‘It’s just the injustice that hit me’: ‘non-qualifying’ leaseholders and the latest battle on building safety

“It’s just the injustice that hit me,” she says. “It was unfair. We’ve relied on legislation, we’ve relied on testing, we’ve relied on the government to manage the environment we lived in, and that system has failed.”

Ms Brodie owned a flat with her husband in an eight-storey block in east London. She says she “never felt unsafe in it” before Grenfell. But, in 2020, when EWS1 checks became a requirement to get a mortgage on a flat, it emerged that the cladding used in the render was combustible. The resident management company quoted £67,000 to fix it. 

This might all seem like yesterday’s news. Hasn’t the government introduced legislation to prevent people like Ms Brodie from being hit by these bills?

Not quite. The rules are limited to qualifying leaseholders: those in blocks taller than 11m, with a lease starting before 14 February 2022 and who own no more than three properties where the flat in question is not their primary home.

But Ms Brodie and her husband owned two other residential properties, having invested in them for their retirement. As such, they were excluded from any protection.

“The fact that you own three properties doesn’t make it any easier to pay that amount of money,” she says. The only option for her and her husband would have been to sell one or both of their other properties.

This would have meant either evicting the tenants, or a sale to another landlord with the tenants remaining in the property. This is legally possible, but can be difficult to achieve – particularly in the current market. 

“I’ve got two young families in there, both NHS workers, who have been with me for years,” she says.

If Ms Brodie and her husband do not pay, there is a further problem: remedial works cannot start until all the funds for the remediation are in place. And if the non-qualifying leaseholders don’t pay, it means the block will remain unfixed, and everyone in it will remain unable to sell and move on.

This has highlighted a big problem with the legislation. “We’re aware of blocks where they have got a large percentage of non-qualifying leaseholders: 30% or 40%, even one block where 70% are non-qualifying,” says Ms Brodie. There is no prospect of remediation works being carried out on these buildings under the current rules.

“The law seems to say if we were going to be asked to pay, you would be given 28 days, right? So you’d start to think, do you have to evict people now and start getting some money in the bank, in case you have to pay an unknown amount?” she says.

Suzy Spilling is the other co-founder of the campaign. Like many of her generation, she invested in property as a pension plan. Along with her husband, she “mortgaged up to the hilt” to buy two houses in Northamptonshire, and later a couple of apartments in City Lofts in Salford, Greater Manchester.

These two apartments got dragged into the building safety crisis. “When all this blew up, my kids kept saying, ‘Oh, the government won’t let that happen, they can’t let that happen to people, it would be so unjust’,” she says.

Like the faith that buildings had been built properly, this too proved unfounded. “It consumed me, honestly, it was just starting to put my life on hold,” she says. The bill for her remediation was around £30,000 per apartment, so £60,000 in total.

These costs will have changed: on the one hand, prices have risen, but on the other, some may now be met through new government funding pots which cover a wider range of defects. But there will certainly be substantial bills that are not covered by government funds.

Ms Brodie has been rescued recently by the developer liability scheme; the original developer of her block has signed the government contracts and will pay for the entire works.

But this is not the case for Ms Spilling. “It was City Lofts Group that actually built the original building, and they went into liquidation soon after,” she says.

Some of the original directors are still trading via a new company registered in Monaco, but this makes the chances of compensation extremely remote.

“If we were to get the letter through the letterbox tomorrow, we haven’t got the funds to actually start covering the costs of the remediation,” she says. 

This would probably entail a move from her home in Bedfordshire to Salford to live in the affected flats, as they would have nowhere else to go. But this would mean moving away from ageing parents and grandchildren they care for.

“My biggest worry up until April was that I had cared pretty much full time for my mother. She was in tears at the thought of me having to leave her to move up to Manchester, which was atrocious. Unfortunately, we lost her in back in April, but we’ve still got my husband’s father, who’s been diagnosed with cancer.

“He’s in his eighties, as is my mother-in-law. So it would mean moving away from all our family to have to go and live in a flat in Salford in God knows what sort of condition.”