the situation in ukraine, the former president has told the bbc that everyone now understands that global security is at stake. he said the world needed to show president putin that it was strong and united. he president putin that it was strong and united.- strong and united. he is absolutely _ strong and united. he is absolutely serious. - strong and united. he is absolutely serious. the | absolutely serious. the understanding of the world is different because everybody in the world understands this is the danger for ukraine. now no—one has an illusion that this is the danger for the european and global security. it can, at the same time, attack the baltic states, attack the baltic states, attack poland, using the ukraine as an instrument for blackmailing the whole world, and with this situation, everybody understands that in western, in ukrainian security, they invest to their own security. and i have one proposal for all the viewers and listeners of bbc. to all the leaders — don't be afraid to surprise putin. surprise by our unity, surprise by our strength. and putin now isjust simply raising the stakes. he is blackmailing the world, and with this situation, definitely, united and strong ukraine is absolutely the right answer to putin. and if you ask me what now ukraine needs from the west — point number one is that we need to increase the defensive capabilities of ukraine. and this is, we should make russia weaker — weaker by introducing sanctions, weaker by presenting the sanctions if he makes a decision to continuation of aggression. we should present to ukraine a membership action plan because that is the right answer for the blackmail of putin, not only to ukraine, but for the whole world. that was a form ukrainian president speaking to bbc. now, sarah corker investigates britain's dangerous buildings. who should pay to fix britain's dangerous buildings? it's 4.5 years since the grenfell tragedy. yet more than 500,000 people are still living in flats wrapped in flammable materials. from london to leeds, manchester to merseyside, many homes are unsafe and unsellable. what work needs doing on the building? what needs to be replaced? so, if you look at all the timber cladding that you see, that all has to come down. those who can least afford it are facing life—changing bills. i'm on universal credit. every penny literally counts. we're still facing high, huge, out—of—this—universe type of bills. there are warnings this is becoming a mental health crisis too. it's a financial strain that has kind of forced me to take medication for my mental health just to keep afloat. safety checks have exposed the failure of building regulations over decades. we were having meetings with government in 2009, 2010 with our concerns about the quality issues on building sites. pressure is now mounting from the conservative backbenches. if we don't want another grenfell, if we want buildings to be safe, leaseholders cannot be forced to pay. this is britain's building safety crisis. but who is to blame? so this is the children's bedroom. they share a room. as you can see, it's quite cramped. a lot of stuff is in here. in south london, single mum emma has outgrown her one—bed flat. this is the living room and this doubles as your bedroom and the sofa. yeah, in the evening, it's like changing rooms, and in here is my bed. it was 12 months ago when we first met. back then, emma had just been told her block was so unsafe it needed round—the—clock fire wardens. i'm angry. i'm actually furious at it. this is ruining people's lives. it's not our fault. we didn't buy these properties thinking that there was something wrong with them. a year on, and they have had a fire alarm installed, but it's still unclear what financial help leaseholders will get to remove the cladding or fix the other fire safety faults. when you moved in, this was all brand—new, wasn't it? brand spanking new. so i'm assuming it passed all the surveys that were done. i was walking into a perfectly brand—new home. what colour was the cake? chocolate cake!— emma is out of work and on universal credit. she bought using an affordable housing scheme ten years ago. yet her share of the bill to fix the building could be up to £30,000. how has the way you feel about your home changed through all of this? my mum died when i was 19, so the deposit for my flat, essentially, was inheritance. i'm only here because i lost my mum. i've made good use of that inheritance, especially at a young age. i think everyone was quite shocked that i actually was quite sensible and thought i'm actually going to invest it and do something for my life and for my future. fast forward to now, ifeel like it's probably been the worst thing that i've ever done is sign on the dotted line. i'm stuck with something that potentially might ruin me. it's hard to even think about it all because it's just too much, too heartbreaking. concerns over building safety were triggered by the grenfell tower fire in 2017. 72 people died. an inquiry found the type of cladding used, known as acm, was the primary cause of the fire's rapid spread. something wasn't right and i think you knew too. since then, the cladding crisis has only escalated. there have been a wave of demonstrations. applause this is a scandal that has been 30 years in the making. safety checks on other tower blocks after the grenfell tower fire found notjust problems with cladding, but many other fire safety defects too. so, flammable balconies, missing fire breaks, defective insulation. and the question at the heart of this issue is — who's to blame for those failures? who should pay to fix them? flat owners have come from across the uk to protest in westminster. who has the money in your block? anyone? nobody, nobody. i know of one guy, certainly, who will be going bankrupt. i've lost £75,000 of my money, really. if we're looking at £30,000 to £40,000 from remediation, that's half the value of my apartment! how is it impacting on kind of your health and your well being and how you feel every day? most mornings, i get up and i'm sick. i