Islington Leaseholders AssociationHelen Cagnoni (ILA director) letter to the tribune on Council broken promises to return Council Housing back to Islington Councils’ direct responsibility at the completion of ‘Decent Homes’ work,, expensive delays in advertising for a so-called ‘independent tenants’ advisor’, and avoiding responsibility for their full statutory duties, and ILA preventing leaseholders from being overcharged..more
21 April 2011 | By Carl Brown
Islington Council is asking tenants to contribute to a review of its housing management services.
The London authority is to appoint a residents’ panel to inform the review and to appoint an independent tenant advisor to seek residents’ views. More..
From: Islington Tribnune 1.4.11
Contractors working on behalf of Homes for Islington (HfI) carried out the repairs in 2006 over three months on the Blenheim estate at Marlborough Road, replacing windows with double glazing, repairing the roof and other common areas. Yara Spinelly, 56, had threatened to go to court rather than pay the full £28,000 for her share of the work on her estate because she had never received a final bill. more….
more local stories here
Bemerton leaseholders could lose their homes if estate is demolished
By ROB BLEANEY, islington Gazzette Wednesday, March 30, 2011
MORE than 250 leaseholders on an estate earmarked for demolition could be forced to give up their homes or face being saddled with huge mortgages for flats in the swanky new blocks. more…
more local stories here
A- Short answer “as many as necessary”. Long answer here.
Audit committee 22.3.11 report
Various ILA members & leaseholders attended the Audit committee (AC) meeting reviewing reports on HFI’s “Quality of PFI Refurbishment Works” & and the “quality of Partners’ assessments of challenges made by leaseholders’ to their final bills for refurbishment works to their homes.”(LCR).
The meeting heard that in the AC’s opinion, everything was mostly fine, and considered Partners work in general as passing the council approved standard (availability standard) despite the fact that HFI inspectors only inspected 10% of the properties in the PFI2 contract and identified on average issues with all the properties they inspected (271 issue on 216 properties).
HFI also said that they could not inspect any more of the 4000 PFI2 properties, and refused to allocate any more of their 800 staff to property inspection and monitoring the availability standard on this PFI2 £426million contract. The report also says its impossible to judge whether Partners represent Value for money. This was accepted as fine by the AC.
Another (LCR) report said that 26 out of the 30 challanges made by leaseholders were successful with an average reduction in bills being £.1.4k and concluded that Partners treatment of challenges was fair, and made some recomendations to improve and speed up the process. ( full details in report via weblink below)
ILA Chair Dr Brian Potter called “the report a white wash” and invited the chair “Cllr Kelly” to attend the next leaseholders meeting—the invitation was not accepted—instead he asked if I would attend a HFI surgery!
Dr Potter said he was happy to attend any meeting with our councilors but without HFI present—since these meeting were at policy level—and HFI did not set the policy for Islington—The council did…!!!
you can download these reports ( all approved by the Audit committee) here
Partners have created a new “Leaseholder Service Charge Challenge” leaflet that specifically deals with service charge disputes, and is in addition to the ”Service Alerts & Formal Complaints” procedure
A leaseholder member of the partners residents forum will be discussing these with Partners next week and hope to get some amendments made, to clarify and improve the position for Partners leaseholders.
Copies are enclosed on following page, if any (Partners) Leaseholders have any comments on the leaflets or proposed amendments could you please add them to following form (click ‘more’ & scroll down) by next wednesday 23.3.11- sorry for short notice. And these will be passed on. Thanks. more…
‘Proposed Repair/Maintenance etc. work list 2011-2012’ spreadsheet which Leaseholders may wish to check.
The Partners / PFI Compensation procedure – What it is & How it works. It’s different from the HFI procedure below.
Partners Leaseholders will be subject to a major works & decoration cycle of 7 years which is intended to provide well maintained homes to the availability Standards. More…
Dear Islington Leaseholders,
THURSDAY, 27 January 2011
7.30 pm
Audit Committee room 4
Town Hall,
Upper Street,
Islington.
Come along and hear whether you’ve been overcharged?
Call for ‘independent’ body to investigate housing overcharging allegations
http://www.islingtontribune.com/news/2011/jan/call-independent-body-investigate-housing-overcharging-allegations
Some leaseholder have queried:
Will we or won’t we hear the full results of the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ special investigation ?
Why wasn’t the 1st phase continued by Pwc but by the very HfI Officer responsible for Performance instead ?
Why didn’t the independent skilled Internal Audit Team undertake the work ?
Is this especially odd as important Leaseholder financial issues were identified ?
The council say “At the last audit committee meeting, the report into PFI confirmed there had been no fraud – but the council were concerned to learn there had been overcharging of leaseholders in some cases.
The committee asked for the original sample of 20 properties investigated by PWC to be extended, and so we instructed HFI to investigate a further sample of randomly-selected cases. The results of this investigation will be reported back to the audit committee.
The report going to audit committee next week on January 27th will be public and will give an indication of the nature of the work.”