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Politicians warned repayment plans were disastrous
• IN May, Councillor Barbara Smith and Islington Council leader Councillor Terry Stacy signed off the leaseholder repayment options. Why didn’t they ask officers: what are the full adverse impacts for leaseholders signing up? Why haven’t councillors Stacy or Smith replied to questions in the Tribune or, better, suspended these disastrous options for a rethink? In July, at the Options launch, a leaseholder publicly made Cllr Smith fully aware of the horrendous impact. Why, only after that did Cllr Smith finally ask a borough solicitor basic questions about the full legal consequences upon leaseholders?
Homes for Islington (HfI) officer Doug Goldring thinks all is well, and a chat with the bill issuer is a great replacement for proper legal challenge and scrutiny (Charges can be challenged even if you have pay plan, September 18). Anyone having tried that would at best respond with derision.
Why this silence from our councillors? Are our elected representatives incapable of sorting out long-standing problems costing millions and so are going along with these Options legally gagging leaseholders footing the bills?
Mrs Newsom
Member, Islington Leaseholder Association
• I AM distressed by HfI attempts to stymie bids by leaseholders to challenge the quality, cost and reasonableness of its repair contracts through the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal (LVT). HfI has consistently lost at the LVT over the years. But instead of addressing issues of poor quality and overcharging raised at the LVT it has opted to try and silence its critics.
By challenging bills, leaseholders provide a valuable service to the community by highlighting poor-quality work and overcharging by HfI’s contractors. Islington tenants as well as leaseholders pay the cost of this overcharging through higher rents and poorer services.
In the light of endemic price fixing in the building trade, including many of HfI’s contractors, would its legal department’s energies not be better spent trying to recover some of the amounts contractors overcharged rather than devising ways to silence leaseholders? And shouldn’t HfI concentrate on obtaining value for money and policing its contractors rather than persecuting leaseholders and imposing spurious conditions in its instalment plans?
Cllr Mick O’Sullivan
Labour, Finsbury Park
• HOMES for Islington’s payment plans for leaseholder bills were pinched wholesale by Councillor Terry Stacy, then executive member for housing, from those pioneered by Harrow Council.
When presented by Cllr Stacy at a meeting of the executive, the payment proposals contained no clause making it compulsory that a leaseholder would waive the rights of application to the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal. Nor did this clause appear on publicity material about the payment options put out by HfI. The crucial clause makes its first appearance on the bill submitted to the leaseholder.
Given this sequence of events, it seems reasonable to conclude that it was not the political intention to impose such an unfair term. Who took it upon themselves to make the change?
Michael Read
Islington Leaseholder Action Group
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