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Morning Briefing: residents facing exclusion from £200m cladding fund still fear bankruptcy or homelessness
Residents in high rises that are wrapped in dangerous cladding but are potentially not covered by the government’s new £200m fund have said they still fear bankruptcy or homelessness
Campaigner Ritu Saha of the UK Cladding Action Group said the announcement yesterday by James Brokenshire was only positive for tower blocks covered in aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding.
Ms Saha told HuffPost: “There’s a lot of frustration, and the anxiety remains that we will be made homeless because we can’t afford the bills anymore and will be in breach of the terms of our lease.
“This announcement should be a cause of hope, but is actually looking quite hopeless for us. There’s a sense of abandonment by the government and that continues. We are faced every day with bankruptcy or homelessness every day we are living there.”
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Ms Saha is a leaseholder at the Northpoint block in Bromley, south London. She fears that the cladding will stay at her building because it is clad in a combination of three types of material and not entirely ACM, HuffPost reports.
However, plans at the building remain unclear. The block’s freeholder is a firm called Citistead, which is reportedly ultimately owned by the family trust of property mogul Vincent Tchenguiz. Leaseholders have been fearing an overall bill of £4m for recladding work as responsibility for it has been disputed.
In January, Inside Housing revealed that Citistead director William Procter regarded it a “hollow threat” from government that they would force freeholders to pay for remediation work.
Yesterday, Mr Procter told The Guardian that Citistead would try to access the government’s new fund. But he added that Mr Brokenshire’s claim of freeholder inaction was unfounded and “we have committed considerable time and resource to date”.
Meanwhile, Legal & General – a company that has footed the bill for recladding – has separately announced plans to build 3,000 retirement homes in UK cities and towns.
The £2bn initiative is being seen as a way of helping to counteract the decline in high streets due to retail woes.
The new subsidiary, Guild Living, will build thousands of apartments for older people starting in Bath and Epsom, Surrey, The Telegraph reports.
Elsewhere, the BBC reports on news that empty council houses are being reopened as temporary shelters for homeless people.
Charity Streets2Homes is enabling nine rough sleepers to live in two refurbished cottages in the West Essex town of Harlow. One person offered a place has reportedly been sleeping in a tent in woods for seven months, the BBC reports.
And London mayor Sadiq Khan is expected today to announce whether he has hit his target of starting at least 14,000 affordable homes this year, according to the capital’s Evening Standard.
Mr Khan, who is a backer of Inside Housing’s End Our Cladding Scandal campaign, highlighted the need for recladding work to happen as quickly as possible:
Along with campaigners across the country, I’ve been calling on the Government to pay to remove this cladding some time. We now need to ensure that these safety works happen without delay. t.co/59Wklh5arW
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan)Along with campaigners across the country, I've been calling on the Government to pay to remove this cladding some time. We now need to ensure that these safety works happen without delay. https://t.co/59Wklh5arW
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) May 9, 2019
