Not only are they living in buildings with fire safety risks, but they are finding themselves saddled with large bills to pay for fixing problems of external cladding, insulation, firebreaks, alarms and sprinkler systems, as well as rapidly rising insurance bills.
Last summer, the UK parliament's housing and local government committee published a report on the cladding crisis, which said there are still 2,000 high risk residential buildings with dangerous cladding in England. The UK ministry of housing, communities and local government estimates there are 77,500 residential buildings across the UK in this height category, of which 98% are apartments and flats and the remainder are student housing and sheltered accommodation.
In privately owned towers, two thirds have not had dangerous cladding materials removed. That is 96 buildings.From the outside, Royal Artillery Quays in Woolwich, South-East London, doesn't look like it would be affected by the cladding problems thrown up by the Grenfell fire. For a start, there is no visible external cladding.
"My ex partner and I bought this flat with a shared ownership scheme, so it's part mortgage, part rent. And in 2019, we decided to put it on the market and to sell it. That was after Grenfell, so obviously the issue was already well known. But a shortage of qualified inspection engineers, and the sheer numbers of buildings involved, mean there a big delays in getting certificates.
In England's complicated system of buying and selling property, an impact in one segment of the property market leads to impacts elsewhere. In short, rungs are dropping out of the property ladder, leaving potentially millions of people trapped in properties they want to move on from. RICS is reviewing how the process works, and is ready to launch a programme to train up to 2,000 inspectors within six months. But a lack of professional indemnity insurance for inspectors threatens to halt this expansion.
"I am probably going to have to go bankrupt. I don't have £45,000 to pay the cladding bill so my only option is to go bankrupt. And all of my life savings are in it," she told RTÉ. The London Assembly Fire, Resilience and Emergency Planning heard there are 590 high risk buildings in the city that have a Waking Watch patrol or common fire alarms as "temporary" fire safety measures.
Unbelievable that you can write an article about Grenfell without mentioning Kingspan's central role in the tragedy and the contemptuous way in which at least one former Kingspan employee treated the public enquiry. 'You've got me confused with someone who cares..'
did they ever find what was in that fridge ?