‘Botched insulation means mushrooms grow on my walls’

Mrs Khatun is 84 and recently had a stroke. Not far from where she sits, large growths of dry rot fungus are feeding off the floorboards.

“Worry, worry,’’ she says as she points to the black mould that is growing on her sitting room wall.

In November 2022, Mrs Khatun had her house insulated under a government scheme known as ECO 4. It is designed to help low-income households make their homes warmer and cut their energy bills. Insulation boards are fixed to the exterior brickwork of a house and then coated in render.

More than three million homes in the UK have had insulation fitted under government ECO schemes, which are paid for by the energy companies, with the cost passed on to all consumers through their energy bills.

The BBC revealed earlier this year that hundreds of thousands of these homes could have insulation that wasn’t installed to the required standard.

Within months of Mrs Khatun getting her insulation fitted, it became clear that this was the case in her house. A surveyor’s report shows how rainwater penetrated the house leading to the damp, mould and dry rot.

Mrs Khatun’s son, Lukman Ashraf, says he doesn’t feel like there’s any guarantee the companies involved will cover the costs of repairs.

“We’ve been dealing with this for nearly a year whilst the situation has been getting progressively worse and the repair costs are going up.

“We just want to wake up from this nightmare and get our lives back.”