Desperate homeowners living in low-rise flats with flammable cladding claim they have been stuck with massively inflated insurance fees since the Grenfell disaster. Residents of Picton in Victoria Wharf, Cardiff, claim Cardiff council has the power to save them from inflated insurance costs charged by a sister-company to the building's manager FirstPort.
They claim the overall cost of insurance has increased almost tenfold, from (£67,000 to £624,000 per year) for all seven Victoria Wharf blocks since the cladding scandal, and management company FirstPort does not dispute this. Picton resident Deborah Polverino explained: "Everybody that lives in these blocks is concerned and there are some people that lost their jobs in the pandemic, so it's harder for them and I know a lot of people have been really stretched financially.
"There's a mixture of people who want to stay and leave. There are some people who'd happily be here forever but they want to know that they feel completely safe in their home and they want the charges to go down. The biggest problem is that for anybody who wants to sell, even if the cladding work is done, if we don't get the insurance costs and service charges down then who is going to buy the property?"
