Make owners foot the bill? We should be paying them compensation!

EVER since the cladding scandal emerged in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower conflagration, our post bags have overflowed with desperate missives from flat-owners.

We have been told of the heartbreak of young couples, unable to sell their poky flats and forced to delay – who knows for how long – their dreams of starting a family.

And we have listened to the despair of flat-dwelling pensioners, including one in her mid- seventies who has had to go back to work because of the unbearable financial burden placed upon her.

We are told that the question of who should foot the bill is highly complex and a legal minefield to boot.

The current owners of buildings may not be the ones directly responsible for the unsafe construction. Some developers and freeholders will claim they do not have enough money to pay up. Others will argue they followed the rules as they were at the time and should not be held responsible for subsequent changes.

Perhaps. But there are two glaringly simple facts in this swamp of blame and fear.

One is that the people who bought these benighted flats in good faith are being forced to live in potential death traps and faced with devastating financial consequences through absolutely no fault of their own.

It would be a monstrous injustice if they were made to pay tens of thousands of pounds to rectify building faults they never even suspected when they purchased their properties.

If anything, they deserve compensation for being mis-sold such dreadfully defective dwellings.

The second fact is that Britain’s big building companies have filled their coffers with vast mountains of profit in recent years. THE top five developers – Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey, Bellway, Barratt and Berkeley – have raked in around £10billion in profits and dished out billions of pounds in dividends to their shareholders since Grenfell.

While the cladding victims face financial ruin, obscene sums have been handed to the bosses of the house building firms in recent years, most notoriously to the former chief executive of Persimmon, Jeff Fairburn. he was forced out of his job after a row over his astounding £75million pay packet.

It is true the costs of remediation are daunting and it is – unfortunately – unrealistic to expect developers to cover the entire costs. Taxpayers will almost certainly end up paying billions, some of it on local authority and housing association properties. But wealthy building companies cannot be allowed to wriggle off the hook.

Inside the Government there is a belief that the construction industry, which has profited so handsomely in the past few years, should pay a cladding levy.

That is absolutely right. All the big developers have built flats with unsafe cladding or other fire safety defects that never complied with regulations. It is only fair they should pay to atone for their collective mistakes.

In many cases, the developers who built the flats in question sold on the freeholds to investment companies. The latter should also be responsible for part of the bill.

This would ensure that the pain is taken by those with deep pockets. OUR biggest builders have a moral obligation to make financial amends – all the more so because a large slice of their recent profits came courtesy of the taxpayer-backed help to Buy scheme.

This, according to some estimates, funded almost a third of their £45billion overall turnover since the tax year ending in 2018.

For the past three years, flat-owners have been in a living hell they are unable to escape. Some are being forced to shell out crippling sums for fire patrols and exorbitant insurance premiums.

The idea that they face ruinous bills on top of already being compelled to pay through the nose to live in an unsafe, un-mortgageable home is quite simply outrageous.

home-ownership is at the core of Conservative Party philosophy and that is why ministers must act.

Most of the victims are young first-time buyers, many of whom purchased their flats with the help of government schemes.

They are now discovering that their finances – and it is no exaggeration to say their whole lives – could be permanently blighted by the cladding scandal.

The Government cannot abandon these blameless homebuyers to decades of debt while allowing rich building firms to shirk their moral responsibility.