Communal stair cleaning bill

Jowo_2

gauly - your points are fair but the OP does demonstrate why it can be fairly frustrating to live in a building where the occupants do not meet their legal or contractual responsibilities or resent the costs involved.

This is just a minor issue, easy for them to clarify, but I'm sure you can imagine what its like when there are larger issues at stake and why those with experience of living in shared buildings find their slopey shoulder and critical stance annoying. I was open about my particular wider agenda.

Perhaps the cleaner has been formally engaged and a quick word with the council or neighbours will verify this, perhaps the cleaner is just chancing it and trying to build up a round of customers off their own back.

The OP was aware that he was obliged to keep the common areas clean. There's no evidence he bothered to do this but every sign that he is miffed that the costs for someone else to do it falls squarely on them. Now that the OP has found they are probably obliged by the Tenement Act and perhaps tenancy contract to pay it, they've suddenly got a strong interest in whether it offers value for money and if it is high enough quality.

" if I am paying for a service then the charge for it should be in proportion to how long it takes" - the notion that a cleaning charge should be less if its mechanised rather than manual is quite bizarre as there's nothing particularly strange about billing a fixed fee for a particular service unrelated to time or physical effort spent on it.

It might only take the gas engineer 10 minutes to certify the boiler as being safe and he is unlikely to break into sweat but he's still going to charge the landlord £50 for it.

The OP can challenge the cleaning for being above market rates and check if they have a contract with the Factor but isn't going to get very far by saying they are charging too much for the time it takes them and because they use equipment to help them...

joolley

Jowo is spot on!
OP,
Go on, tell us what the bill is. I'll tell you how it compares to my flat in Crosshill in Glasgow when I lived there a decade ago and the flat I rented in Edinburgh City Centre when I worked through there recently. I should have thought of asking my landlord. Good idea!

Time to do job vs cost is nonsense. How about if your boss takes that stance.

ailuro2

It's much easier than getting all the other tenants to take their turn though, that's why these companies make their money.

I used to 'take my turn' regularly when I lived in a flat, but there were only two of us who did it regularly, the other lot were a bunch of lazy sods who didn't care....:mad:

Fire_Fox

The vast majority of posters seem to be assuming that the OP is liable, in England that would not be the case as a leaseholder cannot pass legal liability for costs that would fall under the service charge to his tenant. Secondly I see no evidence that there is a contract between the cleaner and the tenant, she has agreed to clean the stairwell NOT pay for the stairwell to be cleaned.

Jowo_2

Firefox - In Scotland, properties are not held on a leasehold basis - all property owners are equal and there is no overarching Freeholder. This is a good thing in many respects because you don't get greedy or lazy freeholders who won't carry out repairs or who aren't transparent in their extortionate charges. But its also a bad thing because it means if the owners of a building aren't organised, a few stingy owners sabotage its general upkeep. In particular landlords have the reputation for trying to evade their share of the expense and they've brought in a landlord registration scheme to try to make it easier to track them down so they can be traced and held responsible for repair costs.

Scotland has much stronger laws that oblige flat owners to pay towards repairs and maintenance in communal areas (including cleaning). There doesn't need to be a contract between an individual flat owner and an organisation that has undertaken particular work. If a building is self-factored or have engaged a professional property Factor for them and have arranged the work (assuming they were set up correctly and follow the right procedures, the owners must cough up.

In this particular case, the obligation for the tenant to pay the cleaner is not clear because it is not known if the cleaner had authority from elsewhere to do this, but individual owners do not necessarily have to give direct consent for each particular piece of work to be carried out. the shelter scotland site explains more about the process which runs much differently from England's Freeholder/Leaseholder/Managing Agent processes.

http://scotland.shelter.org.uk/getadvice/advice_topics/repairs_and_bad_conditions/repairs_and_maintenance_in_common_areas

The cleaning charge is quite a trivial matter but you can imagine the fun and games that some Tenements have in getting money out of individual owners each time there is a major repair. Our building easily has 6 repairs each year to the drains, pipes, windows, doors, roof and lights, plus quarterly gardening and fortnightly stair cleaning. Across 8 owners, it was a total nightmare to administer and manage and with 2 out of 8 owners completely hostile to every expense, it was even worse. That's why I'm glad we have a Factor in place, even though they are deeply unpopular with many flat owners who ultimately resent any expense that goes towards the l upkeep of the building, who always feel ripped off, at least its better than being verbally abused by my neighbours who refused to pay towards general maintenance.

Owain_Moneysaver

My local council has a by-law that the stairs must be cleaned fortnightly. It doesn't care how, but the tenant would (probably - I haven't read the by-law) be responsible for complying with this as occupier.