A Letter to Angela Rayner From a London Leaseholder
Dear Angela Rayner,
As you survey the gulls swooping over the beach at Hove this weekend you must be thinking life can’t get much more brutal than than losing three top jobs in one day. Alas, yes it can! For, having chosen to buy a flat as your new family home, you have entered the hell on earth that is leasehold.
Here too, perhaps you should have got some expert advice. Of course, as the former Secretary of State in charge of leasehold reform, you should by now know all about the horrors of this debt trap tenure. But just in case you are in ignorance, here’s the state of play at our building. Let it serve as a warning!
My own flat is in a mixed use building, once sold as a luxury mix of hotel and 158 leasehold flats. “Get your laundry done, like a hotel guest! Order room service 24/7!” How hollow that sales pitch feels, 20 years on.
At 5.45pm this Monday, our Residents What’s App group received a plaintive post: “I am stuck in lift. Please help. I don’t have data”
The poor resident had pressed the lift’s alarm button, but got no response. And because he was stuck somewhere underground, no one had heard his shouts. Thank God he had enough signal to reach us, or who knows how long he might have been trapped there.
The next logical step should have been to phone our front desk and ask them to call Otis, the lift manufacturer. Only we couldn’t. Our concierge have had no phone line or broadband, and our intercoms haven’t worked for the best part of a year now. Our property manager was always “talking to” this firm or that about repairs, but nothing ever actually got fixed, in spite of these having been sold as “luxury apartments”, where even a one bed flat pays £12,000 in service charges. If there’s a fire, or someone falls ill or has an accident, residents can’t let our concierge know – unless we happen to have their personal mobile numbers.
“We aren’t supposed to phone Otis any more,” the poor concierge said nervously, when someone finally managed to talk to him. “We have to phone the managing agent and get them to make the call.”
”Sod that,” we insisted. “It’s 6pm. They’ll have buggered off for the night. A resident is stuck. You and the managing agent will be on the end of a law suit, if you don’t do something right now, to get him out.”
When the lift engineer finally turned up, we discovered the reason for this prohibition. Our building no longer had a contract with Otis. It had expired months ago. So no, he could not actually fix the lift. (WTF?!*?!) How does a 33 storey apartment block have no service contract with a lift company? Most residential towers have 25 or 30-year contracts signed when the lifts are first installed. The Otis guy freed the poor trapped resident, took the lift out of service, then left.
Another of our lifts had already failed a fortnight previously. We wondered why it had just sat there, doors gaping open, with a notice saying “Out of order”. Now we knew. No one had ever been coming to fix it.
We were down to just one working lift. Sure enough, the pressure of all those cleaners, contractors, visitors and 158 families trying to get down next morning to work and school proved too much. By lunchtime, it too was malfunctioning. It’s hit and miss whether it registers when you push its buttons, or takes you where you want to go.
We bombarded our property manager with emails. He’s the fourth in the year this agent has been managing, but at least the 50th since the building opened. He’d only started the week before and, in the course of our email exchange, suddenly announced that he was leaving at the end of the month. This place is a poisoned chalice!
We also emailed his boss, the Managing Director, a man with over 27 years experience at this particular agency. An executive with integrity and guts would surely have apologised immediately, then made sure someone was on site at the crack of dawn next day to set up a new contract with Otis and get a phone line and broadband installed for the front desk by close of business. Our building was the first residential tower in the UK to get fibre optic cabling. How hard could it be? Instead… silence.
The response we finally got this afternoon, three days too late, read rather like your own attempt to pass the buck to your poor conveyancer. Amid the usual vague promises that things would change, the MD blamed a former junior employee for everything that had gone wrong. Meanwhile, nothing will happen over a weekend, except very possibly the third lift will finally give up the ghost. After which, I will be stuck here on the 31st floor, unable to risk leaving my flat. I could walk the emergency stairs down to the hotel levels and get their lifts to the ground. But how on earth would I get back up?
But I’ve gone on too long about the lifts, Angela. They are far from our only problem. My hot water has been lukewarm for weeks. My cooling does not cool. My windows haven’t been cleaned for five years, although I continue to be billed. We’ve been charged a fortune in repairs for our window cleaning cradles. Still they don’t work. Our corridors have torn, filthy carpets, stained from years of leaks. Walls and ceilings are littered with holes and patches. Bits have fallen off the fire doors. We are owed over £1 million in insurance commission overcharges. We have no Fire Risk Assessment or at least not one that residents have ever been allowed to see. No Capital Expenditure Report. No Resident Engagement Strategy, which we were supposed to get under the Bulding Safety Act a year ago. We’ve been dumped with thousands of pounds of utility bills, with no proof these costs are actually owed. Our last service charge budget was prepared by someone who cannot even use a calculator. It contains around £300,000 of errors and overcharges.
