Badly built new houses: an essay! (House Builders in general)

Member Name: rdobbie

Product:	House Builders in general
Date:	01/07/02 (5159 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No chain, Unspoilt interior, They look nice

Disadvantages: Many! (read the op)

This article is about the risks of buying a newly-built house. Occasionally I may veer into rant mode, but please forgive me on this occasion, as this is a wide-ranging article which contains consumer advice and a cry for help to our politicians. After all, I felt so strongly about this issue that I wrote a website about it (but more of that later).

In December 1998 I bought a newly-built three bedroomed house from Wilcon Homes on a new development in South Manchester. I was attracted by the convenient location and the obvious benefits of "chainbreaking" that come from buying a new house when you also have one to sell. Never did the quality of the house even enter my mind as a consideration. Naturally I assumed that Britain was a civilised and advanced country which only allowed buildings of the highest calibre to be erected. What a big mistake.

I will now attempt to summarise the major problems with my Wilcon Home over the last three and a half years. If you want to read about these experiences in greater detail, please visit my website where you will find the problems covered in much greater depth.

1. The radiator in the dining room continually leaked for the first six months. Wilcon unsuccessfully repaired it three times and the constant leaking water left my carpet mouldy.
2. The hot water pipes under the bedroom floorboards started leaking, causing water to leak through the lounge ceiling. I had to move all my furniture from upstairs while Wilcon took up the floorboards in all three bedrooms until they found the leak; after much argument Wilcon eventually agreed to do the redecorating work to the lounge ceiling and walls. Wilcon's attempts at this redecoration work were a disaster and I eventually did it myself.
3. The hot water pipe under my bath started leaking, causing water to leak through the kitchen ceiling. Wilcon refused to even inspect the problem. I took the bath out myself and located the pipe then rep
laced the connector which had not been installed properly; I also had to replaster and repaint the damaged kitchen ceiling, and re-tile the area around the bath, at my own expense.
4. In November 1999 my house was wrecked by a flood caused by the cowboy plumbing in my Wilcon Home. Without any warning the main cold water stoptap under the sink exploded, causing a massive torrent of cold water to spray out, drenching the entire kitchen within seconds. The entire ground floor of my house was swimming in 2 or 3 inches of water. There was irreparable damage to much of my furniture and belongings. Wilcon refused to admit any liability and refused to pay for any of the damage to my house. For four weeks, I was living with family over 60 miles away while the house dried out. An expert's report later showed that the stoptap had burst because the joint was held together with something resembling PVC wood adhesive, and had been like a "time bomb" waiting to explode.
5. The boiler in my kitchen started to leak water onto the wall below and onto two plug sockets and two main switches, causing the electricity to trip at the main circuit-breaker board. I got an electric shock because the circuits were incorrectly labelled on the circuit-breaker board, causing me to turn off the wrong circuit while I attempted to dry out the switches in the kitchen.
6. For all the residents living on my Wilcon development there has been nearly five years of life on pot-holed, unsurfaced roads with no drainage or street lighting. It is Wilcon's responsibility to do this work, yet they disappeared off site as soon as all the houses had been sold.
7. Forty-one houses on my development had faults with their heating system. Wilcon had shamelessly used incompetent, unqualified cowboys to fit the boilers, tanks and pipes in every house. It was left to each individual house owner to make a legal claim against Wilcon, which they defended every time.

In every instan
ce it was terribly difficult to get Wilcon Homes to carry out remedial work. Their "24 Hour Careline" is never answered when you phone up. Your letters are never answered. On the few occasions that Wilcon have inspected the problems, their standard of customer service has been appalling, with endless excuses and broken appointments, causing me to take needless time off work which is spent twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the contractors that never turn up. In one year alone I lost eleven days of my annual holiday entitlement because of Wilcon Homes.

The problems with my house had brought me misery, stress and enormous financial cost. At times I felt that my career and relationship were starting to suffer. I felt great anger towards Wilcon. Some months ago I decided it would be a good idea to publicly shame Wilcon Homes by creating a website about my experiences. I was able to register a beautifully apt domain name (www.wilcon-homes.com) and set about putting my nightmare into writing.

During the research that I did while creating my website, I found that two other people had made websites about their awful experiences with Wilcon Homes. One of these was John Bowley, who set up www.wronglybuilthouses.co.uk after his Wilcon Home literally began falling to pieces because the foundations were too shallow. He has gone to great lengths to publicise his cause, and his website has now achieved national fame. I also found consumer protest websites about Barratt, Wimpey, Redrow and Beazer Homes. Each contained woeful stories of badly constructed new houses which had brought misery to the unfortunate buyers.

On my website I included a feedback page, in the hope that I might get a few encouraging comments and bits of advice. I was staggered by the response. E-mails began flooding in, sometimes at the rate of 20 a week, from other Wilcon purchasers whose houses had become living nightmares. It soon became clear that Britain's problem with
badly-built new homes is threatening to reach crisis point.

Earlier this year I successfully sued Wilcon Homes for the cost of the repairs to my boiler, and for an additional sum to compensate me for having no heating or hot water for a long period of time.

Wilcon Homes tried and failed to have my website removed, and to impose a gagging order which would have prevented me from giving any media interviews. I'm pleased to say that my website is still going strong and has now attracted over 10,000 hits.

So what of the consumer protection? Surely we live in a well governed society with laws to protect us from this kind of thing?

Well, you'd be amazed.

