‘It consumed her’: the dream flat that cost Amanda her life

Amanda Walker’s voice trembled. Her face was gaunt. As she spoke to the House of Lords it was clear that the dream home she had bought a few years earlier was now the source of immense distress. It had been caught up in the cladding scandal. It was a fire risk, unsalable, and had burdened her with a “black chasm” of unlimited costs for ever.

“What I’ve had,” she told peers last July, “and what’s been difficult — an understatement — is the threat, this sword of Damocles, over my head for three long years. Tomorrow, tomorrow, get ready tomorrow …”
The worry “consumed” her life. Six months later, Amanda’s sister and her mother Glenda found her dead in bed in the immaculate one-bedroom flat. A post-mortem examination detected sleeping tablets, antidepressants, powerful painkillers and alcohol in her blood. She was 51.

The family wants to tell Amanda’s story for the first time, to carry on her fight to free the millions of people still trapped in the cladding scandal — and fix a law that is failing to protect many like her.

Read this story for free: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/it-consumed-her-the-dream-flat-that-cost-amanda-her-life-m3zgzmx5g