Why don’t I just sell up and get up? That’s what just about everyone in my building wants to do. But we can’t. My flat is unsellable. Not just because of our sky high charges and war-torn interior, but because we don’t have an External Wall Survey Certificate. These certificates, known as EWS1s, were put in place after Grenfell so that buildings over 18 meters could prove they don’t have flammable cladding as part of their facade. The fire safety engineer who did our original certificate was fired for committing fraud,and all his company’s certificates suspended this time last year. Our See-You-Next-Tuesday of a freeholder and his Pass-The-Buck managing agent must both have known this months ago, yet they made no effort to get another certificate until we threatened to complain to the Building Safety Regulator. EWS1s are not a legal requirement for a sale, but most banks won’t lend without one, which leaves only a trickle of cash buyers, offering rock bottom prices. People are being offered 40% of what they paid 20 years ago. Renters can walk away from properties with a month’s notice and their deposit back. Leaseholders can’t get out without losing a huge chunk of their life’s savings, even supposing they can find a mug willing to take on a leasehold flat. Sales nationwide are frozen.
I fear that paying the wrong stamp duty may not be the only mistake you’ve made, Angela. I truly wish you and yours every happiness in your new seaside home. But you may find that buying a flat at all was a far bigger and more costly error. You may soon be wishing you’d done more to solve leaseholders’ problems back when you had the chance.
Yours sincerely,
A London Leaseholder
Stop Press: Angela’s Seaside Pad Update
My neighbours and I did a little digging over the weekend. Anything to pass the time, rather than risking that lone lift too often! Turns out that Ms Rayner’s new Hove pad is one of the tiny minority of flats in England and Wales that are ‘share of freehold’ rather than leasehold. This means that, unlike the vast majority of residential blocks, her flat has no third party freeholder/landlord, to control when her windows get cleaned, or the roof repaired, or to charge her thousands for services she never gets. She and her neighbours elect some of their number to run the place. This board – which they can vote out if it does a bad job – sets a budget for repairing and managing their building. They, not some off-shore freeholder, hire and fire the managing agent. (This is the only way those managing agencies will ever be forced to become honest brokers. The complicated and expensive ‘regulation’ proposed by this Labour Government will solve nothing)
Angela Rayner’s ‘share of freehold’ is the way multi-ownership blocks are organised around the world. England and Wales are the only outliers. I and others have spent the past decade campaigning for the control of our homes that Ms Rayner already enjoys. Her choice of one of the few flats to offer this kind of tenure is pretty depressing. If she thought her government was ever going to keep its manifesto promise and end leasehold for the 5.2 million households who are trapped, she could have bought a leasehold flat like the rest of us, confident that she would soon own the home she had paid for. Clearly, she knows substantial reform is never going to happen.
As long as we remain in the ECHR, a gang of ultra wealthy freeholders can and will paralyse this and any government by mounting legal challenge after legal challenge to reform. A regime so deep in debt and so generally inept cannot afford to keep up the fight for years on end. And so they will quietly back away. As this Government is doing now. Those wealthy freeholders have already paralysed the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act, Michael Gove’s last minute and inadequate attempt to put things right. The bits that might have helped us most still haven’t been enacted and probably never will be. Like sections of the 2002 Commonhold Act. And meanwhile Labour’s own manifesto promises of new legislation, that will end leasehold for good, get kicked further and further into the long grass. (This video from campaign group, Free Leaseholders, explains why.)
I’m ashamed to say that when Angela Rayner popped up on TV talking about the “frewdal” (her pronunciation of feudal) leasehold system in carefully rehearsed sound bites, I always assumed she was just thick. I was wrong. She was smart enough to learn exactly what to do to avoid falling into the trap people like me are in. She just didn’t care enough or scheme enough or work hard enough to end this brutal injustice for the rest of us. As with everything else this Labour Government does, it’s “one rule for thee and another for me”.
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I live in a house (thankfully) that is part of what was once a social housing estate comprising a block of 20 flats and six small houses. The freeholders of the flats are Peabody (previously Catalyst – the greatest misnomer you could think of, we used to call them Cataclysmic or Catastrophic) and Peabody is proving to be even worse. A new lift was fitted a short while ago at a cost of £180,000 that included a £34,000 “management fee” the cost of which was to be shared between all 20 flats – £9000 each. This is now the subject of a dispute involving our MP. A short while ago, one of the residents noticed that the water in the bathroom was cloudy and foul smelling. He made no less than ELEVEN phone calls to Peabody, each time having to hang on for close to an hour before they even deemed it necessary to send someone out. When they did, of course, they sent someone unequipped for the job – who would have thought he needed a ladder to access the tank on the roof??? – and when someone equipped to do the job arrived, he said it was a… Read more »
I was never interested in a flat for the leasehold reasons above but aren’t residents able to appoint their own management company now if the majority vote for it?
