The day Brighton Council told me to “moan to someone else”

07 Jan 2012 8 Comments

by pennyforthem in Uncategorized

I love my home. You may have read blogs previously about how I came to live here and how much it means to me. But lateley, my dream home has become a nightmare. Some of you might have recently read about our £10,000 bill from Brighton and Hove City Council. This bill was the latest in a long line of demands for alterations to the building that we live in. We own our flat in a building that the council owns, and rightly so, we pay our contribution to repairs and alterations. Over the past eight years, we’ve had to pay roughly £10,000 for things such as a new roof, new water tanks, a new intercom system, a new electronic door, new fire doors on every floor on top of the yearly maintenence charges, which ammount to about £1000 a year. We’re always found the money and paid when asked.

As some of you might have noticed, we’re in a recession. My husband decided to retrain as a teacher a couple of years ago, and is just about to complete his first year as a (poorly paid) Newly Qualified Teacher. It’s been a tough couple of years financially, with only me earning whilst he trained, but we emptied our savings pot, and made it through. I work in the retail industry, and like almost every other sector, we’ve also felt the pinch, but hopefully the worst is behind us now. I know that many other people are in the same boat, or worse off than us, and have also had to tighten their belts to get them through difficult times.

Earlier this year, we got a bill for £300 for our portion of the bill for a new satellite aerial to be intalled. We have a terrible reception here, and have paid for cable TV fr the entire time we’ve lived here, and have an aerial on our balcony, but now we have to pay an extra £300 so that the people that don’t have cable TV can receive it. We were disgruntled to say the least, but along with a letter stating our complaint, we sent our money.

Then we got a letter saying that the fire regulations in our building have changed, and that our front door is now non-compliant. It doesn’t matter that the council fitted the front door themselves years ago, it is now defunct and has to be replaced. So we declined their offer of fitting a cheap plastic one (that others who have had it fitted say repeatedly break and are draughty) for £800 and we spent the same ammount of money on a nicer wooden one.

Then a story broke in the Argus. It said that the council were spending millions of pounds citywide on replacing lifts in it’s buildings. We were worried, but thought that it couldn’t affect us, as we’d had no letter through declaring this intention in our building. But sure enough, the next day, we got a letter telling us that we would have to pay £10,000 within the next few years to replace the lifts. We weren’t even given the courtesy of receiving this letter before it broke in the local news. Our first reaction was to get quotes from several companies (Thyssen etc) for the job in question, and the quotes came back to us at least a third cheaper, but sometimes by half. We wrote to the council, and asked why this was, and they wrote back and said because Liftec (the company that got the lift contract) offered better long term options. When we wrote back and asked them why we would need better long term care when the lifts were brand new and shouldn’t need anything other than the most basic maintenece, we were stonewalled. As we were when we wrote back after every single one of their responses asking more quetions, or arguing that “because we said so” wasn’t a valid answer.

And then once more, we got another letter telling us that we’d be paying £220 for a new lighting system throughout the building. We were upset at yet another bill being passed on to us, but were begining to feel more and more helpless. Once the lights had been fitted, and we saw how poorly they operated, (only staying on for 30 seconds, leaving us in the dark, not being sensitive enough) we decided to write one last letter. We had tried to reason with the council, and we were stonewalled. We tried to get the media involved to see if we could rouse interest in a huge, uneccesary overspend, but we failed. We tried writing to different people, but never got anywhere. We decided to try and appeal to their sensitive sides, to try and let them know how desperate we were becoming. This is the last letter we wrote:

Dear Mr Dennison

Thank you for your letter dated 15th December, which yet again made me furious by your failure to engage with me on the issues I’ve raised. I give up trying to communicate with you about this, as you appear utterly unable to talk to me on a human level about my very real and upsetting concerns about the way you deal with these issues. All I’ve had from anyone at the council is stonewalling, misdirection and legal-speak when I had hoped that someone, somewhere would just LISTEN and understand and at least try to sympathise and meet us halfway.

