Anastasia Frost often wonders why she listened to the Tories when they talked about aspiration, the benefits of home ownership and levelling up. She lives in a two-bedroom flat in the Ancoats area of Manchester with her husband and their 11-week-old son. “We put trust in this system. We were told you must buy a flat, you must get on the property ladder, but what good is it really?” she says.

The Frosts spent 10 years saving up and finally were able to buy their home in 2015. But then, in 2017, came the Grenfell Tower disaster and, more than four years on, as they wait for their block to be declared safe – if it ever is – their home is worth nothing.

It is not fit for sale. No purchaser could get a mortgage to buy it. Insurers run a mile. The Frosts have already spent £7,000 of their own money paying the safety fees demanded of leaseholders, including those for waking watchmen who patrol the block in case of fires, and special alarms. It is money that Frost, a housing resettlement worker, wishes she could have spent on her first child.

“It has been very stressful. When you are pregnant, you don’t need any extra worries. You don’t need the constant reminder that you are living in a flammable box. It is not what I had hoped for. I would rather have spent the money on my son,” she says.

On Sunday, as the Conservative party hits Manchester for its first full conference since it won an 80-strong majority in the 2019 election, having broken through the red wall and taken dozens of former Labour seats in the north and Midlands, Frost will address a parallel conference in the city centre on the cladding scandal.

It could hardly look worse for Boris Johnson’s government. The meeting, organised by the Manchester Cladiators, a voluntary group formed by residents in early 2019 to pressure government “to protect innocent people fully and fairly from exorbitant costs to fix the collective state and industry failure”, will also be attended by the bishop of Manchester, David Walker, the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and, the organisers hope, a number of worried Tory MPs in northern seats who were part of the 2019 intake.

While the cladding issue is a national one, those MPs know the struggles of low-income homeowners do not sit well with the government’s mission to “level up” the country, revive deprived urban centres and advance home ownership and the one-nation cause.

Robert Jenrick, the cabinet minister who was, until weeks ago, in charge of housing (he was replaced by Michael Gove in the recent reshuffle), set up a national £5bn fund to help those hit by the knock-on effects of the Grenfell disaster, but it was too late, and nowhere near enough, said Frost.

Manchester is known as the cladding capital of the north, with the biggest number of high-rise flats and applicants to Jenrick’s building safety fund of any region outside London. Many people affected say they applied for help but have not heard back.

One is Tom Brothwell, who bought a flat in 2017 a stone’s throw from where the Tory conference will open on Sunday. “We had the survey … [and] applied to the building safety fund in September 2020, and have heard nothing,” he says. Brothwell works in a bank but also spends 30 hours a week of his own time trying to help those who are facing the nightmare combination of having to pay huge bills to make their homes safer, while being unable to sell them.

Lucy Powell, the shadow housing secretary and MP for Manchester Central, says the area has 15,000 residents caught up in the crisis and says data from the Land Registry shows sales of affected buildings in Manchester have plunged to almost zero. Those who are able to sell are finding they can only do so to cash buyers – and at a substantial loss.

“They were promised as leaseholders that they wouldn’t have to pay for fire remediation costs, yet the bills just keep coming, adds Powell. “The new building safety bill makes the situation worse, and the government’s fund just isn’t working. It’s time to assess, fix, fund and certify every tall building and put in law that leaseholders won’t pay.”

More broadly, the presence of Johnson and his party in Manchester has turned the focus on to the prime minister’s agenda of “levelling up” the country. Conservative MPs who represent seats behind the “red wall” know that their chances of retaining them at the next general election, which could come as early as spring 2023, will depend on him putting flesh on the bones of what many think is still a mere slogan.

In private, many Conservatives complain that there is no detailed plan. “The fact is that the government and the prime minister don’t really understand how people outside the prosperous south live,” said one former minister with a northern seat. Increasingly, they are using the phrase “southern privilege” to describe an attitude and a national divide that is not being bridged.

The recent announcement of an increase in national insurance and the Tories’ commitment to end the £20 a week uplift in universal credit are both causing deep unease in sections of Johnson’s party, as fears grow of cost-of-living and fuel crises caused by labour shortages.

At Labour’s conference in Brighton last week, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that it would scrap business rates and undertake the “biggest overhaul of business taxation in a generation”. Plenty of Tories want their party to offer some relief.

Esther McVey, the former work and pensions secretary, said last week: “Reducing business rates for retail would have a significant impact on those areas of the country most in need of levelling up. Cutting the ‘shops tax’ would unlock investment, create jobs and grow local economies.”

Today Bright Blue, an independent Tory thinktank for liberal conservatism, publishes new analysis, entitled Beyond the Safety Net? showing that a quarter of universal credit claimants, more than 1 mllion people, were receiving informal financial support from family and/or friends in the early stages of the pandemic. Ryan Shorthouse, its chief executive, said: “The Conservative government cannot really represent left-behind places and people if it now makes the biggest single cut to working-aged benefits ever seen.”

John Stevenson, the Conservative MP for Carlisle, is one of many northern Tory MPs who also question the £20 universal credit cut and how it sits with promises to level up. “Universal credit has actually been a real success. I just think it slightly undermines what we’ve achieved because of the loss of £20.”

“In the wider context, complacency in any political party is a danger. Speaking for my northern colleagues, I do not think there’s any complacency among us at this moment in time. We realise that we made a substantial breakthrough in the last election. You’ve got to consolidate that. The only way we’re going to consolidate that is to demonstrate to the voters that it’s worth voting for us in the first place. That’s got to be showing things happening in your locality, your community, or across parts of the north.”