Cladding scandal: I wanted to secure a nest egg for retirement

“Thousands of people invested in the market; many my wife and I, as a quasi-pension while in our 40s and 50s,’’ he said. “Our investment in this respect forms the majority of our planning for income in old age.

“The fact that we cannot now sell these properties itself makes the prospect of what should have been a well-planned and comfortable old age much more challenging. The added threat that large bills will probably be rendered to us in the future is a significant mental challenge, as is the thought that these problems will simply be passed on to our children when we die.”

Mr Whitfield said many more leasehold properties, whether impacted by current or known building safety issues, or not, are potentially affected by the conditions imposed by a new act.

He added: “The Building Safety Act (BSA) came into force in 2022 with the aim of overhauling regulations around building safety for residential properties over 18m high and with the express aim of providing financial exposure protections for some (“qualifying”) leaseholders in respect of the costs involved with remediating historical safety defects in properties.

“In respect of these protections, the BSA limits the exposure for “qualifying” leaseholders to £10,000 (a higher limit applies in London) for putting right historical safety defects. A combination of building owners, freeholders, developers and some others are responsible for costs beyond this. This is referred to as the “waterfall”.

Mr Whitfield said England and Wales are almost unique in operating a quasi-feudal system where landowners are able to sell leases amounting to nearly all the tangible value of a property development, while retaining legal ownership of the land and enabling the charging of “ground rents” to the people to whom they have sold leaseholds.

He added: “To make matters worse, the leases are designed in such a way as to cause all the costs involved in upkeep or repairs to the property to be the responsibility of the leaseholders, with virtually no recourse to those charging the leaseholders what can be very substantial ground rents and service charges.

“In many cases these arrangements amount to no more than investment instruments, designed to enrich those building owners and those holding the freeholds at the expense of those to whom leases have been granted. The most important qualification criterion to be a “qualifying” leaseholder is that you must not own more then three residential properties in the UK. If you own four or more properties you become “non-qualifying” for all the protections provided for by the Act.”

The fundamental flaw in the drafting of the bill is that the effects of non-qualifying status render the leases themselves to be “non-qualifying”, in perpetuity, even if the ownership of that lease subsequently passes to a person who would have been qualifying themselves, Mr Whitfield said.

He added: “If the lease is deemed to be non-qualifying for protections under the BSA as a result of it being owned by a non-qualifying leaseholder in February 2022, it will remain non-qualifying for the protections in perpetuity. This means that those who own non-qualifying leases will never have any protection against collection of payments for remediation of safety defects: either those presenting themselves currently, or in the future.

“Whilst the BSA makes laudable efforts to provide innocent qualifying leaseholders with some protection against these remediation costs, the argument deployed by campaigners such as myself is that the so called non-qualifying leaseholders are no less innocent. They have had no part in creating the safety issues, the root causes of which and the dysfunctional, historical behaviour of the perpetrator firms have been quite well publicised by the findings of the Grenfell Inquiry.”