WE CAN’T SELL – OR AFFORD REPAIR BILL
ALEXANDRA Parry and her partner Aled Evans are being forced to pay more than £330 a month in extra bills for their unsafe flat – and face forking out for a share of the £6.2million the block will cost to fix.
Since finding out it had failed post-Grenfell fire checks, they are having to fork out each month for safety warden patrols, alarms and enhanced insurance.
Miss Parry, 25, and Mr Evans, 28, who live on the edge of Manchester city centre, want to buy a house and start a family, but she said: ‘We are stuck in this unsafe apartment as we cannot sell.’
Remediation work to external walls made with flammable insulation will cost £6.2million split between all 180 flats.
The flat had been valued at £230,000, but Miss Parry said: ‘Now it’s worth nothing.’
Down in Reigate, Surrey, the sale of Sarah Fletcher’s £285,000, two-bedroom flat collapsed when she was told the block needed a survey that could take 42 months.
The teacher, 33, says building managers didn’t tell residents in the 12-apartment block about dangerous cladding.
Now she and her husband, Lee, 34, face a bill of up to £50,000 for their share of remediation work.
The block doesn’t qualify for the Government’s Building Safety Fund, so she fears she will have to cover all the costs.
Mrs Fletcher said: ‘I didn’t build the building, I didn’t pass the regulations on the cladding but now I have to pay for it.’
Nikki Urquhart is facing a bill of tens of thousands of pounds for work on part of her block of flats she doesn’t own or use.
The 30-year-old said she was reassured when the management company told her there was no Grenfell Tower-type cladding. But her hopes of selling her £190,000, one-bed flat were dashed because of wooden walkways in the brick-built block, in Didsbury, south Manchester.
She does not know when remedial work will start – and, worse, who will pay.