Zoe Conway and
James Stewart
BBC
Bushra Rashid from Fishwick says that 2013 insulation work has damaged her health and her property
Homeowners who say that botched insulation under government schemes left them living in mouldy conditions are calling for an investigation into the problem to be widened.
One woman has told the BBC that damage from works to her home in 2013 has left her bedroom too damp to sleep in, and may be causing her breathing difficulties.
Around 280,000 properties in Britain were offered free insulation – either external wall or other types of solid wall – under government schemes between 2013 and 2025. Billions of pounds of public money was spent on the projects.
Earlier this month, the government said that 92% of external wall insulation put in place under these schemes over the last three years has at least one major issue.
The government did not respond to a question from the BBC on why it was not reviewing all work carried out before 2022, but said it was “fixing the broken system by introducing comprehensive reforms”.
Imran Hussain, the Labour MP for Bradford East, has called on the government to widen its investigation to include all insulation fitted under these schemes.
“Families who tried to do the right thing to make their homes warmer and greener have been left paying the price for failure and negligence,” he says.
The BBC has been told that serious problems were known to the then-Conservative government as long as a decade ago.
Dampness has caused lasting problems to Bushra Rashid’s house
One 2013 scheme in Preston, Lancashire, quickly became a byword for failure, according to Andrej Miller of the fuel poverty charity National Energy Action (NEA). He worked in the government’s climate and energy teams for 18 years as a civil servant and says it was seen as “the ultimate project gone wrong”.
Under the scheme, 350 homes in the town’s Fishwick area were fitted with external wall insulation.
Bushra Rashid lives in one of these properties. She says she has been living with damp and mould for years. The 72-year-old has told the BBC she can’t sleep in her own bedroom, where the damp plaster is crumbling, and she fears it’s affected her health.
Bushra and her husband, Abdul, bought their home in the early 1970s
Bushra and her husband, Abdul, bought their home in the early 1970s. In 2013, insulation boards were fixed to the exterior brickwork of the Victorian homes and render applied with the purpose of making it waterproof.
The idea behind many of the government schemes was to cut carbon emissions by getting energy companies to install energy-saving measures, including insulation, on people’s homes. The schemes were targeted at low-income households and paid for via the “green levy” on energy bills.
However, “bad design and bad workmanship” on the Fishwick project meant that rainwater got trapped behind the insulation and penetrated walls in houses such as the Rashids’, according to building surveyor David Walter.
Abdul Rashid, who was a bus driver, died from Parkinson’s disease four years ago. His son, Atif, says that despite his illness, his father knew the house was being destroyed by the botched installation.
“He spent time crying because he felt helpless,” says Atif. He adds that his father ”felt betrayed” and had ”nowhere to go” to get help.
The Fishwick project had not even been completed before Preston City Council – which had encouraged residents to sign up for the insulation – started receiving complaints about the quality of the work.
“Horrifying” stories about poor workmanship, mushrooms growing on walls and light fittings being turned into “water features”, were being reported back to Andrea Howe, the council’s energy officer at the time.
The installer went bust soon after the project finished, and any guarantees were considered worthless because the insulation wasn’t fitted properly.
Ms Howe says she took her concerns to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, and showed photographs of the damaged homes to officials. In the winter of 2015, a group of civil servants were taken on a tour of Fishwick’s homes.
She recalls what one official told her he had seen: ”He went into one house and in the small child’s bedroom there was a sheet kind of pinned all around the ceiling because the ceiling was falling down – it was that wet.”
Ms Howe says he told her he was heartbroken: ”He said he had never seen anything like it.”
The problems at Fishwick highlight a “systemic issue in how government works” because ministers and officials have never been around long enough to find a solution, says Miller.
In 2018, the then-minister for energy and clean growth, Claire Perry, told MPs that 62 homes had received repairs following enforcement action by Ofgem.
