Two years after Spectrum Building fire, residents still trapped paying mortgages on destroyed flats

Sarah Williams camped in a car park overnight in 2016 to secure a deposit on a flat in the newly completed Spectrum Building in Dagenham, east London. She had queued for 24 hours before the units went on sale. "It was basically the only flat I could afford in London," she recalls. "This was a year before Grenfell, and the flats market in London was completely crazy." Four years later, her flat became unsellable when dangerous, flammable cladding was discovered covering the building. Four years after that, on August 26, 2024, the building caught fire in the early hours of the morning, fueled by scaffolding that had been erected while the cladding was being replaced. More than 80 residents were forced to flee. Two years on, Williams remains trapped in a legal and financial nightmare: she continues paying a mortgage on a flat that no longer exists, with no certainty about when or how much compensation she will receive.

The Spectrum Building's freeholder, Arinium Ltd, declared bankruptcy shortly after the fire. Administrators now control the distribution of insurance payouts and any remaining assets. Williams, who works for a charity, describes the limbo as suffocating. "We still haven't got our money, and we have no idea whether it will even cover the value of the flats," she said. "We don't know when we're going to get it. We've still got to pay our mortgages. We've still got to pay our rent. So many people have told us: 'It's terrible what happened to you, and this is a priority for us.' But our lives are still on hold." Insurance is covering emergency accommodation for three years, but no one knows what happens to residents if compensation hasn't been awarded by then—they could be forced to pay both rent and a mortgage simultaneously.

James Allchurch owned two flats in the building. He and his partner woke to embers and blue flashing lights outside their third-floor window and fled with only the clothes they were wearing. "We just grabbed whatever clothes we had and ran out the building, leaving everything behind," he said. "Because the last thing you think is, we'll never go back in our flat." The trauma has not faded. "It wears you down. I still have nightmares about the fire, I have nightmares about watching our building being demolished, losing everything. There's an underlying sense of anxiety that has been with me most days since that fire." The legal process compounds the psychological toll. Leaseholders face another anxiety: if the freeholder is prosecuted for fire safety breaches and fined, that money could be deducted from the compensation pot meant for residents. Allchurch articulated the cruel bind: "You want some justice, you want to feel that someone's taking responsibility and there's accountability. But the result of that might be that we're all thousands of pounds worse off."

Beyond the immediate crisis at Spectrum, residents are furious at the pace of cladding remediation across the country. The day after the fire, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner stood at the site and declared that cladding remediation was proceeding "far too slowly" and promised urgent action to accelerate it. Yet in the two years since, the proportion of buildings requiring cladding work where remediation has started or been completed has crept from 50% to 53%. Williams is blunt about the broken promise: "I don't want anybody else to go through this. Do not stand in front of my smouldering building saying this is a priority then fail to follow up on that. I expected fast and urgent action, but I haven't seen that for the residents of Spectrum and I haven't seen that for the country."

Giles Grover, from the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign group, said the government has failed to deliver on its manifesto commitments on building safety. "Progress has been very slow in the last couple of years," he said. "There's been a couple of small steps forward, but it's piecemeal. It feels like Labour prioritised building 1.5m homes, and that's meant they've swept ending the building safety crisis under the carpet. But this fire was a warning, and they need to heed it. There's hundreds of thousands of people still living in unsafe buildings." A Ministry of Housing spokesperson acknowledged the urgency, saying residents "must be fully and urgently compensated so they can start to rebuild their lives" and urging administrators to resolve insurance settlements quickly. The ministry also stated it is "speeding up cladding removal" and introducing a legal duty to remediate, with criminal prosecution as a consequence for non-compliance. Yet for Williams, Allchurch, and the other residents of Spectrum, these statements ring hollow. Their lives remain suspended, their futures uncertain, their mortgages due.