Building safety campaigners tell Gove the real story

MICHAEL Gove made good on a promise to visit Leeds and meet those whose lives are still blighted by the cladding and building safety scandal. He was taken on a tour of affected apartment buildings at Leeds Dock before a meeting with a group of leasehold flat owners from across the city.

The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities appeared shocked to hear that less than five per cent of the affected apartment buildings in Leeds had been fully remediated whilst the rest still had safety issues.

While apartment owners are not liable to pay for historical building repair work or for the removal of cladding, they are being forced by the freeholders of the buildings to fork out thousands of pounds for the interim safety measures and sky high insurance costs. The consequences are harrowing.

A growing number of leasehold flat owners have been tipped into bankruptcy and others into penury while being effectively trapped in a blighted home. Most are suffering from anxiety and depression and not surprisingly as it is now over six years on from the Grenfell fire tragedy which exposed the threats to life in at least 1.5 million flats due to flammable cladding and insulation and other issues.

Rachael Loftus, who owns a blighted flat at the Timblebeck development in Leeds, helped organise the meeting with Mr Gove and says the biggest barrier to the remediation of affected apartment blocks is that building owners and developers have been given no deadline to fix them.

She adds: “In the meantime we have to pay huge bills and there is no end in sight. Almost everyone in the meeting with Michael

Gove said that their building had no remediation plan and that is a massive problem.The freeholders and developers responsible for doing that work don’t care because it’s us who are paying the bills in the meantime.

“There is a massive power imbalance. Developers and freeholders are legally responsible to make the buildings safe but they are dragging their feet knowing they can.”

Rachael’s insurance bill for the leasehold apartment she bought was £300 a year before the building safety scandal and it is now £3,500. Altogether, since the building’s fire safety issues were identified, she has paid almost £20,000 extra for safety measures and the huge bills keep coming.

She and other members of the Leeds Cladding Scandal group put out a statement saying “We were able to talk to him directly about many of the issues that are blighting our lives and our homes because of fire safety issues identified in the wake of the Grenfell disaster. We told him that most of us have been left waiting in limbo for years with no end in sight whilst the developers, freeholders and those we pay to manage our buildings are shirking their legal obligations to make safe the buildings our homes are in.

“We told him of the huge expense that the delays, regulations and blatant profiteering from banks and insurers are having, with each leaseholder being forced to pay thousands of pounds extra each year in unnecessary costs, despite being blameless for this fiasco. We told him about how powerless we feel.”

They also urged Mr Gove to ensure developers, freeholders, managing agents, banks and insurers do the right thing: legally and morally and gave him a copy of the national End Our Cladding Scandal campaign manifesto.