don't eat. i don't sleep. i've advised my son, don't bother buying. he's saving up to get a mortgage and i've told him, don't bother. it's not worth it. more conservative mps are openly criticising their own government. we are going to get a resolution to this one way or the other. thank you. applause he has supported us all along. these — he has supported us all along. these log _ he has supported us all along. these log into the stage. —— please welcome him to the stage. the mp for stevenage has been a thorn in the side of his own party. if we don't want another grenfell, if we want buildings to be safe, leaseholders cannot be forced to pay. i'm standing up for not only the leaseholders in my constituency, but the leaseholders up and down the country, the millions of people who are trapped. and i don't want to live in a society where we write off millions of people. the government has announced a £5 billion fund to remove dangerous cladding on the highest risk blocks. that's above 18 metres. a 4% cladding tax on developers with profits higher than £25 million will help to pay for it, and the housing select committee estimates this is at least a £15 billion problem, and that's just to remove cladding. living with all of this has been described as an ongoing trauma. ijust, you know, work so hard, constantly working to provide food for my child, working to provide a roof for my child. and i thought that that could just go away in an instant because i'd already seen people become bankrupt because of the situation. sophie bought this two—bed flat in chelmsford just weeks before her son, reuben, was born, but their world came crashing down. which part of the building is the problem? so, behind you, you can see the acm panels. so, this stuff here, basically. that's the same type of cladding as grenfell. sophie's left to find out how much it may cost to remove, and that's taking its toll on her mental health. a crippling depression where you can't get up. just couldn't see the point in anything, had a really bleak outlook on life. i've been able to pick myself up from the worst of it, but since then, i've had such bad issues of my anxiety. some days i feel like i can't leave the house, and i have like physical problems leaving the house because i feel so sick. sophie's not alone in her struggles. i've come to sheffield to find out more about how housing and health are interlinked. new research carried out by academics here and shared exclusively with the bbc found that the building safety crisis is having a severe impact on the mental health of some leaseholders. it was a kind of really catastrophic sort of experience for some people, and that's notjust something that exists today, but it's something that kind of goes on in the future as well. and in the worst—case scenarios, several people spoke about points of crisis that they had come to through their experience of building safety problems, and this resulted in them needing to get immediate help from a gp. so things like just feeling that they couldn't go on, that they were trapped and that they couldn't see a way out of this crisis was leading to feelings of suicide and self—harm. if we don't see a change in policy, if we don't see government action, actually, you know, where is this going to end? psychologists have echoed those concerns. professor cary cooper is a leading stress expert. in life, generally, uncertainty and lack of control are the two leading causes of stress, and these people have it in tonnes. living in conditions like that for long periods of time, what impact does that have on mental health? number one, you know that you're going to have to cough up some money. number two, you don't know how much. and it could be quite substantial. so the worries about that on top of all the other worries, i think, is going to be quite a significant issue. these people really do need support. they probably will need counselling support. so, your whole life is on hold until this can be sorted out. yeah. how long do you think it could be until you can move on from this property? i think i'm being optimistic by thinking i'll be able to move in ten years. back in chelmsford, sophie went to her gp for help and has been prescribed anti—anxiety medication. the doctor was so shocked by her situation, he wrote to her local mp, asking her to raise the issues in parliament. sophie's focus is now on her son, who was recently diagnosed with autism. the family is desperate to move somewhere bigger that meets his needs. because of his needs, he has sensory issues, it would be such a big help for him to have a sensory room. it'd be such a big help for his mental well being, to have a garden, because it's not something we can provide him with here. he needs somewhere different to go. he needs an outlet. are you going to hold my hand? i'm the very tip of the iceberg in the sense that i think i'm one of the lucky ones and that i'm one of the lucky ones that has support around me. my love for my son has enabled me to drag myself up from the depths of despair, to go reach out, to get help, to keep myself in check. this ongoing crisis is now starting to paralyse entire sections of the property market, and i'm on my way to hampshire to meet one woman who believes her block didn't meet regulations at the time it was built. we moved in about seven years ago. for your retirement? that's right, yeah. and hasn't been plain sailing. what's the problem? if we look upon this one... the problem is all of the cladding here, the grey cladding. this is crown heights in basingstoke, built in 2003, marketed as modern city living outside of the capital. she planned a happy retirement here. so this move was to make your life easier as you got older. yes. what has the reality been? unfortunately, financially and mentally, it's ruining us. a cladding inspection last year revealed safety failures within the walls of this 14—storey block, including combustible material and missing fire barriers. jean and husband terry are living with the consequences of those issues. service charges and