This is Home Front with Vicky Spratt, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
Good afternoon and welcome to Home Front. This week, we’re looking at the latest iteration of the building safety scandal: spray foam insulation.
If you think the crisis in building safety and quality that was exposed by Grenfell ends with dangerous cladding, think again.
It has emerged that a quarter of the UK’s biggest mortgage lenders are refusing to lend against homes where spray foam insulation has been used to retrofit the building, making it warmer and more energy efficient.
This is because poor workmanship can mean that moisture gets trapped behind the foam, increasing the risk of dangerous rot to timber frames, severe mould and damp.
But, let’s get something straight: spray foam is not always dangerous. If applied properly, building safety experts tell me that it is perfectly safe to use and can even be a very effective way to insulate homes quickly and affordably.
However, mortgage lenders are not going to check every single home where it has been used. A proper inspection would be almost impossible without removing it to see what’s underneath, which is simply not practical.
As a result, mortgage lenders are refusing to take on the risk of lending against a home which could have serious structural problems. It could cost a lot of money to repair and it could impact the property’s value.
And that is placing homeowners between a rock and a hard place.
According to a BBC report, an estimated 250,000 homes in the UK have spray foam insulation within their roofs. A lot of it will have been installed under the previous Conservative government’s subsidised Green Homes Grant scheme but some of it will predate that.
Rico Wojtulewicz, head of policy at the National Federation of Builders, said he had been warning the Government, builders and anyone who will listen about the potential problems presented by spray foam insulation for years.
There are two kinds of spray foam, Wojtulewicz explains.
“There is what’s called closed cell and open cell [foam]. All homes move and expand. So, if you’re using closed cell, it’s really rigid. This can cause structural issues. However, while open cell is OK in that respect, it can create more issues with mould and damp because it might fill spaces that it shouldn’t.”
Wojtulewicz says that “lots of mortgage lenders are deciding it’s not worth the hassle” to take on homes with spray foam.
“There is now a broad-brush approach because it’s too difficult to analyse each home individually.”
Part of the problem with spray foam is that it’s not very well understood. Not by the homeowners who have had it fitted. Not by the lenders who are exercising caution. And, perhaps, not even by the builders who have used it (some banks are asking for documentary evidence of correct installation).
This further exposes the crisis in the standard of British building and reinforces the need for Government oversight, which has been repeatedly flagged by experts and campaigners since the Grenfell Tower Fire in 2017.
Grenfell had been retrofitted poorly. Deadly combustible cladding had been fitted, but there were also issues with insulation and poor workmanship more broadly.
“We are obsessed with retrofitting [homes] in this country,” Wojtulewicz adds. “But we are not obsessed with the quality of the works.
“We need retrofit to be taken more seriously and done properly. We need the Government to listen to expert builders and industry.”
Until that happens, there will be more building materials which are exposed as problematic. And, sadly, more homeowners will be caught up in the crisis of building quality in Britain.
Giles Grover is the co-leader of the campaign group End Our Cladding Scandal (EOCS), he advocates for homeowners who are trapped in buildings with dangerous cladding.
“Cladding was always just one symptom of a deep-rooted, systemic issue with the built environment in this country. Whether it’s flats, houses, care homes, hospitals or schools, the building safety crisis widens every day.”
As Grover sees it, the problem is oversight of the building industry.
“Everyone has just relied on the developers and builders to do ‘the right thing’. But then you find out years later that either the materials were not appropriate or that they weren’t installed properly. But we – the homeowners – are the ones left with the huge cost and suffering.”
The Government’s current position is that the presence of spray foam in homes should not preclude mortgage lenders from lending against them. However, as we know with cladding on low-rise buildings, just because the Government doesn’t think something is a problem doesn’t mean lenders will agree.
I am hearing regularly from homeowners in small blocks of flats where there is no cladding or known fire safety issue that some mortgage lenders are demanding EWS1 forms to prove that there is no fire safety risk present. This goes against the Government’s guidelines and, yet, it is still happening.
Have you been impacted by spray foam insulation? Have you been asked for an EWS1 when you shouldn’t have been? Please do email me vicky.spratt@inews.co.uk
Key Housing
Next up, let’s zoom in on what’s happening in the housing market.
According to the property listings site Rightmove, asking prices have dropped by more than £5,000 this month.
Why? It could be that Rachel Reeves’s first budget cause some jitters, particularly among landlords who are keen to offload properties. However, it’s also normal for the market to stall a bit in the run up to Christmas because people are less keen to move.
Average asking prices from new sellers fell by £5,366, or 1.4 per cent, in November to £366,592, compared with the 0.8 per cent decline usually recorded at this time of year, according to Rightmove.
It’s worth paying attention to this. The housing market may be busier than it was last year, but we are absolutely not in a house price boom.
The Bank of England has just cut the base rate for the second time this year, by another quarter point to 4.75 per cent.
So, you might expect home sellers to be buoyant. However, mortgage rates are not falling significantly due to political and economic turbulence around the world, including the election of Donald Trump in the US and the ongoing war in the Middle East.
What happens next to house prices in Britain will depend on two things: how low interest rates go and what, if anything, the Labour Government announces next year to help first-time buyers.
Ask me anything
Speaking of first-time buyers, this week’s question has come via Instagram. A reader wants to know “if Labour are going to announce anything like the Tories’ Help to Buy scheme to help those who are struggling to save deposits and get mortgages?”
My understanding is that what, if anything, this government can do for first-time buyers is very much an ongoing conversation being had both at Rachel Reeves’ Treasury and Angela Rayner’s Ministry of Housing.
They must tread carefully. They need to boost the housing market just enough, but they want to avoid encouraging house price inflation that worsens affordability in the long term (which is exactly what Help to Buy did).
Expect announcements at some point next year.
Vicky’s pick
I have just finished reading Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. You may never have heard of Parrott’s work. I certainly hadn’t. Reading Ex-Wife, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a debut novel by a young contemporary woman writer. It was, in fact, written in 1929, which is eerie, because the way that Parrott analyses modern relationships is more clear-eyed than many of us who are trying to make sense of them today.
The latest edition, published by Faber, has an introduction by the brilliant novelist and screenwriter Monica Heisey. That’s worth reading on its own too.
This is Home Front with Vicky Spratt, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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