Leasehold Maintenance Fee - Flats vs. Mews Houses

Pammy75

I own a flat in a converted brewery. This is one single building that is split into six mews houses and six flats. The lease is very general. It states that there is a maintenance fee, payable twice yearly. It states that communal areas must be maintained and specifies that the flats front doors must be maintained with good paint, banisters, communal hallways etc. It states that the property must be lit, both in the grounds and in the communal areas of the flats. Since this lease was created in the 80s, fire regulations have improved and we must now have a fire alarm in the flat communal hallway. The maintenance charges for the above, plus insurance etc. are specified in the lease for each property. The site is managed by a maintenance company that consists of directors (owners voted in at the annual AGM). Now the complicated bit...

Many years go, one of the directors decided that the flats must pay an additional charge (works out at about 6% additional cost of the total yearly charge) because some properties, namely the mews houses, don't benefit from the fire alarm in the communal area of the flats (despite it being one building), they don't benefit from the flat communal hallway being lit (other than when they use the hoover and garden equipment storage areas on the ground floor of the flat communal areas), they don't benefit from the cleaner hoovering the flats etc.

Nowhere in the lease does it say that the flats should pay more. This, surely, was already taken into account when the percentages for each property were calculated in the lease. In these situations, there are always swings and roundabouts, with the mews houses requiring gutters to be cleared every year, but the flats do not benefit from that etc.

The flats have over-contributed around £17k over the years into the fund, despite it not being in the lease. We are now at a point where the front door and communal carpets in the flats need changing. The mews houses have brought up that they do not want the spend for these coming out of the maintenance charge fund, despite the extra money the flats have paid in for things that were not specified in the lease. The lease itself refers to all external parts of the flats and internal communal areas being maintained, but does not specify the door being changed, or the carpets being changed, but after more than 30 years, both are beyond being maintained.

My question is, can we insist, given the money that has been paid in, that the carpet and door are paid for from the communal fund (there is money in the pot, but others want funds directed elsewhere). Do we have to keep paying the additional charge that isn't specified in the lease simply because it has been paid for many years?

What happens with things like a fire alarm that benefit everyone in a single unit? Can one end of the building "opt out" of paying for something like this when it isn't specified in the lease?

SmashedAvacado

Can you let us know the wording of the clause in the lease that relates to how service charge is split - does it say that each flat pays a fair proportion or something similar? Or does it allocate each flat a fixed percentage.