麻豆社

Good morning.

What must it feel like to be flooded out of your home? To see dirty water coursing through living rooms, bathrooms and kitchens, destroying in its wake furnishings, fabrics and personal possessions? To know that it may take many months, and complex negotiations with loss adjusters, before you can return. Will it ever feel truly home again, knowing that what has happened once can all too readily recur? Will future insurance premiums be unaffordable? And, if you鈥檙e a homeowner, has the flood made it impossible to ever get a fair price for your property? After two successive weekends of storms, many across Britain are facing those harrowing questions right now.

The places we call home fascinate me. One of the privileges of my years as a parish clergyman was going into an amazing variety of homes. The people who lived there taught me that what really matters about a home is not its shape or size. Far more important is that it is safe, secure and affordable, with ready access to work, leisure, and community facilities. I recognise those factors in the pages of the bible. They underpin some of the most detailed legislation in the Old Testament. They would have featured in the carpenter鈥檚 house at Nazareth where Jesus himself was raised.

Flood is not the only risk to property safety. From the over ambitious Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis to that at Siloam In Jerusalem, which Jesus records collapsed killing 18 innocent people, high rise constructions also bring particular challenges. So, for the last year or so, I鈥檝e been trying to support one Manchester based group for whom their dream home has turned into a nightmare. These are the leaseholders living in blocks whose homes have failed the new fire safety requirements, put in place after Grenfell. Across Britain the homes of something over half a million people are now reckoned to require expensive works to make them safe. The charge for putting them right amounts to unaffordable tens of thousands of pounds per household. And as no lender will offer a mortgage, they are trapped, unable to move elsewhere. This last weekend a new campaign was launched in newspapers and on TV, bringing together residents across the whole north of England in a push to find a fair way of covering the costs.

Over two years on from the Grenfell tragedy, the danger still being faced by tower block leaseholders doesn鈥檛 have the immediate visible impact of seeing families evacuated from flooded out homes. But that in no way diminishes the gravity or urgency of the problem. High rise homes may be comfortable, conveniently situated to avoid the rush hour commute, and often with breathtaking views out over the city, but that doesn鈥檛 assuage the fears of those living in them. Whether the risk is from fire or water, an unsafe home cannot be a true home.

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