insurance costs are soaring. i spend my life jogging along behind you, don't i, my darling? i had to leave myjob to care for my husband, and, therefore, we're surviving on benefits. we are flat broke. you know, we can't afford this. and, therefore, the final years of his life are lived on benefits, surviving rather than being able to live as we would have hoped. when the cladding system was installed here, it should have included fire barriers in the walls on every floor above two storeys. tests by surveyors at least three locations found none. typically, flats should have barriers inside the spaces between cladding and the outside walls and between each floor, as well as fire stops in the internal walls. these protections help to reduce the spread of smoke and flames in the event of a fire. developers usually argue that builders were compliant at the time, and they shouldn't have to pay for work done because rules have been tightened since grenfell. but the bbc has seen a report by surveyors which concluded that some elements of construction did not appear to have complied with building regulations at the time. how did you feel when you first read that report? i was just so shocked. i definitely feel let down by a whole raft of professionals, we rely on them. and i'm not an expert on building. that's why we have a building control inspector. the developer told us that crown heights was signed off by an approved inspector as meeting the requirements of building regulations at the time of construction. contractors involved said the development was built in line with regulations, and the national house building council, in charge of building control at crown heights, told us the primary responsibility for achieving compliance with building regulations rests with the builder. graham has worked in the construction sector for four decades. he says building regulations have shrunk from 300 pages to 2a pages over the years and can be ambiguous. i think anybody living in a building in which there is not enough restriction for fire spread is living in a building that doesn't comply with building regulations. and in my view, there's no way that the leaseholders or the residents should be responsible for paying for that remediation. to what extent has this crisis been 20, 30 years in the making? i think it goes back into the �*70s and the �*80s, actually in terms of the whole deregulation bandwagon. we were having meetings with government in 2009, 2010 with our concerns about the quality issues on building sites. so it's been there for a very long time. rewind to 1984. this is a bbc documentary called the great british housing disaster. structural engineers warned of the possible fire risk from cladding even back then. i think it's absolutely essential that anything that is being placed on or around existing blocks should be considered very carefully in relation to a serious fire. do you think that there are now systems being used which represent a fire risk? frankly, yes. would you be prepared to name them? no. and warnings from housing managers about poor standards and who should pay to fix the faults echo those from today's crisis. those experts built these buildings that have now been shown to warrant £33 million worth of repairs. that's £33 million worth of a professional mistake, and the cost of that has to be met because the builder went bankrupt and the professionals responsible can't be nailed for it. the cost of that has to be found by ratepayers and rent payers. industry experts have warned that the construction workforce has become used to marking its own homework. we've lost the independent quality checks on construction sites that were always part and parcel of the process. so, for example, architects and engineers who used to go on site regularly to supervise the work, they rarely go on site now. so do you think the system is broken then? i think the system was broken in 2017. i think we're gradually fixing it up now. it's a massive job, but what i do feel is that we've gone overboard and some buildings are being claimed to be unsafe, where actually the risk is very, very low and is an acceptable level of risk. in the autumn, michael gove replaced robertjenrick as housing secretary and there was a change of tone from government. in his first appearance before the housing committee in november, mr gove questioned why leaseholders should have to pay at all. we also have a responsibility to relieve some of the obligations that are being faced by leaseholders at the moment, who are innocent parties in this and who are being in many circumstances, asked to pay disproportionate sums. and when asked who was responsible for the problems in the first place, mr gove said while local and central government had a role, he also hit out at developers. ok, the sheriff. 0r sheriffs might not have been on the ball, but the cowboys were behaving like cowboys in an unregulated way. tough words, but the campaigners want that backed up with action. the protests have continued, the political pressure for a solution increasing, and the financial situation for many is already critical. fast forward to january 2022 and a significant shift in policy. i know called the secretary of state for levelling up housing new communities. a £4 billion scheme will soon help those living in buildings between 11 and 18 metres. they've previously missed out on grants, and michael gove warned developers would have to pick up the bill. to those who mis—sold dangerous products like cladding or insulation, to those who cut corners to save cash as they developed or refurbished people's homes, and to those who sought to profiteer from the consequences of the grenfell tragedy. we are coming for you. but labour said the funding covered cladding only and ignored the wider safety problems found on thousands of buildings. he'll also know that there's a gaping hole in what he's proposed. a significant number of buildings have both cladding and non—cladding defects, and leaseholders in them face ruinous costs to fix things like missing fire breaks and