Two years after fire tore through the Spectrum Building in Dagenham, dozens of leaseholders remain trapped in a grim financial limbo: still servicing mortgages on flats that no longer exist, with no compensation in sight after freeholder Arinium collapsed into insolvency in the blaze's aftermath. Sarah Williams, who queued overnight in a car park in 2016 to secure one of the development's flats, is emblematic of thousands of buyers who piled into new-build apartment blocks during London's last great flats boom, only to discover that ownership of a leasehold flat conveys remarkably little protection when things go catastrophically wrong.