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Section 20

Ningaloo
Posts: 188 Forumite


Advice please. Section20 issued estimating works to be £5000. Works have been completed and the cost is now £15k. Freeholder is the local council. Works have over run in time and they undertook to replace the whole pitched roof of the flat building which wasnt in the initial work plan. Council have referred themselves to the First-tier Tribunal, as they carried out additional work discovered during the planned works and felt they had no option but to press ahead and do works, without issuing a new Section20.
Advice appreciated on how to appeal against this cost. £5k was bad enough and will be a struggle to find, but £15k is devastating news.
Advice appreciated on how to appeal against this cost. £5k was bad enough and will be a struggle to find, but £15k is devastating news.
Thank you to everyone who has helped me MoneySave
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Comments
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Ningaloo said:
Council have referred themselves to the First-tier Tribunal, as they carried out additional work discovered during the planned works and felt they had no option but to press ahead and do works, without issuing a new Section20.
I guess you mean that the Council have applied to the First-tier Tribunal for retrospective dispensation from the requirement to do a section 20 consultation.
Based on a recent appeal court case, it looks like the Tribunal would look at the council's application from this point of view...- Are leaseholders worse off as a result of the lack of a section 20 consultation?
i.e. Would leaseholders have ended up paying less, if an s20 consultation had been done? If so, the tribunal would reduce the bill accordingly.
There's also the overriding requirement that Service Charges must be reasonable. So maybe the key questions would be...- Was all the work done reasonable? (i.e. was it required.)
- Was the amount paid for the work reasonable? (i.e. would another suitable contractor done it more cheaply)
It might be quite difficult to build a case to challenge the above. I suspect that the council took advice from very experienced surveyors, engineers, etc. So you might need equally experienced surveyors, engineers, etc in order to challenge what was done.
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I suppose I will never know if cost was reasonable as far as I can see, as the new unplanned work was not put out to tender.
The work has taken three times as long to complete as planned too.
No communication was entered into either so I have been kept very much in the dark of what, to me, has been a poorly managed project which has allowed costs to spiral.
I don't have £15k so I'm at a loss as to how to proceed.Thank you to everyone who has helped me MoneySave0
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