A home is a place of greater safety. It is where we can shut the door on a scary world and relax and recalibrate. Lockdown only reinforced the need for this sense of solace — and not just financial security — from our bricks and mortar.
As we revealed last week, however, not only are 700,000 people still trapped in flats wrapped in many kinds of flammable materials, but up to 3.6 million face waiting for up to a decade to sell their flat or get a new mortgage.
Millions more are stuck simply because they cannot prove their flats are safe: they say they can’t get married, can’t get IVF, can’t afford to have children, can’t retire. They literally cannot move on with their lives.
They are existing in often cramped conditions, worried about the risk of fire, and anxious about the prospect of repair bills as large as £75,000.
It would never be a good time to be in this position, but in the face of another national lockdown and the worst recession in a century, the cost — both human and financial — is enormous. Worse still, there is no end in sight for those who are stuck in unsafe unsellable homes. Lives and livelihoods are at stake.
Vickie Pargetter, who is married and has a child, Blake, bought with the government’s Help to Buy scheme. She only discovered her two-bedroom flat in Birmingham lacked fire barriers to stop flames spreading inside the walls when she came to sell. It left the home valued at £220,000 in January worth £0.
“The likely timeframe for any resolution also means we won’t be able to try for a sibling for Blake,” says Pargetter, 39, a university director. “We are normally healthy, positive people but both my husband and I are on antidepressants.”
These properties should never have been built. And why should leaseholders trapped in dangerous homes that they bought in good faith with hard-earned savings pay for them to be made safe? Adequate housing was recognised as part of the right to a decent standard of living in the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
So will you back a new Sunday Times campaign to end our hidden housing scandal?
Ever since the Grenfell fire tragedy laid bare decades of regulatory failure and exposed the shoddy state of many of Britain’s buildings, Home has been championing the cause of those imprisoned in dangerous homes.
Run jointly with Inside Housing magazine and residents trapped in affected flats all over Britain, the Safe Homes for All campaign has the backing of Grenfell United, which is made up of the survivors of the 2017 London fire and their human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield, as well as more than 100 cross-party MPs and mayors. The bodies for architects (Riba), housing associations (NHF), block managers (ARMA) and fire brigades (FBU) are among many organisations that have signed up, as well as household names including George Clarke and Phil Spencer.
We want to call on the government to:
● Pay for works upfront and then recoup costs through court cases against the original builders and levies on new schemes.
● Expand the government’s £1.6 billion fund to fix blocks of all heights — not only those above 18m (59ft) — and cover excluded issues such as flammable balconies, unsafe structures, fire patrols and alarms. Experts estimate that the current pot will fund less than a quarter of high-rise blocks with materials other than Grenfell cladding and no lower-rise buildings.
● Lead an “urgent national effort” to strip all unsafe cladding by June 2022, prioritised by risk — not the current haphazard order.
● Head a fairer, faster process to replace EWS1, the almost impossible to obtain fire safety certificate, and compel freeholders or managing agents to be honest with residents about fire risks. Many have suffered hardship after losing sales over defects admitted late in transactions.
● Change the draft Building Safety Bill so residents are not liable for historic defects or costs of unknown future regulatory changes.
Please add your name to the Safe Homes for All campaign, and share your stories at timesonline.co.uk
