Sebastian O’Kelly
Director
Sebastian O’Kelly was the Mail on Sunday’s property editor for 10 years. In 2011 he wrote about the plight of retirement flat residents facing inflated fees and unacceptable, peremptory management practices. Since then he has been writing about leasehold issues concerning high-end London riverside developments, such as the £1 million settlement to leaseholders at St George’s Wharf, Vauxhall, in September 2011, which was obfuscated by a confidentiality agreement; the £500,000 re-payments at Charter Quay, Kingston, and the right to manage victory at Chelsea Bridge Wharf, in Battersea. He jointly set up LKP with Melissa Briggs in January 2012.
Melissa Briggs
Director
Melissa is a sales and marketing professional, IT consultant, political activist and veteran campaigner. She is a co-founder of the Campaign Against Retirement Leasehold Exploitation (Carlex) and stood as an independent candidate at the last general election.
Martin Boyd
Director
Martin Boyd had a career in IT and subsequently became a property investor. As a leaseholder at Charter Quay in Kingston, Surrey, Martin orchestrated four Leasehold Valuation Tribunal victories against his landlord, winning back more than £500,000 in over-paid service charges. The cases amount to devastating criticism of current leasehold practices and are reported on this site. Search ‘charter quay’
Imogen Restell
Accountant
Imogen brings important financial expertise to the LKP team. Imogen is a chartered accountant having trained at a London Big-4 accountancy practice and having been accepted into the ICAEW back in March 2002. She has worked as a Group Financial Controller of a UK plc and also in accountancy training before establishing her own accountancy practice in 2006. Through this work in practice Imogen has experience of company formation, corporate and individual accountancy and tax issues, including statutory company administration and filing, tax filing and tax efficiency and financial management and control.
Bob Smytherman
Board member. Chairman of the Federation of Private Residents Associations
Bob agreed to become involved with LKP from the start when his expertise was called on in the design phase of the accreditation documents. He is one of the most knowledgeable people in the UK in the Leasehold sector, and has extensive knowledge of the regulations that managing agents are supposed to comply with. He is about to become Deputy Mayor in Worthing and, most importantly, he is the Chairman of the FPRA, the Federation of Private Residents Associations (see www.fpra.org). He has also been a panellist at several leasehold events, spoken personally to hundreds of leaseholders on a wide range range of related leasehold issues and has attended many meetings with Carlex and LKP.
Thank you for all your hard work in setting up this service. Janet & I managed to extract a refund of both a transfer and contingency fee from Peverel,because we had sublet twice within 12 months. One set of fees was returned after protracted correspondence. Although we were pleased to receive the £2250, we were aggrieved that we were still down by the same amount. The injustice rankles even more!I t’s nice to feel a sense of union with others that feel similarly affronted. THANK YOU ALL.
LKP’s high quality impartial reporting will encourage more and more leaseholders to come forward and share their experiences and this can only be to the greater good.
I may not agree wholeheartedly with your call for grassroots reform of the legislation. All lessees have a lease which sets out the details of their contractual relationship with their landlord. On the purpose-built estates, these leases will have been drafted by specialist lawyers who understand far better than the politicians the issues most likely to give vulnerable lessees the best protection of their property and assets whilst ensuring a fair and workable balance between landlord and tenant. In the case of one-off conversion developments, it is true that those minority of leases – probably drafted by your average high-street conveyancing solicitor – may not give lessees adequate protection.
In addition to the lease, we have the more general laws so well encapsulated by the RICS in their ‘Service Charge Residential Management Code’. If you read this document together with the more detailed requirements set out in any lease, you may agree with me that lessees are already well protected without the need for more laws.
It would have been neater and tidier if Grant Shapps had implemented all of the clauses in the Commonhold & Leasehold Reform Act 2002. In particular, without section 152 ‘annual statements’, managing agents could take this apparent loophole in the law as meaning there is no need to provide lessees with good quality financial reports. Yet, if they were to read the lease and the RICS Code, they would find there is already a very specific requirement to do so. Again, the lack of section 156 requirement for separate bank accounts could give the wrong impression. Paragraph 4 of the RICS Code requires managers to set up a separate client bank account (or accounts); in paragraph 4.21, the Code says the manager ‘should never lend one client’s funds to another’. Without the implementation of separate bank accounts as set out in section 156 of CLRA 2002, this question of ‘loans’ between client account is impossible avoid in practice even if the paper accounts are kept separate. How do you account for the interest earned on such melting-pot bank accounts?
I sumbit for the LKP team’s consideration that lessees are already well protected by their lease, the legislation and RICS Code. What is missing is enforcement and the abject lack of will on the part of ARMA and its members to do anything meaningful about it beyond a window-dressing exercise.
Thank you all for your dedication to a worthy cause.
I am currently a Chairman of a Residents Association of a residential block of 76 flats. We have around 86% of the qualifying flats as members of this association. We won an LVT case in 2011 to get rid of the incumbent management company and also won our case for unreasonable service charges. The association continues to work hard to build consensus and offer a democratic process to get leaseholders views and concerns raised with our new block management agent. We also want to carry out RTM and to this end we appointed a solicitor in 2011 and formed an RTM company. We secured more than 70% of the total number of qualifying flats as members of our RTM and was ready to serve notice on the freeholder. However a block management company, (unbeknown to us) had set up a rival RTM with the directors of this company as directors of the RTM company (they don’t own any property within the block) and secured support via various unsolicited marketing methods of around 15% of the total number of qualifying flats. We understand from various legal sources that the residents association backed RTM, which represents the majority of leaseholders can now not move forward. The management company in question refuses to move aside, even though they only have 15% of the total qualifying flats and has stated they will wait as long as it takes to secure RTM in their name and also become the new management company……..is this not an abuse of the RTM process by a block management company? It is clear to me that in this case, despite our hard efforts over the past three years we, the leaseholders seemingly have no rights to control our own destiny. The management company in question also claims to be a member/patron of LKP?
This is a serious issue and we are looking into it as a priority.