NEA later completed repairs on a further 45 homes in Fishwick, at an average cost of £70,000 per property. The charity estimates it could cost up to £22m to fully rectify problems in that area, but it has run out of funding to carry out further work.
In 2019, a government-commissioned report estimated there was failure on all 350 properties in the Fishwick scheme, caused by poor design, assessment, ventilation and workmanship. It also suggested that many of the properties were unsuitable for the insulation in the first place. But the government never published the report or shared it with Fishwick residents.
Tasneem Hussain had external wall insulation installed on her home in Fishwick at about the same time as the Rashid family. She says she has been forced to redecorate more than 20 times over the last decade because of damp in her home, caused by the insulation.
She is also concerned about what effect the conditions could be having on her 14-year-old son, Mohammed, who has disabilities.
“He’s prone to infections, and he had pneumonia a few months ago. I feel this is not going to be helping him,” says Tasneem.
She says she does not know where to go or how to get help for her family’s situation: “It needs to be sorted.”
Preston City Council told the BBC the external wall insulation scheme in Fishwick was a “significant failure”, but the council “did not directly deliver, oversee or have any project management oversight of the contractors and the work they completed”.
It added: “It is hugely regrettable that neither the original installers nor indeed the government have provided the level of support so obviously required when the scale of failed external wall insulation became apparent.”
It’s unclear how many other schemes involving this type of insulation have gone wrong.
The National Audit Office’s recent report suggests the government doesn’t have an accurate picture of failure rates in earlier schemes.
It says of one scheme, ECO3, which ran from 2018 to 2022, ”we do not know how many measures were audited for quality compliance”.
Dr Peter Rickaby, an energy expert who contributed to an independent review of the sector published in 2016, said problems with external wall insulation can take up to 10 years before they appear as damp on people’s homes.
Industry insiders have told the BBC that Fishwick is now regarded as an object lesson in how not to run an installation project.
However, similar problems have arisen in later government insulation schemes.
In February, BBC News reported on a scheme in County Durham, which was carried out in 2021.
Jean Liddle, 82, was among a number of Chilton residents who had external wall insulation fitted on her home. The work was organised by her local council, and paid for by central government.
“We were more or less pushed into it,” Jean told the BBC.
Jean Liddle says she was “more or less pushed” into accepting insulation
She said that damp and mould had been spreading in her home since the insulation was installed. A survey report commissioned by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero highlighted what it called an ”immediate risk to the fabric of the building and health of the occupant”.
It said Jean should not be living in the property in its ”current condition” and that substantial work would be required before it would be safe to live there.
The primary cause of the damp in Jean’s home is believed to be a damaged drainage pipe. The subcontractor disputes that the damage was caused when the insulation was fitted.
The report was given to the council, but its warning about the danger to Jean’s health was not shared with her. She eventually found out via a freedom of information request.
Some repair work has now been carried out on Jean’s home, organised by the council and the subcontractor, but building surveyor David Walter believes it’s still not safe for her to be living there, because of the presence of “dampness and mould and powder and dust”.
Durham County Council said it was ”working with residents and the subcontractor to address any outstanding issues” and gave ”sincere apologies for any distress caused”.
It added that conflicting findings from different surveys had complicated attempts to rectify the reported faults, and gave ”sincere apologies for any distress caused’
Jean accuses the council and the government of showing a disregard for her welfare: “I’m just nothing to them. I’m a number,” she told the BBC.
In a statement, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that the residents of Fishwick and Chilton had been ”let down by poor installation”.
It added that it was introducing comprehensive reforms, and in future, in cases “where rare things go wrong”, there would be clear lines of accountability, and a guarantee to get any problems fixed quickly.
‘I think people have to be held to account,’ says Bushra’s son Atif
Meanwhile in Fishwick, Atif says he is disgusted by the behaviour shown by successive governments to his parents.
“I think people have to be held to account,” he says. “Whether it’s the government, the energy firms, their local suppliers, the councils… responsibility has to sit somewhere, and it shouldn’t be the homeowners.”
