Half a year earlier, in July 2023, Amanda had addressed peers in the House of Lords investigating the impact of the cladding problem on flat owners.
“It’s devastating. It’s just a quagmire. It’s just chaos,” she told them. “It’s so unjust. I had done nothing wrong and it’s destroyed my life already.”
The video of Amanda’s address to the Lords is now treasured by her mother, who’s speaking for the first time since the inquest’s verdict.
Glenda thinks Amanda, an office manager at a hedge fund in the City of London, started drinking to deal with the anxiety of having to face unaffordable bills to fix the cladding, running into the tens of thousands.
“I’m not ashamed for her for that because it was her way of coping. She used the term ‘seeking oblivion’.”
Amanda wrote countless letters to MPs, local authorities and other responsible bodies – but “always got the statutory response”, her mother continues.
“There are still over a million people in this situation and [MPs and civil servants] would write these platitudinous letters saying ‘oh we’re doing this, we’re doing that’.”
She doesn’t just see those as unhelpful – but as evidence that nobody really understood the scale of the problem and how seriously it was affecting people.
