Michael Gove visited Leeds and was shocked by a lack of action to help those still trapped by the building safety crisis six years after the Grenfell fire

The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities was clearly shocked to hear that less than five per cent of the affected apartment buildings in Leeds had been fully remediated whilst the rest still had safety issues.

While apartment owners are not liable to pay for historical building repair work or for the removal of cladding, they are being forced by the freeholders of the buildings to fork out thousands of pounds for interim safety measures and sky high insurance costs. The consequences have been harrowing.

A growing number of leasehold flat owners have been tipped into bankruptcy and others into penury while being effectively trapped in a blighted home. Most are suffering from anxiety and depression and not surprisingly as it is now over six years on from the Grenfell fire tragedy which exposed the threats to life in at least 1.5 million flats due to flammable cladding and insulation and other issues.

Rachael Loftus, who owns a blighted flat at the Timblebeck development in Leeds, helped organise the meeting with Mr Gove and says the biggest barrier to the remediation of affected apartment blocks is that building owners and developers have been given no deadline to fix them.

In the meantime we have to pay huge bills and there is no end in sight. Almost everyone in the meeting today said that their building had no remediation plan and that is a massive problem.The freeholders and developers responsible for doing that work don’t care because it’s us who are paying the bills in the meantime.

She adds: “There is a massive power imbalance. Developers and freeholders are legally responsible to make the buildings safe but they are dragging their feet knowing they can.”

Rachael’s insurance bill for the leasehold apartment she bought and lives was £300 a year before the building safety scandal and it is now £3,500.

Altogether, since the building’s fire safety issues were identified, Rachel has paid almost £20,000 extra for safety measures and the huge bills keep coming.

She and other members of the Leeds Cladding Scandal group, formed to fight for justice for innocent leasehold apartment owners, put out this statement: “We were pleased that Michael Gove kept his promise to our MP Hilary Benn to come to our city and meet a few of the thousands of Leeds' leaseholders impacted by the building safety crisis.

We were able to talk to him directly about many of the issues that are blighting our lives and our homes because of fire safety issues identified in the wake of the Grenfell disaster.

We told him that most of us have been left waiting in limbo for years with no end in sight whilst the developers, freeholders and those we pay to manage our buildings are shirking their legal obligations to make safe the buildings our homes are in.

We told him of the huge expense that the delays, regulations and blatant profiteering from banks and insurers are having, with each leaseholder being forced to pay thousands of pounds extra each year in unnecessary costs, despite being blameless for this fiasco.

We told him about how powerless we feel compared to the developers and the freeholders owners of the buildings, who often have huge legal and PR departments to protect them as they put off doing the necessary works to put right a situation that they have already profited from and continue to profit from.

We were able to give Mr Gove an advance copy of our national End Our Cladding Scandal campaign manifesto and we urged him to go back to Westminster and look at all the options available to make sure developers, freeholders, managing agents, banks and insurers do the right thing: legally and morally.

We asked him to make sure that remediation of buildings is faster and fairer so that leaseholders in Leeds do not get left behind and we also asked him not to penalise leaseholders who do not qualify for the limited protections

offered by the Government in the Building Safety Act.

And most of all, we asked him to keep in mind the real people who live in these buildings in Leeds: it’s our homes, our life savings attached to our homes and our life choices that are being limited and it is the risks we face going to sleep every night in unsafe buildings.

We told him we just want to live safely in the homes we purchased. We don’t want to face the consequences or the cost of the shoddy work done by those who should be taking responsibility.

We need the government to back us in this fight and we look forward to seeing what Mr Gove will do to honour his commitment to end our cladding and building safety scandal.

*The Yorkshire Post wholeheartedly supports the cladding and building safety campaigners.