HI Hope someone can help me. I Own a 2 bed in London and I pay service charges to westminster council for the maintenance of the buidling. For few years now I have been renting out the flat to tenanats ( I have a buy to let mortgage) however the appalling state of the building and communal ares is driving them away. I have compplained lods of times and Never stopped paying. What can I do? I pay for a service I do not get!. The building should have security gates ( they dont work) , CCTV camers ( they dont work ) regular cleaning( At times you can find escrement in the stairs of lift) The lift is more often OOO than working... is hard to challenge Westminster council but they are now causing me huge financial strains... Pls help GG

First of all write to their leasehold services team detailing the failures and specifically ask for a refund in your service charges or put in a official complaint about the service charges.

Also take a look at the Leasehold Advisory Service website for help.

Just saw your post GG - I have been battling with this for over 10yrs now. The lazy good for nothing caretakers do not see dirt. They seem to only focus on middle area floors or lifts and rub a dirty mop around the middly area shoving all the dirt into corners of the floors or lifts.

In your services charge you are paying for an estate manager that deals within side tenants flats and then there is the takers I will not say 'care' as they do not know what the meaning of that word is, as well as s supervisor another taker, as he never gets out of the van that we provde for them they just do not show up nobody knows who s/he is as they do not wear badges maybe sometimes you will see a very dirty council shirt on them. There used to be a patch manager but in my borough that has changed to a ward manager but you never see him/her either, probably off doing private jobs some where else.

Three council employees that do nothing whatsoever about seeing that the blocks are kept clean. That is why most council block are let go into ghettos due to lack of care by these lazy employees of the council. We are paying our services charges that pays their wages and we get nothing back in return. Council’s tenants pay services charges on top of their rents.

In my block I was told by a caretaker that took over from another one that was a caretaker on rehabilitation, you could telll by this person that he was not all together. The caretaker that took over from him did not want to any work either and keep saying well I better than the last one that got the sack for drug dealing!!

If you are lucky enough to find out who the supervisor for the block then when approach him as it is mainly a male. ....the answer will be ‘it is the tenants fault’, all tenants knows it is not them but lazy council employee will saying it is the tenants fault. Also, I feel they do not want to keep a block clean because they will have a standard to maintain, therefore if by change you get a good caretaker after about a week when they realised that on one is supervising them they do as little as possible and then off for the day. Also they will be told not to be doing so much, as they cannot have this kind of cleanness for council tenants.