Transcription
Hi, I'm Dan. I live at the infamous 53 Aar Grove. It's an apartment I bought back in 2019 for £850,000. It's dangerously defective. It's been said that it needs demolishing and rebuilding and it's now worth zero.
>> Oh my god, the whole wall is living. >> It's been catastrophic. We've not had elevators since probably about week three. There's enough movement that the windows are now jammed in the frame. Imagine living in a home like it was a platform for your life and then all you're doing is emailing developers.
>> The developer left this all collapsed. It was only when the London Fire Brigade got involved and said this is a fire risk in the communal area that the developer actually put the ceilings back. So this is 53 Aar Grove. It's a defective block of flats in Kiama's constituency. Um, as you've seen, I've just walked straight in. There's no gate providing no security to the building, which means our post boxes are constantly robbed. They've all been pried open. Uh, so you can't get any mail delivered here really. It's a case of delivering it to somebody, you know, and then um picking it up. Uh, these are our I believe they're meant to be bike sheds, but as you can see, they also get broken into. They've also started to rot because they're not weatherproof. And so, all we can really do is leave bins in there. And the real concern is that if this is the timber that we can see and they've done such a bad job of something that's visible, um, you've got to wonder how seriously they took the timber frame inside the actual building.
I was incredibly lucky um to be able to afford to buy a place in London as it stands. I'd built a business over the last 5 years and I'd then sold it to one of the major retail banks which gave me some funds to go and buy like a lovely new property. So, this was the first of my bathrooms to leak. And uh it began as just a leak, but then it was the smell started to get really repugnant. And at first it was obviously a mold and a damp smell because the bathroom's leaking. But then it became I believe as the plumbing system started to fail. Every few days it will flood the apartment with the smell of sewage. Sometimes sewage, sometimes garlic, sometimes who knows what else. And it's on those days that I end up sleeping upstairs on the sofa.
I noticed problems with the property before I even opened my front door on the first day I moved in. So, as I was coming up the stairs, my next door neighbor who moved in a couple of months before I did, she heard somebody, me, opened the door and then started telling me about her nightmare story. So upon moving in, her terrace had started to leak into her bedroom and her daughter's bedroom. And I don't know that I believed her immediately, like until I opened my door and I started to see the brown staining on my ceiling as well. There was obviously water ingress issues, but I could hear noise as well. And it was only later on that we figured out cuz the building was moving. All the seals around the windows had been broken. And so it was quite a harsh reality check to go from something that appeared fantastic upon viewing it and then was like the beginning of a living nightmare upon on the very first day I moved in.
As you can see, I'm missing part of the door frame and it fell off as the building moved. And what's interesting there is those door frames according to some building plans that we did manage to get hold of are meant to be 30 minutes fire safe, but there's no insulation around them. So it's just a gap of air and so they're timber doors with a gap of air and so you'd be lucky if they were a minute fire safe and there's not really anything we can do about it. So the London Fire Brigade has had this property on a fire notice. We have had to have communal alarm systems put in. But when we talk about the internal defects to each apartment, the London Fire Brigade's answer is that they can't do anything. The Building Safety Act means that they're only responsible for the common areas of the building, not the internal areas of people's apartments.
>> Even though this building could essentially go up in flames very quickly, >> it's a timber frame building. It's not been treated. There's clear defects in fire safety and the London Fire Brigade are essentially their hands are tied behind their backs by the Building Safety Act.
>> Oh my god. >> The builders or the contractors who came into to do the investigations realized that there was like fairly wide long running stepped cracks through the facade of the building. At which point it went from a "Oh, I'm making a claim for some leaks" to "There's a wider issue in the building here that really needs investigating."
>> So the issues with this building are turned out to be structural and foundational. >> So yes, um, there is it's agreed that there are problems with the timber frame and problems with how the brick facade is attached to the timber frame.
