£14,000 Fees from Landlord to Leasholders!

Ginger_Winner

I am a leaseholder of a flat within a block in Wembley. The landlord for the block is Brent Council. I and my fellow leaseholders have recently received a Bill for just under £4,000 each for essential fire maintenance work. Three months later we have received details of forthcoming cyclical work for which we will be charged between £10,000 - £11,500 each which will be due in December 2018. This will be in addition to our annual service charge which is usually between £700 and £1000 a year.

Clearly these sums of money are huge and represent considerable challenges and have caused distress for all leaseholders. We have a number of concerns but don’t really know what our rights are. The concerns we have are as follows:

- We are not consulted on this work, but just informed that it is happening.

- We don’t feel that there is anyone ‘fighting our corner’ in terms of price when this work is being quoted for. The prices seem very high and approximately 30% of the cost is admin fees.

- When work is carried out, it doesn’t feel like it’s done efficiently e.g. scaffolding is often left up for weeks on end without any work being carried out.

- There are conflicts of interest when assessing the work i.e. the person who makes the decision as to what needs to be done is paid a percentage commission on the cost of the work.

- When work has been done in the past I have been asked to sign a form without filling it in. I subsequently found out that this was a feedback form that they were going to fill in on my behalf.


When we approach Brent Council, they become very defensive and provide a long bureaucratic reply talking about their process, health and safety, etc and show no empathy for the lease holders position.

The reason for this post is to see if anyone can advise us on our rights regarding this issues or indeed if they have faced similar issues and can maybe help us in a few pointers, so that we can improve this situation ongoing.

KILL_BILL

have they provided a detailed breakdown of the costs together with estimates from at least 2 or 3 companies to show competiveness

if you disagree in general you and the other leasholders then you can challenge through the leasehold tribunal service but it might be worthwile seeing if the other agree

better if their is more of you.

da_rule

Did you receive a notice under Section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act.

Cakeguts

This is often the case with council freeholders. There are repeated warnings on this site to people thinking of buying a council flat about the cost of repairs. I know this doesn't help you now but a bit of research before you bought the flat might have helped.

The council block has to be repaired so everyone has to pay a share of that. The council tenants don't pay because that is covered in their rent. It is normal for leaseholders to pay for repairs to the building.

sheff6107

For a bill of approximately £14000 each I'd be getting together and chipping in for a session with a solicitor.

patman99

Surely Brent Council are sensible enough to make sure that service charges are set so that there is always an annual surplus to ad to a sinking fund for future major works?.

Oh, silly me. That is to much like common sense.

I feel that there are the odd conflict of interests here. 30% of the cost is admin fees?. What?, how much does it cost to send a letter.
Also, the person deciding on what is needed to be done gets a commission payment based on the cost of the works?. Surely this is not legal is it?.

Cakeguts

patman99 wrote: »

Surely Brent Council are sensible enough to make sure that service charges are set so that there is always an annual surplus to ad to a sinking fund for future major works?.

Oh, silly me. That is to much like common sense.

I feel that there are the odd conflict of interests here. 30% of the cost is admin fees?. What?, how much does it cost to send a letter.
Also, the person deciding on what is needed to be done gets a commission payment based on the cost of the works?. Surely this is not legal is it?.

We are talking about Brent council here.

G_M

Given the recent news, are you not at least pleased that fire safety work is being done....?

AdrianC

Council block. "Essential fire maintenance work".

Now, lemme think...

agrinnall

Ask Sajid Javid to pay it for you, he has consistently ducked the question of whether the government will pay for essential fire prevention work...

Ginger_Winner

Thanks for the replies...

To address some of the points/questions...

- Yes we have a section 20, we have until the first week in July to make our 'observations'.

- We are of course happy that the fire safety work was carried out although £3,700 to replace a front door with a fire door and replace loft access feels quite expensive. Our principal concern is not having visibility of planned work and therefore not being able to plan for these huge costs and also not having any representation in the decision making process effectively meaning that there is no one involved who has an interest in cost efficiency.

- Some of the fees that I am unclear about are a '4.5% Consultant fee' and a 'Planning and Building Control' fee which amounts to 1.6% and 'Overheads and profit' which amounts to 4.5%. The additional costs outside of the actual building work are Preliminaries (10%) and there is also a contingency of 7.1%... so perhaps I'm getting a bit carried away in labelling these all as extra fees. My observation however, is that the works are £7.3k but the total cost is £10.3k.

We (the leaseholders) all accept that work needs to be done and would like to find a way to work with Brent in this process in an efficient and sensible way in the future. This may be unrealistic, but I feel that we must at least try and I guess the first point in doing so is to reply to the section 20.

Once again, many thanks for the comments above.