Well worth looking into from what I’ve read elsewhere…
Tte problem here is how the building is managed, not the leasehold system, since were it a condominium a management company might also have been employed if not a residents’ association.
Why, given the littany of woe, didn’t the residents hold a meeting, figure out a plan of action, get legal advice and sue?
Many flats are let out by unscrupulous landlords who couldn’t care less about their tenants. They will care a great deal when they come to sell as many are doing now and doing nothing about the management of the building or supporting their tenants is coming back to bite them. A few of the flats in the block near me are still owned by the freeholder and management – Peabody
Too tired to be bothered to respond to
this. You clearly have no
understanding of leasehold and how it works.
The thought of being stuck in a lift with Angela Rayner is too horrific to contemplate.
I dunno, the chance of escaping myself while leaving her in there and then telling everyone else I was the only occupant would be worth the initial discomfort, I think.
More of the same from me, though, I live in an age ghetto (aka retirement village but I think my definition is more appropriate). Freeholder is Affordable Homes and Communities, previously Platinum Skies and no doubt a different name in the future. The head lease is Quantum Group, God help me. After two years of incompetence in trying to manage this site and four others they brought in Firstport. We are treated like cash cows and morons. If only I was one of those! At least here you have a greater chance of dying than having to live here for years because you cannot sell. Unfortunately, we just pass on the problem to our families who will spend a couple of years trying to sell the property while paying rent on the share we don’t own plus service charge. They cannot sublet or move in because only those named on the lease can live here. Nor can we bring in our own management company because the development is a mix of houses and flats. However, looking on the bright side (and it has taken me four years to do that) when you live in paradise you have to expect that… Read more »
Surely you would only have to pay costs if you lose the case?
The odds of winning a case are stacked in favour of the Freeholder. Many leases are worded in such a way that regardless of “winning” you will still pay, via the service charge the cost of their legal charges.
I would have thought that in the case of a clear breach of contract, you would be confident of winning the case. If they pass the cost on in service charges that’s different matter I think- it seems to defeat the purpose of suing someone if you win the case and still need to pay costs – I am surprised that such a clause is considered legal
There is no reason for it to be like that and the answer cannot be to steal the freehold nor more government regulation.
In continental Europe snd in the USA there are perfectly good ways of arranging services on, what the US calls, condominiums. Even in high wage Switzerland an engineer would be there without delay.
She perhaps thought that, as DPM etc., the usual rules wouldn’t apply and the leaseholder would jump immediately.
The problem is that she is now a lowly MP with little clout.
With that many residents, surely they have residents committee and have threatened to withdraw maintenance fees for breach of contract. The company would get crucified in court! Sounds like the company itself are either in deep doodoo financially, or are just ripoff merchants. No lift contract with Otis waves a massive red flag!
Sorry, but Caveat Emptor. Buying a flat on the 31st floor isn’t a good idea.
My first flat (admittedly bought 40-odd years ago) was the ground floor of a 4 story block. When I was flat-hunting I was advised not to buy one in a block which was over 5 storeys high, for the very good reason that “they are nothing but trouble.”
Yet another BS article about how terrible leasehold is, because one building has a poor maintenance company. The truth is there are many blocks of leasehold flats where the maintenance system works perfectly well. The flat owners could consider banding together and setting up a “right to manage” company and take over the maintenance themselves. They wouldn’t though. That would mean they would have to do some work to run the company. Of course there would be expenses and maintenance work to be done if they owned a freehold house. But let’s forget about that and just attack leasehold on the ground that “renters can walk away from properties with a month’s notice and their deposit back”. True. But homeowners whether freehold or leasehold have to pay for maintenance. So do renters of course. They just don’t see the cost because it’s included in their rent. Leasehold is the way you force all the flat owners to pay towards the maintenance of the building. Obviously they would rather not pay. Because they thought owning a home was just like renting. They thought that somebody would maintain their building for them without any action or expense for them. Owning a home… Read more »
As for the “stop press” bit, it appears the author has misunderstood “share of freehold”. That is too do with the ownership of the freehold of the building. Ownership of the freehold is a separate thing from responsibility for maintenance.
It is probably also worth noting that “share of freehold” properties are still leasehold. It is just that the freehold is held by a company that is owned by the leaseholders.
Commonhold, which the author also mentions, is an option for new buildings but has the disadvantage that the power to force flat owners to pay their share of the maintenance is weaker, relying on potential legal action on the grounds of unpaid debt.
The level of ignorance in this whole article is astonishing.
Another one to steer clear of is buying a residential park home. I’m currently looking to downsize as I don’t need the large house I occupy, but a residential park home, on a camp, is now almost as expensive as a conventional home and there are substantial yearly ‘management’ charges to pay on top of the purchase price.