trade group formed by the housing ministry.
He believes if officials had accepted the scale of the problem, they might have acted to remove dangerous cladding straight away, rather than waiting to see how it could be replaced.
He adds: ‘That would have avoided all the waking watch [fire patrol] costs that crippled people’s finances and the anxiety that people have had for three and a half years.’
The Government’s second error was its refusal to accept that ACM was not the only problem. Independent fire safety consultant Stephen MacKenzie says experts were ‘lobbying like crazy’ for tests on other cladding systems, but officials feared a Pandora’s Box.
Testing on non-ACM was first promised in September 2017, but results were not published until July 2019.
A month earlier a fire almost destroyed Samuel Garside House in Barking, east London. The building had non-ACM timber cladding and was below 60ft (18m) in height, which exposed another flaw in the Government’s response. Buildings below this height have never been subject to restrictions on materials that could be used for cladding, meaning the number of affected blocks could be huge.
It took more than a year for ministers to accept that thousands of buildings with any number of defects were potentially unsafe.
But their next move was catastrophic for the property market.
In December 2018, the Government published a document with the innocuous name ‘Advice Note 14’, which told building owners to remove all combustible materials from sites unless testing proved they were safe. It contradicted decades of official guidance, which permitted these materials on high-rise blocks.
Banks stopped lending on flats that were previously deemed safe and the market ground to a halt.
In December 2019, industry bodies developed the ‘ EWS1’ form, which was designed to give lenders more confidence in providing mortgages on multi-storey buildings. But the Government then updated its advice in January to include buildings below 60ft. The number of affected flats rose from 307,000 to 1.27 million, with fewer than 300 qualified engineers in the country who could complete the forms. In October, the Mail reported that an estimated 30,000 sales had already collapsed due to the issue.
The biggest sticking point has been over who pays, which is wrapped up in who is to blame.
Fire safety laws mean building owners are responsible for making buildings safe, but leasehold law means leaseholders must pay.
It means a stalemate has occurred in which leaseholders are liable to pay but can’t afford to, while the Government wants building owners to pay but won’t make them. And no money means no work. On December 4, 2017, then-housing secretary Sajid Javid called on building owners to ‘do the right thing’ and not pass on costs to leaseholders. But Martin Boyd, former chairman of the charity, Leasehold Knowledge Partnership (LKP), says this was ‘ always an utterly absurd statement’.
He adds: ‘One of the first things we told them was that you’re saying the building owner or developer must pay and the leaseholder mustn’t pay, but the law says exactly the opposite.’
Tribunals have consistently found leaseholders liable for millions of pounds of remediation work. Nigel Glen, chief executive of the Association of Residential Managing Agents, says the task has become wearisome.
‘We’ve had this hobby-horse for years,’ he says. ‘What lasts longer
– a housing minister or a wine gum? We always have this huge churn of staff and politicians in the ministry. [Current housing secretary Robert] Jenrick has been almost invisible. We keep asking for a meeting to say we are the guys on the ground who are going to be charged with putting this right, and you just get nothing back.’
Previously, regulations simply said buildings ‘had to adequately resist the spread of flame’, but did not say how.
Guidance did allow certain combustible materials to be used on tall buildings – and while there have been cases of non- compliance, critics say it was still the Government’s responsibility to stop this.
Mr Boyd says: ‘Its backstop is to say, “somewhere in the legislation it says that you’ve got to make a building safe”. It doesn’t define what safe is. So the Government is just saying on the grounds that it now deems these buildings to be unsafe, the developers never followed the law. The developers’ defence is to say, “if we weren’t compliant with the regulations, how come it was all signed off as compliant?”’ Dr Evans believes ministers must step up. ‘Nobody else has the pockets deep enough to fund quick and swift remediation,’ he says. ‘ The Government refuses to accept it is a regulatory failure for which it is responsible. So the Treasury is asking why should taxpayers pay if industry has made such a mess of this?’ He believes remediation work may not be completed for another ten years.
A Government spokesman says its ‘priority’ is making residents safe ‘by removing dangerous cladding as quickly as possible – backed by £1.6 billion funding’. He adds: ‘Where building owners are not taking steps to make their buildings safe, we are supporting councils and Fire and Rescue Services to take enforcement action.’
While the arguments rage on, leaseholders lose out.
Miss Tillotson is sleeping on her father’s sofa with no idea of what the future holds. She points the finger of blame squarely at the Government.
‘They could stop it if they wanted, but they won’t and they don’t,’ she says. ‘I’ve got all these sanctions and restrictions. I probably can’t get loans, or a car, or have kids. I can’t be a normal person because of cladding.
‘Not because I’m a gambling addict or I drank all my money away. Just because of cladding. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last.’