Buying a brand-new home should be a pleasurable experience. New appliances, woodwork, windows, roofs, doors and paint should all add up to at least a few years of repair- and maintenance-free living. But the reality has been very different for residents of a new Westbury Homes development in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset.
Angie and Jamie Skuse moved into their new £179,000 four-bed home in Dunedin Way on the St Georges development with their three children in November 2002 (paying almost 10% more than the Land Registry’s average price of £163,351 for a detached house in the area).
“While the house was being built we mentioned that the front wall seemed uneven but were told that everything would be fine by the time we moved in,” says Angie, 34. It wasn’t. “There were two different colours of mortar and the gaps between bricks varied from 10mm to 25mm,” says Jamie, 39. The Westbury representative pointed out some problems in the kitchen, but, adds Angie: “She insisted that these, together with other ‘snag’ items, would be sorted out.”
“It seemed as if the kitchen simply wasn’t finished,” says Jamie, a local businessman. “The floor was uneven, so the flooring we’d ordered couldn’t be fitted correctly. There was a drawer sticking out and the oven and hob were wired and fitted badly. If they had fixed these things properly it would be one thing, but they would bodge them and have to come back again.”
It wasn’t just the kitchen that worried the Skuses; raised carpet tacks meant the children’s feet were regularly spiked, and their five-year-old son fell down the stairs because of the loose stair carpet.
Noel Smith, a first-time buyer, spent £100,000 on his two-bedroom terrace home and moved in 11 months ago. “There was a whole list of unfinished jobs and broken items,” he says. “You expect some small things to need fixing but not the amount I had. Westbury were very difficult to get hold of. I’d bought new so I wouldn’t have any hassle with repairs, as I work long hours.”
The first thing Ricky Freeman found when he moved into his £140,000 home was that a boundary wall had been built in the wrong place. “It took a lot of effort to get Westbury to acknowledge there was a problem. Now they refuse to move the wall but are offering me £1,000 compensation,” says Ricky, 36. “The point is that when I come to sell, the plans will be wrong, so no amount of compensation is going to fix that.”
“Snag” items are supposed to be identified within seven days of moving in, with the builder allowed a further 10 days to fix them. “Little were we to know that 18 months on, we still wouldn’t have the snag list signed off,” says Angie Skuse. The couple became so frustrated that they mentioned contacting their local paper. “That got them moving. Very quickly our house was swarming with builders taking up floorboards, moving appliances — you name it. The mess was unbelievable. They even managed to damage appliances while doing the work.”
At this point the Skuses were offered £2,000 compensation, which they refused as insufficient. They then found out that the mortgage company had not carried out a final inspection of the house. “We decided to get an independent surveyor; he walked around the house unable to disguise his shock,” recalls Angie. The surveyor, Paul Sheldon, estimated it would take at least £15,000 to £20,000 to bring the house up to National House-Building Council standard.
“I was particularly concerned as there appeared to be a significant lack of fixings on the roof tiles, specifically where the pitch is 55 degrees. There were also poorly formed valley gutters, plus the defective brickwork and many other shortcomings in the way the house had been built, all of which added up to a substandard property.”
On seeing the report, Westbury conceded that work was needed and erected scaffolding to remove the outer layer of bricks from the front elevation and retile the roof. “We were expected to stay in the house during this work — no daylight, no ventilation and, with the outer skin removed, no warmth offered by the cavity wall insulation,” says Angie.
It then emerged that the Skuses weren’t the only residents with roof problems. In March, an investigation by the BBC’s Watchdog programme found that none of the roofs it examined had been secured — including the Skuses’. “We were shocked,” says Angie. “As far as we were concerned, Westbury had fixed our roof.”
Neighbours Lorraine and Kevin Durkin are worried about the loose roof on their £179,950 home. “We have open land in front of us and the wind does get up,” says Lorraine, 50. “Westbury have now started work on the roofs but there’s no real sense of urgency.” All the residents have been offered £150 for the inconvenience of having scaffolding erected.
Shaun Gray and his girlfriend Ellie Frake, both 35, spent £219,950 on a four-bedroom house but large cracks have appeared in it, the biggest of which Westbury is refusing to investigate.
Noel Smith has finally got the firm to admit that his home’s central heating was installed incorrectly. “I now await their return to replace the piping, which means ripping up the carpets and hacking out some walls. It will be a mess and I don’t trust them to do a good job,” says Smith.
Westbury Homes’ reported operating profit to February 2004 was £138m, with managing director Nigel Fee receiving a bonus of £187,000 — more than the cost of most houses in the development. “It makes our blood boil,” says Angie Skuse. “It is a living hell in this house as it seems to take three attempts to get anything right — we’ve had three kitchens, including three ovens, three lots of brickwork and we now await our third roof.”
Ricky Freeman has also had three ovens. “Each time they put in an oven it warps,” he says. “Westbury blame Hotpoint but can all their ovens be faulty? I think not. If only Westbury would accept their responsibility, put forward a realistic plan to correct all the problems and offer some decent compensation.”
David Smith, divisional chairman for Westbury Homes, last week apologised for the inconvenience. “The nature of new build is such that there are occasions… when our usual high standards on product quality are not met. Where Westbury is at fault we make every effort to resolve issues as quickly as possible.” He added: “We were aware of the build quality issues on one home but we were not aware that the problem may extend to other properties. Every new home is checked by independent inspectors prior to occupation and we therefore would not have expected any problems to be widespread.”
Angie Skuse cannot understand how their house can have been subject to an independent inspection, since it was supposed to have taken place the day they moved in and they saw no one. Noel Smith is equally unmoved: “I have written many, many letters so to say they are not aware of problems is quite amazing.”
Despite the apology, Jamie Skuse is still angry: “We feel we’ve bought a factory second at full price and yet we’ve had to continue to pay out in terms of lost work time to get it brought up to standard. We’ll never get back the last 18 months with our children and as yet can’t see an end to the problems.”
Disaster list
Problems at the Westbury development include:
