A WOMAN who wants to sell her home amid worsening health issues says she would be lucky to break even because of a major issue.
Mandy Sandhu, 48, bought her £130,000 flat in Salford, Greater Manchester, in 2005, believing she would live there for a maximum of 15 years.
But nearly 20 years later, she’s still at Transport House, on Chapel Street, and thinks she would be “lucky” to break even when selling up.
Homes nearby can fetch more than £250,000, but Mandy’s property, which has walls made from foam, has been declared unsafe, the Manchester Evening News reports.
An estate agent’s valuation said her home could be worth up to £200,000 — but only if she had an EWS1 form declaring it safe, which she does not yet have.
Mandy, who has multiple sclerosis, says she is “not getting any better” and she cannot go up and down stairs.
She says she would like to move to a bungalow, but these can cost up to £300,000, meaning she would need a new mortgage.
Combustible cladding was found five years ago on the 360 building in Castlefield, Manchester, where flat owner Tom Brothwell lives, but it has still not been removed.
Tom, 43, said: “It’s completely insane to be stuck in a building for five years knowing that there are defects.
“Every time the fire alarm goes off, probably from a false alarm from a shower, people start to panic.”
He has been trying to get government funds to fix the issue, and the Building Safety Fund (BSF) stumped up before the block’s original developer stepped in to cover the cost eighteen months ago, the MEN reports.
Tom, who did not much fancy paying £60,000 to fix it himself, was relieved, but still remains in limbo.
He said residents and the developer are ready to start, but work has not yet begun because the building’s freeholders have not yet given their final greenlight on the project.
Elsewhere, Lawyer Steph Pike discovered unsafe cladding four years ago in Bristol, but work on it only began this year.
As a leaseholder of a flat in the building, Steph, 33, was initially looking at a bill of over £70,000 to replace the cladding.
She said: “I was distraught at the news, I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to pay for this… I was seriously having to consider bankruptcy.”
She is now a campaigner with the group End Our Cladding Scandal.
The discovery of unsafe cladding has left homes like Tom and Steph’s nigh unsellable.
In 2022, the last Conservative government announced that developers would be required to contribute more to the cost of the removal, with residents in high rise buildings not having to pay at all.
As of July, over 4,500 high rise buildings across the country have been identified as having unsafe cladding.
Half of those have not yet had remediation work begin.
Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner said on Thursday that she would bring in a plan to speed up this work.
A final public inquiry report into the Grenfell disaster, published on Wednesday, found that successive central and local governments and building regulatory bodies had for decades ignored warning signs about fire safety.
It also accused the firms providing cladding of “systematic dishonesty”, selling materials that they knew to be dangerous.
“Even now I don’t know if they’re going to be putting the right materials on the building. How can I trust them?” said Pike.
“Some progress is being made, but it’s just painfully slow.”
