Sue me, sue you...

[Gob]

A little schadenfreude for you...

A divorcing barrister couple spent £100,000 fighting over their £1million home before it was declared to be worthless because it has Grenfell-style cladding.

The debt-laden couple spent the huge sum on legal fees to claim their respective stakes in the London flat.

But their courtroom battle ended in disaster when the family home was found to be fitted with cladding outlawed because of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. This gave it a grand worth of exactly zero pounds.

A judge ended the costly fight with a ruling that has given the couple – both themselves high-earning lawyers – three years to deal with the cladding problem before they settle up with each other.

Judge Edward Hess said: ‘It is very sad for the objective observer to witness two educated, intelligent and resourceful individuals being so unable to compromise their differences that their collective activities risk mutual self-destruction.’

He added: ‘As the story unfolds it can be seen that the parties fell victim to the long shadows of the awful Grenfell Tower disaster.’

The couple, who married in 2007 and have two children, broke up in 2019 and began their struggle over their ‘stretched’ resources.

The wife, 44, who earns £155,000 a year working for a City bank, aimed to keep the flat in a ‘striking multi-storey block’ near the financial district for herself and her children.

She agreed to pay her 51-year-old husband, who earns £69,000 a year as a Government lawyer, £300,000 for his share of the £1.1million flat.

The wife was preparing to raise a fresh mortgage of £300,000 to pay the husband for his share of their flat.

[Scooter]

A value of zero would mean that it would supposedly cost £1.1million (what would otherwise have been the value) to remove and replace the cladding. Sounds like bullshit.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Maybe it sounds odd but we're not talking about their own flat but an entire ‘striking multi-storey block’ of flats of which theirs is just one.

The owners of the building collectively will all have to remediate or move out. This odd couple cannot remediate their own little piece and sell it - it's worthless unless the entire block is fixed.

[Long Run]

That is a bleak house.

[ex-khobar Andy]

It's not easy to feel sympathy for these folk but their story is a not uncommon one. Plenty of people bought flats in buildings where the Grenfell (that tower block which erupted in flames a couple of years ago killing 79 people) cladding was installed. The story is tangled but the stuff apparently met building regulations in some circumstances at the time but because of the fire, no-one wants to live in that sort of building. I've seen numbers where the average flat needs maybe £40,000 ($60,000) to remove and replace the cladding but of course that is based in the assumption that everyone in the building does theirs. The government has provided cash (or at least promises of cash) for social housing (= projects in American parlance) but private owners are down the list and pretty much looking at major bills.