Oh my god, the whole wall is moving. >> Oh my god. >> So yeah, the brick facade isn't attached to the frame adequately. Um, as you can see on the ground, I've got this temporary cut. Well, I say temporary, but it seems permanent. I've had this for years. This is where the terrace was leaking into the ground below. If you can just see here, you can see that the building's moving because all the water just stands in the drains. This terrace has been replaced once so that the water would fall and then within a few days of it being replaced, the water was standing in the drains yet again.
After the water ingress and the people who came to investigate realizing there were stepped cracks all the way around the building, there was some back and forth and in 2022 the warranty provider gave the developer a surveyor to use and said, "This is the person who should survey this building." And his conclusion after 6 months or so of monitoring it is that he didn't think there was any cost-effective way to remedy like the instability and the structural integrity of the building. And I believe the phrase was that consideration should be given to a demolition and rebuild.
>> This developer is going for the porcupine effect. This chipboard in the loft looks like it was cut by a beaver last thing on a Friday afternoon. Look at this work of art. This internal wall is 22 mm of plum. The tolerance is 8 mm. Why am I finding this? Why is the developer not finding this?
>> So, my name's John Cooper. I'm the managing director of New Home Quality Control.
>> And tell us about the TikToks that you make. What sort of things are you seeing when you're going to these new build properties?
>> We're seeing lots of disasters. Um, fake weak vents, lots of walls, hugely out of tolerance. Um, really, really poor quality workmanship within properties.
So, why does this earth bonding need to be 5 million miles long? We got some kinky pipe work under this toilet.
>> Who is to blame for the poor quality of some new build homes?
>> Uh, it's got to be the tradesman. It can't blame anybody else. You can only blame the person doing the work. Um, don't get me wrong, there's other factors within that. For me, the answer is most definitely lack of education and a lack of training. I just believe that the role of an apprentice, not the role it's set out on paper. It's more of a laborer's role and a helping hand role until you qualify and then you're set off in the big wide world yourself. Even up to their third year, they don't learn a great deal about building properties and building houses whilst out on site. They're more there as a helping hand to earn other tradesmen a lot of money and they can move on.
What do you think needs to be done to solve this issue? Is it more oversight, more regulation? Is it more funding for training?
>> Subcontracting companies should be held to account for what happens with their apprentices. It should be an independent governing body that look after the apprentices on a daily basis that work independently with the subcontractors to ensure that all apprentices moving forward get trained right, get shown how to work on site correctly and on a daily basis they learn something other than sweeping the floor and putting tools away.
>> Quite early on we began making claims against our structural warranty policy. It came to light that they thought there was a problem with the limit of indemnity and that the limit of indemnity wouldn't cover demolishing and rebuilding this property. And so my reading of the policy was that it would. Their reading of the policy was that it wouldn't and we ended up having to go to court to argue that and unfortunately we lost that court case.
>> And how much have you spent on legal fees fighting this?
So between myself, my neighbor, and another neighbor who has been less involved, but has put some towards, we're over half a million pounds now.
>> The developer and the freeholder are one and the same here. What have they had to say about this?
>> It's interesting because they're a developer and a freeholder and they retained three apartments and so you'd expect them to be on our side, but initially they weren't. Initially, they were saying how it was a leasehold problem. It was a snagging problem. You're going to have to resolve these issues yourself, which we can't do cuz we don't own the building. We lease an apartment in it. And they just got more and more difficult over time as I think they realized that they were more and more culpable. They slowed things down drastically. And when you're in a legal fight, slowing things down is how you make the other party spend money. And I think everybody in this has played a blinder at slowing things down and just costing myself and my neighbors more and more money.
It's aspirational to have a home. We're told that everybody should save up and buy the home. It's security, but objectively I think that's not the case. I think people tend to treat buying a home a little bit like buying a dishwasher or or Okay, that's probably but like an expensive car in that if you buy an expensive car from a known manufacturer and it's defective, they have to make it right. That's not what really happens when you're buying a property, whether it's freehold or whether it's leasehold. You're entering into a sales contract that doesn't benefit from any consumer rights really.
So, I'm trapped here because the property's worth zero. I'm trapped here because I'm stuck in the middle of a legal fight. There's not a way out of this other than going through it.