For many of the residents of Mar House, the past year has been spent in perpetual twilight.
The seven-storey block in Colindale, north London, is cloaked in blue netting and scaffolding that shroud its rooms in shadow in the middle of the day. The netting is for work to replace the building’s flammable Grenfell-style cladding and wooden balconies.
But there is little sign of the gloom lifting in the 95-apartment block. While work began in April 2022, with the scaffolding starting to go up last year, it has been on hold since May. The contractor walked off site after removing the cladding, owed £700,000 by the block’s freeholder, Old House Group.
The cladding paralysis is just one in a string of problems that have plunged Mar House residents – who bought their flats to achieve their home-owning dream – into a leasehold nightmare.
They now face a winter with no cladding, trapped in flats they cannot find buyers for, while the block’s freeholder fell into administration in June. Meanwhile, the blame for their plight is entangled in conflicting allegations made by the multitude of companies involved in managing the block.
The experiences of Mar House’s leaseholders will chime with many of England’s 3.4 million leaseholders living in flats who face daily struggles with cladding issues, unaffordable and often opaque service charges, and a feeling of powerlessness, while government efforts to tackle the leasehold scandal drag on.
Foot on the ladder
On the top floor, Martin Raychev thumbs through a ring binder filled with hundreds of sheets of paper. It chronicles the multitude of problems he has faced since buying the one-bedroom, £323,000 leasehold flat in 2015: letters to MPs, service charge notices (including one for £65,000), and a council notice warning of multiple fire hazards in the block.
In leasehold – a common form of home ownership, particularly with flats – the buyer buys the right to live in a property for a given period. The leaseholder pays a regular ground rent and service charge to the freeholder of the property and has to follow the conditions set out in the lease.
“It’s like having a part-time job,” Raychev says of the encyclopaedia of complaints. “It’s been terrible.”
Others have given up living in the block. Krishna Panchal moved out of her flat and into her husband’s family’s home in Surrey last year. “When I was pregnant with my daughter we just felt it wasn’t a suitable environment for a child, with the construction going on and no access to our balconies,” she says.
Unable to find a buyer because of the fire safety issues making it near-impossible to secure a mortgage, she is stuck paying 75% of her wage for an empty apartment.
It was not meant to be like this. Completed in 2016 by a now-dissolved developer, Mar City Homes, the £26m project was described by the mayor of London’s…
Read More: Cladding, mould, £75,000 charges – welcome to life in a British leasehold