defective compartmentalization. mr speaker, you cannot make a building half safe. the government says it expects developers and builders to pay for cladding costs, and if they refuse, well, they face the threat of tax rises. new laws or being barred from government schemes like help to buy. so the warning from ministers is cough up, do the right thing or there will be commercial consequences. but developers often argue they met building regulations at the time and so shouldn't have to cover these costs. and the largest home builders say they've already allocated money to fix issues on some high rise blocks. whatever proposals come forward have to be proportionate, and that means looking notjust at the home builders, but beyond the home builders at other parties who've been involved in the process, in particular the suppliers of the materials, which turned out not to be fit for purpose as far as we can understand. back in london, emma fears she may still face unaffordable costs. she bought this flat through an affordable housing scheme. she only owns a 50% share, but terms of the lease means she's liable for 100% of the work that isn't covered by the government's new scheme. what has the reality of shared ownership being for you? i don't think shared ownership is fit for purpose. it's to help people like me who couldn't afford to get a full mortgage on a property. so i was able to own half of it and pay rent on the other. it's really done me a disservice. housing experts say the cladding crisis has exposed the flaws in the shared ownership model and want it reformed. i think the scheme does have a sort of fundamental unfairness. there are potential liabilities, which are so great that people are potentially going to go bankrupt or lose their homes. any scheme which purports to be an affordable housing and which can leave people in that situation is not doing itsjob. emma's housing association told us: in essex, there's better news. the developer of sophie's block has agreed to cover the cost of removing and replacing the dangerous cladding. a huge relief for those living here. in hampshire, jean says they've been told crown heights is eligible for government funding to pay for the work needed, but there have been some delays in the money being released and they don't know if it'll cover everything. it's on my mind a lot. i find it difficult to sleep, i'm taking medication for stress. it is very difficult. money isn't the same as life, i'm much more worried about the fire safety than i am about the money. a generation of homeowners face financial ruin through no fault of their own. 0rdinary people have been forced to become protesters, determined to ramp up the pressure on government, developers and building owners to take greater responsibility for their part in this crisis. hello there. we've certainly seen some windy weather across more northern parts of the uk into the night. the winds will continue to ease down during the day on thursday. it'll still be breezy, mind you, and there should be more sunshine more widely. the strongest winds have been near that area of low pressure that's moving away from the northern isles. this weather front is continuing southwards. it's continuing to weaken, and that means the rain and drizzle on it is becoming very light and patchy. and this is the picture towards the end of the night. further north across the uk, clearer skies are continuing to follow with some more of those showers, mainly in the north of scotland, but it should be a frost—free start to thursday. but we start quite cloudy across much of wales, the midlands, and southern england. some light and patchy rain and drizzle mainly in the west. that'll move southwards, soon cheering up in wales in the midlands. the cloud takes all morning to move away from southern england, heading out into the channel. then sunshine follows widely, a few more of these showers continuing mainly across northern and western scotland. but not a cold day despite the north—westerly wind, temperatures double figures for most. it will feel quite cooler than of late, though, in northern parts of scotland. the winds ease down during the evening. some clear skies will turn it chilly for a while overnight. and then, if we look out to the west, a stream of weather fronts will bring some wet weather mainly toward scotland on friday. but at the same time, we're drawing and some very mild south—westerly winds. ahead of it, though, across england and wales, a chilly start. some sunshine, one or two early mist and fog patches. it does tend to cloud over more and more from the west during the day, hanging onto some sunshine towards south—eastern parts of england, most of the rain coming eastwards from scotland. and for many, those temperatures will be reaching 10—11 celsius. it is turning milder and windier through the day, and most of the rain will continue to affect scotland overnight, that weather front tapping up the rain over western parts of scotland. then that weather front moves southwards on saturday. so again, it'll weaken and the rain becomes light and patchy. moving away from scotland and northern ireland, there won't be much rain heading down across england and wales. then we get a north—westerly wind once again, a few showers across northern parts of scotland. double—figure temperatures for most of the day. very mild in the south—east of england at 14 celsius. a windy day on saturday. the winds won't be as strong, though, on sunday. it will be a bit cooler. northern areas turn wet and windy later on. welcome to bbc news. our top stories: britain's prince andrew demands a trial byjury as he rejects the allegations of sexual assault made by virginia giuffre. the us formally responds to russia's concerns over ukraine, saying they've offered moscow a serious diplomatic path forward. westminster waits for the report that could determine the british prime minister's future as borisjohnson rejects calls for him to resign. and how peruvians are taking a haircut to help clean up a huge oil spill threatening an environmental disaster.