At the moment Britain has no legislation to give basic rights to buyers of newly-built homes. You might be shocked to learn that when you buy a new home and hand over the money there's no legal obligation on the builder to sort out any problems you find when you move in. You have more rights as a consumer when you buy a radio from Dixons.

There is an organistation in existence called the National House-Building Council (NHBC) which gives a 10-year "warranty" to buyers of new homes, but this is a complete and utter sham. Unfortunately people are still being taken in by it. With its reassuring "tick" symbol, you would be forgiven for thinking that the NHBC logo is a meaningful promise of quality. But this logo gives you no legal rights, is not independently awarded, and does not guarantee that the builder's workmanship is subjected to any kind of quality control procedure. The NHBC does not exist to protect housebuyers - it exists to protect the builders by means of smokescreens and hinderances whenever a complaint is made.

The NHBC "warranty" is not a "warranty" by the normal definition of the word, but a scheme that extends the fobbing-off process already in place when you complain to your builder. You m
ust remember that the NHBC is a trade association set up and run by the main housebuilders purely to protect their own interests - it does not exist to protect customers' interests, despite its attempts to masquerade as a consumer rights organisation.

There is a also catalogue of evidence in existence which shows that Wilcon's policy is to ignore the NHBC's standards and recommendations on building new houses. The NHBC have pile upon pile of complaints about Wilcon Homes, backed up with evidence that Wilcon have used unqualified cowboy workers and ignored Building regulations. But the NHBC will never take any action against Wilcon. The NHBC are an integral part of the whole deceitful self-regulating industry.

Even the Chartered Institute of Building has heavily criticised the NHBC for trying to erode the already weak protection given to the housebuyer, by covering up instances of gross incompetence instead of punishing them. The NHBC is doing more harm than good to the consumer.

To make matters worse for buyers of new homes, local councils do not take action under the Building Act because most cases fall outside the ridiculous one year time limit (even though houses are rarely built and occupied within one year of the plans being approved).

Trading Standards will do nothing because of a strange anomaly in the law which means that houses are exempt from the Sale of Goods Act.

Can you believe that? Brand new houses... exempt from the Sale of Goods Act! The innocent customer has nothing to fall back on.

Wilcon, amongst others, are getting away with whatever they can in order to save costs and consequently make more profit. Every industry operates within the limits of its own legislation. Where profit is concerned, there is no such thing as goodwill or responsible business practice. A capitalist-driven production line is only kept in check by legal constraints.

Therefore, at the end of the day, w
e can only blame our politicians for failing to properly legislate the housebuilding industry. It's not rocket science - it has taken me just a few months to compile a shocking dossier on just one of the industry's main offenders, Wilcon Homes. I had no prior knowledge of the building industry and I worked on my website in my spare time, unpaid, purely because I think this scandal is ruining lives and needs to be brought into the public eye. Our MPs and civil servants are PAID vast amounts of OUR MONEY to do this kind of thing. They have secretaries, assistants, state of the art facilities, and every possible resource at their disposal. Yet they are tucked away in their Westminster offices, allowing this scandal to continue.

Eventually the legacy of crumbling modern houses will start to impact on the nation's worsening housing shortage. It will become apparent that Wilcon-built houses, and other such sandcastles, are not going to last more than a few decades until they require remedial work which is beyond their owner's financial means. And only then will the ineffective politicans decide, in retrospect, that we need a reformed Building Act.

But there can be no room for half measures. We need a robust piece of legislation without any loopholes for the crooks to exploit.

--- Every new house should be subject to a strict inspection by a fully independent public inspectorate.
--- It should be statutory for builders to repair all defects which occur within at least the first 15 years, or else buy the house back at current market value, and pay all associated legal and removals costs.
--- The builder should be responsible for the structure of the house for at least 25 years.
--- Builders would need to be licenced based upon stringent quality and competence tests.
--- There would be fines and criminal convictions for companies like Wilcon Homes who repeatedly and unashamedly use unqualified cowboy labourers to ins
tall plumbing and electrics.
--- The NHBC needs to be abolished. It is a corrupt, self-regulating private company run by the big building firms which misleads consumers into thinking they are buying quality when they are not.
--- It should be illegal for the builders to have any financial interest in the company carrying out the survey for the buyer.
--- It should also be illegal for the builder to profiteer from their own bad workmanship by taking commission from companies that sell "extended warranty" schemes on new houses, such as the racket operated by Wilcon and First Principle.

If a retailer sold you a rotten tin of baked beans, they would be liable for prosecution, a hefty fine and damaging headlines in the tabloid press. But when a builder sells a new house with shallow foundations, leaking water pipes and dangerous wrongly-labelled electrical circuits, they face no action. Everyone shrugs their shoulders and says "c'est la vie". The builders turn their back and laugh all the way to the bank.

The fat cat directors of building companies are part of that old boys' club, along with civil servants, surveyors and their pals in the legal industry. They all look out for each other. A certain director of a certain building company even boasted to me that I would never win my court case because he was "friends with a few judges" and "knew every trick".

Have no doubt that all these shyster company directors, crooked surveyors and useless politicans will disappear into the sunset on enormous retirement packages, while hundreds, if not thousands of people on low incomes are stuck with crumbling houses that were never fit to be sold.

In the meantime, my advice is do not, under any circumstances, buy a Wilcon Home. It will probably give you more problems than a well maintained 100 year old house. Don't expect that just because it's new that it's all going to be fine
- that was my mistake.

If you want to buy a newly-built house from another builder, be very careful and do your research first into that builder's track record.

Thank you for reading this very long opinion, and don't have nightmares.

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