The full Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee hearing on leasehold November 5 2018
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Watched the select committee. Huge respect and appreciation to Sir Peter, Jim Fitzpatrick, Martin Boyd, Kath, Jo and Shula for eloquently and starkly presenting the exploitation of leaseholders.
I also watched the first part of the Select Committees meeting on Leasehold Reform where Martin and Sir Peter were excellent and able to put forward their very experienced knowledge regarding Leasehold, but Jim Fitzpatrick was awesome in the views and understanding of knowledge he has on Retirement Leasehold.
I would like to see posted on LKP more opportunities to get back to the original Leasehold Problems such as Retirement Developments, which is why Websites such as:-
TTAS, Peverel Action, Carlex, LKP, and About Peverel, were first set up as a platform to help Flat Leaseholders, in Retirement Developments going back to McCarthy & Stone and Solitaire, whose leases were involved with the Tchenguiz Family Trust. and other Freeholders and especially Rogue Landlords who continue to treat the Residential Flat Leaseholders as Cash Cows as quoted by Jim Fitzpatrick.
At this moment I am going through the Expenses File for my development at ABC, received on Wednesday 07/11/2018, that covers the previous Financial Year, from 01./04/2017 to 31/03/2018.
There are, inaccuracy’s and missing invoices along with additional costs in areas Coded such as:-
Code 1200-Remuneration for a Relief Deputy Manager (RDM) that we had for over a year because no one else was recruited, The Expenses paid alone for the RDM for 12 months were £2,519 @ £20.70 per day. At the moment we do not have a RDM as they are trialing without one?
Code 1230-Telephone costs for the Office has increased by 38% over two year period even though the RDM only worked 3 days a week, no payments for private calls were forthcoming. The cost for Careline Calls have now been added, and charged to the development, over and above the usual charges, hence the 38%.
Code 1300-Insurance the premiums have increased since 2015 when Peverel Retirement became Firstport Retirement and we were informed the previous Insurance Cover had been inadequate so has now been increased circa 60% in two years.
This is only the first trawl through the Trial Balance/Audit Trail, I will add to this if any of the posters show an interest in the possible scams, goings on, at over 1400 Retirement Developments.
McCarthy & Stone and a Media Firestorm in 1991
September 28, 2012 By Admin – Precis
Having now watched part two of the Select Committee on Leasehold Reform I can say again what a great performance by this time both Jo Darbyshire and Katie Kendrick who gave an Oscar Performance along the excellent Shula Rich.
Katie stated the problems seem to be in the North West, where it was said 80% of all houses built were Leasehold. The Help to Buy Government Scheme, their way of helping, what I believed to be First-time Buyers, has allowed the six largest companies building these developments to take advantage of the purchasers of the Leases on their homes.
This is not the first time builders had taken advantage of people purchasing leases. In 1989 in the Retirement Sector where McCarthy & Stone (M&S) built Sheltered Housing for the elderly.
An article in the Daily Telegraph, where someone complained to Age Concern that M&S were ripping their granny off over the service charges paid to Peverel the Managing Agent. The complaint against them was the Service Charges were higher than clients had been originally informed.
Reporter Ian Cowie was concerned, in his article he quoted increased charges of between 16 and 50 per cent. In 1991 McCarthy & Stone launched a disastrous High Court Libel action against the Daily Telegraph claiming £800,000 damages over articles about service charges.
After the first article appeared, McCarthy held a “crisis management meeting” with his lawyers, PR and Nigel Bannister, the then head of Peverel. The issue was taken up by former Labour MP for Edinburgh South, Nigel Griffiths who attacked M&S in the House of Commons, and singled out the firm’s founder for criticism. He told the Commons: “Mr McCarthy spoke out in an article called ‘The truth behind the gossip’. It was so full of inaccuracies that it was really the gossip behind the truth. It was a half-fictional account of the workings of M&S that many residents found hard to credit.”
The McCarthy & Stone bandwagon rolled to halt when the High Court learned that M&S had just been fined £2,000 for misleading sales literature in an action launched by the Office of Fair Trading.
Peverel went into Administration in 2011, Electra Investments, and the fund Chamonix, are now again the owners. In 2015 a change of name after a major Price Fixing Scandal, where Peverel became Firstport Retirement. It is said McCarthy saw the current property crash coming in 2008 and sold up in 2003. He now owns Churchill Retirement Living, which is run by his sons.
On Better Retirement Housing website Michael Hollands wrote a blog as follows::
Clive Betts MP chairs the Communities Select Committee which is inquiring into leasehold issues.
I am interested in Leasehold Retirement Complexes of which I have much experience in the way many unfortunate Pensioners are robbed of their valuable savings.
I also have a great experience of the way Peverel now Firstport were preying on the Retirement Sector from 2005, to date, some 13 years later. My development was set up to be the 66 development to be Price Fixed when we were informed our Warden Call System (WCS) was OBSOLETE, meaning Peverel wanted to update the system where a Sister Company would win the tender making excessive profits as the competition had been removed by Price Fixing &Tender Rigging.
A lightening strike later that year took out our WCS, which we then waited 9 months without the call system, even though it was classed as an emergency. We did receive an Insurance payout for an upgraded system, which was £5,000 more than to replace an updated system , so we got a new system with added access to each flat costing £5,000. Peverel Area Manager, I believe cheated the Insurance Company into paying for the full upgrade, why would the Insurance Company pay out for a system that was considered OBSOLETE.
Just one of the hundreds of ways the MA can cheat on Service Charges.
NEWS from today regarding the number of Leasehold Properties.
Government’s ‘flawed data’ underestimates scale of leasehold home scandal by 50% Sam Barker The Telegraph 12/11/2018:- Leasehold groups say the real figure is much higher?
The Government is accidentally underestimating the extent of the leasehold problem because official figures exclude millions of homes, according to new research.
Many leasehold properties require expensive and unfair payments to be made to the freeholder. These can include a yearly ground rent that rises over time, leaving properties unsellable, as well as other high charges.
In December 2017, Sajid Javid, who was the Communities Secretary at the time, said the Government would set ground rent on all new long leases to zero. But in a consultation last month the Government watered this down. It now wants these to be allowed, but capped at £10 a year.
Campaigners for leasehold reform want stronger protections and now claim that government figures underplay the scale of the problem. Official figures published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government last month said there were 4.3m leasehold homes in England, or 18pc of the total housing stock.
However, according to statistics due to be published by the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership (LKP), a pressure group, the true number is 6.5m, 51% higher.
Martin Boyd, of the LKP, said a third of all leasehold homes, or 2.21m, would have some sort of issue with unfair terms. Mr Boyd said the government methodology was “total horsefeathers” and led to figures that underestimated the problem. He said: “Unless you’ve got the right numbers, how do you plan properly?”
The main reason for the gap is because the Government excludes many leasehold social homes. Government figures say there are 244,000 of these, whereas the LKP says there are as many as 1.9m.
Government statistics also said there were no new leasehold homes built in 2016-17. The LKP said there were around 50,000. Jo Derbyshire, of the National Leasehold Campaign, an action group, said elderly and social leaseholders were among the most affected.