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Crisis facing thousands of homes warns property expert

Cavity wall insulation scam already affecting hundreds of consumers in Southport and Merseyside

A leading local independent property expert this week warned of the crisis facing potentially thousands of homes across Merseyside following a series of reports detailing a mis-selling scandal on a mass scale.

The warning from Graham Ellis, director of Greenhouse Chartered Surveyors comes after vulnerable consumers in their hundreds located in Southport and surrounding areas in the Merseyside region reported that their homes were suffering from extreme damp and wet walls following the injection of insulation material into their cavity walls.

He said: “Issues relating to failed retrofit cavity wall insulation have already been the subject of debate in Parliament and national media coverage and the problem is now right here on our doorstep too.”

Mr. Ellis said he was especially concerned based on the recent findings of local industry specialists such as Cavity Claims North West who has been inundated with complaints from owners and occupiers of homes who have had their walls insulated.

“It’s not just that these issues might prejudice a future sale or purchase or the valuation of the property, but also the health of the occupants. In an extreme case in Manchester recently, there was a death as a result of alleged carbon monoxide poisoning because a gas flue had been blocked by the insulation material.”

Cavity Claims’ operational support specialist Mark Harrison said his firm had received hundreds of complaints from families reporting that their homes had become damp and mouldy following the injection of insulation material into their cavity walls.

“There seems to be a pattern in the vast majority of these cases in the way that cavity wall insulation has been presented to people with doorstepping and cold calling salesman describing this as being government-backed or funded. This is not the case.

“The process is almost always funded by one of the major energy suppliers who have been given targets by the Government to insulate homes, and if they miss those targets, they can be fined by the energy regulator Ofgem so there is pressure to install as much cavity wall insulation as possible.

“What will also be of major concern to people is that we know of houses recently valued, one of which was reduced by £15,000 because of damp and other issues directly related to the cavity wall insulation. The other was a property reduced by £23,000 and sadly, we expect to see more and more incidences of this.”

www.cavityclaimsnorthwest.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jenny McAleavey .