Families across the UK have found themselves unable to move home after planning permissions submitted to Hackney Council were lost due to the cyberattack last month.
Alice Thomas lives with her husband and 13 month-old toddler in a small high-rise flat in London Fields. They can’t move until the building’s cladding is removed under new safety measures imposed after the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.
Planning permission had been approved for the cladding to be removed before Christmas but has now been lost.
Thomas said, “I’ve got a baby and I’m having to entertain him in our small flat as well as I can. He’s starting to walk so it’s hard. We need more space. Our plan was always to move [around] this sort of time and now we can’t.”
According to Hackney Council, planning permissions submitted before 1st October cannot be processed and, in many cases, applications will need to be resubmitted through a new system.
Thomas said that the cladding “takes 12 weeks to be taken off” and to process the new planning permissions “can take eight weeks. So now we are almost back to square one.
“We can’t plan our future, we can’t sell our flat, we can’t start looking at other houses. It means that we can’t take advantage of the government stamp duty scheme. So we miss out.”
Jon Davies, who lives in Hertfordshire, had planned to move house last month, with the seller of his new house buying a place in Devon. He sold his current home to a couple in Hackney, who then sold their own flat to another Hackney resident. But, since the cyber attack interfered with the council’s ability to carry out land searches, the property chain has been disrupted and none of them have been able to move.
Davies told Hackney Post: “I never planned that this year I’d be refreshing Hackney Council’s website every day but that’s the way it’s been.”
In a statement, Hackney Council said: “We remain unable to process land searches for residents buying property, and this service is unlikely to be fully available before the end of the stamp duty holiday in March 2021.”
A spokesperson from the council told Hackney Post, “We are aware of the difficulty the cyber attack is having on purchasing a home right now and are doing everything we can towards a speedy recovery to all affected services.”
