[WillowTheWhisp]

Originally Posted by Bonnyboy

Fair point Neil, the home owners should have insurance, some may not.

Any mortgages outstanding on the properties by law should have insurance cover.

And they will have - and there will have been no cause to claim until the council has come along to do these improvements and done surveys and found there are problems. When did the problems arise? Who knows, but when a mortgage is granted they do surveys and if the houses had been unstable then they would never have got a mortgage, or insurance. So presumably something has happened in the meanwhile. Maybe something underground has shifted. 20 years ago we looked at a house on Countess Street and had a survey done and it came out that there was subsidence so we walked away from it. Subsidence isn't down to original shoddy building. It can be caused by erosion underground or collapsing mines or goodness knows what.

£130k per house? Their market value will be less than that. How much will the residents get if the houses are compulsorarily demolished? Enough to buy a new house? Not if 'Project Phoenix' is anything to go by.

HBC has done a lot to improve housing standards in the area under the grant scheme because there was and still is a lot of substandard housing. When it has been done it makes the whole area look a lot better and puts up the value all round. They came up Ormerod Street doing batches, but never got round the corner to us.