Posted by Charles Walker [BWFL] on July 26, 2007, 1:20 pm, in reply to "Re: Response to Charles"

Stefan, Just a few points in response to your latest posting. 2a. The gym: I would have taken a photo of the flat owner who threatened to sue us and stuck it to the wall in the estate office. Underneath the photo I would write "This is the man who got his flat very cheap and makes us all pay £70000 for it". I wonder how he would make it back to his flat then every evening. Mmm. Not sure that could have ever been an option, and frankly would have opened us up to legal action for defamation of character, and harassment, both are civil and criminal offences. No one knows this to be true and is a dangerous thing to say. 2b. Increased operating costs: true, electricity costs are rising but people mainly get hit by this on their personal bill. Electricity for common areas shouldn't make a huge portion out of the service charges. And the winter was very mild so heating costs shouldn't been an issue. What you fail to mention here is that 90% of the estate + Leisure centre are heated communally by gas. Heating costs are an issue. Some people have said it is their right to even dry their clothes on their radiators in the height of summer. 2d Wheelhouse roof: you name it. It was going on and on for years. Everyone had an opinion but noone was acting. Maybe we would have gained a lot if we had reacted on this immediately when it occured and maybe we pay so much because we had not reacted on this earlier. But I wouldn't blame BWFL for it since i could imagine doing it the same (being unexperienced with roof work). We were caught here between a rock and a hard place. Try to keep the costs down by not replacing the roof and try to solve the problem with localised and cheaper repairs. Retrospection is a wonderful thing and if we knew the above would not have worked we would have replaced the roof from day one. 2e. Estate leaks: This one you got completely wrong and I am sure that you already learned a lesson there. Paying planet plumbing upfront and open the door wide to give them the money was a terrible thing to do. If you throw more money on nonintrusive plumbing checks and hope to get money back on premiums is definately the wrong way. Not to mention that they didn't have to do all checks and BW became a money printing machine to them. I would have advised all landlords to carefully check their premises. But I wouldn't have given a single pound to planet plumbing especially when the costs exceed the premium benefits (if there were or are any) Frankly I do not accept this. We only paid planet plumbing the cost to inspect each flat. About £50 per flat. The idea this was part of the service charge and people would take this up for the communal good and the incentive would be that they had already paid for it and that in the long run it would reduce costs. Asking people nicely to do theirs on their own initiative would not work in reality as a large proportion would not bother [even now there is a large proportion who are not acting responsibly and refuse to have this done], and as I have said before getting leaseholders to get a plumber to do the inspections would cost considerably more than the £50 currently charged. What is more it would be very difficult to document and evidence. Yes, frankly, some people would even lie about what they say they had done. If we have made a mistake here, then we are following the example of a large number of estates that have plumbing checks and the same basis as ours. What made us different is that previously we did not do plumbing checks. Are you suggesting there are no benefits to trying to reduce the insurance premium and therefore the service charges? 2g unplanable forecasts. Hm, I would not sign this. We had stable SCs until end of 2006. In January this year BWFL already increased the SC by 40% because you saw that you would not be able to cover the period. Mid this year you rose it to 76% because you lost it completely with the costs. So you weren't proactive in any way it was more of an disaster recovery action AFTER the disaster happened. (And i still don't understand why reserve funds were not in place to be available as an "reserve") We had stable service charges because we did not have to fork out so much money all in one fell swoop. They were also being financed to a degree by the reserves. Yes I accept by default that we have not got the finances on track because of the issues I have already highlighted in other postings. Some people may, in their mind, think of the halcyon days of previous years. The estate was younger and not having to replace so much stuff that was going wrong. People forget that despite our perceived faults BWFL has saved the estate from oblivion when we took on Galliards at no cost whatsoever to the service charge payer. We also tend to forget the huge capital growths we have all made on our properties over the years. I know for a fact that an estate not far from us are being asked to pay at least £2000 extra on top of their service charges to finance legal action against their developers who now find themselves in a similar position. What is difficult to do is get the sums right all of the time with such conflicting demands on the service charge. My God look at the projected overspend of the London Olympics, and presumably the finest brains this country has to offer are doing the costing. No it does not make it right to find our service charges have gone up here and we do all we can to get things right. I do not like paying out more money any less than the next person. But at least I feel we are facing our critics and trying to be accountable for what we are trying to do. I would dearly love to face you in a year’s time and be able to say we have been able to reduce the service charges in real terms. Just other point I think of all those poor people who have been flooded out of their homes, most are freeholders and even if they are insured they are on their own in reality and will still have to fork out huge amounts of money to get their lives back to normal. Charles

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