A year on from being told their homes were a fire hazard, residents of six apartment blocks on the banks of the Mersey are still living in fear.

Last autumn, leaseholders at The Decks in Runcorn were told that the cladding on their flats was highly flammable and banned from parking under the blocks in case a car fire spread to the buildings.

Since then, new fire alarms have been fitted and work carried out to address fire safety issues inside the building, at great cost to the residents, but the dangerous cladding remains in place.

One of the residents, 54-year-old Gail Jeys, told the LDRS: “It’s a nightmare. I just want to wake up from this nightmare.

“When will it be finished?”

‘Constant fear’ and rising bills for residents For Gail, the past year has been one of constant stress. Rising insurance costs have seen the service charge double to £600 per quarter and she has had to pay more than £1,000 for a new fire alarm.

Meanwhile, she continues to live in a flat that is still classed as a fire hazard and her young grandson has been banned from visiting by his parents because of the risk.

She said: “It’s a constant battle, that constant fear of what’s going to happen.

“When my son found out, he said I can’t let you have the little one there. I was on the verge of just giving up.

“I sit at the window, sometimes I will have a few moments when I think I could just fall out of it.”

But while living at The Decks takes its toll on residents, many are trapped there as the flammable cladding has rendered their flats worthless.

It was supposed to be a luxury development, opened in 2006 with flats selling for upwards of £110,000 and plans of creating a gated community with shops and restaurants next to the flats.

The plans for the wider development were never completed, the shops and restaurants and even two whole blocks of flats going unbuilt and leaving waste ground next to the flats that were completed.

The value of the flats fell, first to around £75,000 and then, with news of the cladding, to literally nothing as mortgage lenders refused to loan would-be owners anything to buy property at The Decks.

Another resident, 49-year-old Patrick Caffrey, moved up to Runcorn from Oxfordshire with his wife in 2012 thinking they were purchasing an affordable but luxury flat, only to find that they now can’t leave.

He said: “It’s been horrendous, we don’t know where we stand. We can’t sell it because nobody will buy it.”

It is that uncertainty that Patrick said he found wearing, not knowing if his home was safe or what would happen next, especially when blocks in other parts of the country were being evacuated for fire safety reasons.

He said: “We saw blocks down in London where they are having to leave, is that going to happen here?

“It’s not knowing that’s the big fear, nobody’s telling us anything.”

Uncertainty surrounds government support Part of the problem, the leaseholders said, was a lack of communication from management company Scanlans.

Scanlans is responsible for managing the block and dealing with the fire safety problems, although it is the leaseholders who ultimately have to pay for it.

Gail said: “A lot of it is the lack of information from Scanlans themselves. We’ve had one letter from them since December last year, that was the one saying they applied for the funding.”

The funding in this case is the government’s Building Safety Fund, a £1 billion pot of money supposed to help pay for dangerous cladding to be removed from buildings like The Decks, and which Scanlans applied for in September.

However, since then there has been no news.

A spokesperson for Scanlans said: “We wrote to owners in September and again this month with updates. Sadly, in the absence of any formal response regarding the BSF application, there has been no news on to report on that.  “We are chasing this on a weekly basis. We fully understand that the lack of information is causing frustration but we are certainly communicating with owners. In addition, we remain in weekly communication with the residents’ association.”

But the lack of news on The Decks’ application and concerns about the Building Safety Fund itself have left residents worried they will still be charged tens of thousands of pounds to remove the cladding from their homes.

These concerns will have been exacerbated by comments from the building safety minister Lord Greenhalgh, who told a House of Commons committee on October 19 that leaseholders would not be protected from all costs of replacing dangerous cladding.

Julie Fraser, a Decks leaseholder and founder of the campaign group Liverpool Cladiators, said the fund would not be enough to cover the thousands of buildings that had applied for assistance so far.

More worryingly, she said, it is not clear whether The Decks application is complete, or even if the buildings are tall enough to be eligible.

She said: “We have no idea, no indication. We did have a conversation with someone from the ministry, he wouldn’t give any details of any specific buildings, but he did say so many of the registrations were just not fit for purpose, there was so much information missing.”

Figures from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government show almost two-thirds of applications did not include enough information for the government to determine whether they were eligible for the fund.

It is not known whether The Decks’ application is one of these, but a spokesperson for Scanlans said: “An application to the Building Safety Fund was submitted on day one of the process.  “We have not yet received a response to whether The Decks has been accepted, but we are ready to deal with any queries regarding the construction of the development and works required. Full quotations should be available by December, which is in line with the requirements of the BSF.”

‘No further forward’ In the meantime, Scanlans has undertaken some work to make the building safer, installing the new fire alarms.  The new system means the two-man “waking watch” patrols, funded by Halton Council at a cost of around £200,000, could be ended but the alarms have not been without problems.

Residents said they were concerned that the alarms kept displaying faults and in one case contractors had drilled through a water pipe while installing the new system.

The Scanlans spokesperson said the new system had been signed off by the fire brigade and the “faults” were just indications that sensor batteries needed replacing.

They said: “The fire alarm system has been fully fitted and is in operation. The system has been approved by Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service and, as a result, the development no longer has to fund a waking watch.

“Unfortunately, when the alarm system was being installed, an internal pipe was damaged. We are liaising with the contractor to ensure this is repaired and made good at the contractor’s expense.

“We acknowledge that the installation of the alarm system has been a difficult process, as access into each apartment has been necessary during the pandemic to fit more than 1,000 sensors.”

But Julie Fraser was not convinced. She said: “We have got no confidence in those alarms whatsoever.

“It’s a daily worry, and the next thing is we are going to face a bill for the cladding if we are not accepted for the fund.

“A year on, we are no further forward.”