Within the next year or two, I could go bankrupt. My mistake: to join a government-backed affordable housing scheme and purchase a one-bedroom flat in east London. For the past four years, it has been my pride and joy — not to mention my savings, my pension and my financial future. I was grateful for the government’s help in getting a foothold in the city. But now another government policy is hurtling towards me, against which I have no defence. Nor do potentially tens of thousands of first-time buyers and the owners of affordable housing in my position. It might be the next big scandal to hit the government.
It’s about cladding. Three years ago, the tragedy at Grenfell showed what can happen when you get this wrong: insulation added for environmental reasons turned out to be highly flammable. The residents were living in a death trap, and when a fridge caught fire, the tower block became an inferno. This, of course, raised the immediate question: how many others are living like this? The answer, it turns out, is all too many — 600,000. Including me.
Or so we’re now told by my housing association. We’ve been warned that the cladding covering our block of flats, along with 11,300 other buildings across the UK, is potentially combustible and has to be tested. Should it fail those tests, the cladding will have to be replaced — and that huge financial cost will most likely fall on leaseholders. You might think this is unfortunate, but is it really a disaster? Unexpected expenses are, after all, one of the normal pitfalls of home ownership; in the great Monopoly game of life, you pick up a Chance card that has you buying a new boiler, fixing your roof or treating subsidence. Is cladding so different?
The answer is yes.
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