"I was blissfully ignorant": Birmingham landlord who owns three flats with dangerous cladding shares her story

The Fire Safety Bill is back in the Commons today (24 February) with ministers being urged to accept a rebel amendment to protect leaseholders in England from the costs of carrying out emergency fire safety work on their flats.

Before the vote we caught up with Patsy Sweeney from Birmingham who lives in one flat with her husband and owns two others, all with fire safety remediation issues and dangerous cladding.

Here's her story:

All my life I've been a saver, I've not really been a spender and I've always thoughts about providing for my financial future and retirement.

Being able to live my life and not worry about whether I can afford to retire.

The government was encouraging individuals like myself to become small private landlords.

People like me were encouraged to invest in our future.

So that's what we did, we bought two small flats, that was basically our pension plan and financial future.

Our situation is, we will struggle to sell this even if we could sell this, our finances are massively impacted by the realisation we could be looking at £150,00 across all three flats.

That's had a massive impact on me and my well being in terms of the future I had planned, is looking very very different.

That's a real worry and really quite depressing.

For me to have to swallow the fact that so many people and the government believe that it's okay to take that money from me, when that's the money I planned for my financial future.

It just seems so wrong.

I think the penny dropped for me very late on, I think part of the problem with all of this is information and understanding of the situation.

Probably it wasn't until late last Summer that things started to seem strange from my perspective in this development, in terms of trying to establish do we need a fire certificate? What did it actually mean?

I thought in my ignorance that having a fire certificate meant we were fine and we'd ticked that box and we were ready to go.

I didn't realise that actually what that meant was that we'd had a fire inspection and then various levels of remedial works would be required.

That's when the penny dropped.

At that point the whole thing started to develop my understanding of the gravity of the sitatuon.

Then the realisation that we've got two other flats and they're equally affected.

Probably since November I've been more depressed about the whole situation.

A lot of leaseholders don't realise the situation they're in.

I thought 'we've got brick on our building, we don't have the cladding that was apparent from the dreadful Grenfell disaster'.

In my ignorance, I thought we would have heard something by now if there was a problem, not realising 3 to 4 years later, nothing much has progressed.

I was blissfully ignorant, I'm not now.

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