How To Handle Lease Disputes

If you have a problem with service or admin charges, service management or any other leaseholder's complaint, here's how to tackle the problem.

Recently my landlord, a local authority, tried to hit me and hundreds of other leaseholders with a huge service charge of £10,000.

It was clear that the works proposed couldn't possibly cost that much, so many of us complained. The landlord then reduced the costs of the works to £4,929. In other words, the bill for the same services more than halved.

If you think that you're being overcharged, or have some other problem with your landlord, here's what you can do:

Query or complain

If the costs seem too high, your first step should be to query or complain to the landlord. All your communications should be by post or email, or at least followed-up in this way, so you have written evidence.

Ask for evidence

If you're unsatisfied with the response, you can next ask them what market testing they have conducted to ensure you're getting fair value. Ask for a copy of the report. Most tribunals won't expect landlords to conduct market tests every year of such things as electricity suppliers, but for infrequent or long-term projects you should certainly expect the landlord to have conducted research.

You should demand, because you're entitled to, a summary of service charges and details of any insurance cover. You also have the right to inspect accounts, receipts for services, and other documents.

Give the landlord one last chance

After assessing the documentation, if you believe it is unreasonable you should contact the landlord again, with details of your complaint. Should this still be unsuccessful, you could take your landlord to court. For most people, however, a better route is to approach the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal (LVT).

Approach the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal

The LVT is an independent body of experts, and its part of the Residential Property Tribunal Service. The LVT can decide how much service or admin charges are to be paid and by whom. This is regardless of whether the charges have already been paid. The LVT can also do such things as make changes to the lease.

The majority of cases progress to a hearing between you, the landlord, and any experts or other witnesses. Complicated cases may be in two steps: a pre-trial review to try to get agreement between the parties on some of the issues, and then finally a hearing.

You can represent yourself or someone else can do so. I read of one case, for example, where three tenants were represented by a member of the local Citizens' Advice.

I've been looking through lists of disputes about service and admin charges. There are hundreds of cases every year where unsatisfied tenants complain to a tribunal. The results are mixed. Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, and sometimes you win bits of your claim.

The tribunals use their own expert knowledge and experience to make decisions, in particular when there is incomplete evidence from one or both parties. The tribunal may even inspect the property itself, perhaps on the day of the hearing.

To prepare for your application to the tribunal:

Read this first. It's a guide from LEASE, the free legal advice service for both leaseholders and landlords.
Read this page from the Residential Property Tribunal Service to learn how a tribunal works.
Select the relevant document from here, as it explains how to use the tribunal's services.
This document may be useful too. It mostly gets interesting from page 16.

More research

I'd go one step further by reading through previous cases to get an understanding of how the tribunals work, to better predict your chances of success, to understand more about recovering your fees and so on. To do that:

Go to the Residential Property Tribunal Services' Decisions page.
Select `LVT' and the area you live in, and press `Go'.
Select the type of case, e.g. a dispute on administration charges or service charges. A list of local authorities in your area will display.
By clicking the links to the right of your local authority you can browse cases by year.

When looking through decisions, a recurring mistake I noticed is that many leasholders complained that they shouldn't have to pay service charges for facilities they don't use. You have to contribute if it's specified in the lease. So, if you're on the ground floor, you still need to pay an equal share for lift maintenance, for example.

Fees

The costs of going to a tribunal aren't huge. You can read about them here.

For further guidance you can call LEASE on 020 7374 5380, or email info@lease-advice.org. You can make enquiries about tribunal procedures direct with the LVT on 0845 600 3178. (saynoto0870.com reveals this cheaper, alternative number: 020 74467700.) You can't ask this helpline for advice about your case though.

More: The Ups And Downs Of Renting