You don’t seem to get it, do you? This isn’t a council building. This isn’t a programme of maintenance for bricks and mortar and machinery. This is MY HOME. This is a home that I used to love. This is a home in which I met my wife, set up my adult life and have enjoyed for almost a decade. A home that has deep emotional resonance – a place of laughter and tears, a place of fun and work and joy and sadness. A place of parties and of arguments. It’s a place I hoped to bring up my children and a place where I need to feel safe and happy and secure, where I’ve spent the happiest times of my life.

The council ride roughshod over this. They choose jobs seemingly at random and over which I have no control and no say. You claim to consult, but you keep proving yourselves incapable of listening. You’re like automatons – resistance to your works is futile and everything that you do is good. The consultation is only ever which of the high costs I should pay, never whether it needs to be done and never when it should be done.

Please, just this once, try to see it from my point of view. Imagine you’re sitting in your home, and a roof contractor turns up. He tells you that your roof needs fixing. You’ve not been told this before, no-one warned you and no-one explains what the problem is. You don’t get to shop around for quotes, you don’t get to question the costs because the roof contractor blandly tells you it’s been done already and done properly and that he’s right. His answer to your every question is “I’m right, please stop asking”. He tells you that he’s not the cheapest, but there’ll be on-going maintenance. You fail understand what could possible need maintenance, because no-one you know has on-going maintenance for their homes, but tough because the contractor insists. He then does some work on your roof and hits you with a bill for £5000.

He then does the same for your TV aerial. You’ve haven’t got Sky and never want it, but he installs it anyway and charges you £300. He refuses to explain why. All the people who wanted Sky already have it, but they now have to get rid of their dishes because the contractor is about to enforce a planning law that has been ignored for 22 years.

Then he does the same for water tanks. That’ll be £3000 please. He suddenly says you need to pay for a new security door that you didn’t know was a problem. He marches you down to the timber yard and makes you buy and install a new front door. There’s works to some doors that caused an overspend on the annual maintenance. Except spending £12000 more than you estimated isn’t an overspend in the council’s world, is it?

And all of this happens at random times and each thing comes as a surprise. You might’ve just spent your savings on a holiday. Maybe you needed a new kitchen? Tough. The contractor is god and when he arrives the work is done (probably badly) and you must pay. Put it off until next year? Put it off at least until we’re out of the worst recession for 50 years? Ha! You’ll be lucky. Kerching!

Then he hits you with the big one: £10,000 please. Oh, and a couple of hundred quid for new lights. Yes, I know the old lights came on at night and light up the place and I know the lights could be replaced at any time in the next decade. But no, right after the £10,000 seems appropriate doesn’t it?

Do you not see? Do you still not get it? It just keeps coming and I have no say, no control. I’m powerless and you’re bleeding me dry. I don’t earn much money. The lift bill will wipe out my savings, and max out my mortgage. It comes on top of all the things above (and more). What happens next year? What happens when you suddenly decide to replace the perfectly serviceable windows or put down some nice new flooring? You won’t even talk to me about it, you won’t even explain or discuss or engage. You just trot out the line that everything is right and proper and the extraordinary costs are “value for money”. Well, it’s not your money is it? No wonder you don’t actually care. But it IS my money and it IS my home and I care deeply.

At the moment I can see no alternative but to sell up and leave. I’m considering my options, but the stress of a letter from the council landing on my mat is simply too much, with the worry that the next one will drive me into debts I can’t afford. But if I do decide to leave, I want you to know this: YOU will have driven me out of a home that I love. YOU will have forced me out because you refuse allow me the courtesy of discussion on a human level. You’ve turned the best decision I ever made in moving here into a stressful nightmare.

In short: you’re turning the home that I love into somewhere I’m beginning to hate. And that is unforgivable.

Merry Christmas

We finally got our response from Mr Dennison today, as a message via Twitter. It simply said

you will be glad to know i have left the council now so you can moan to someone else… have fun

So that’s it. I’ve sobbed and I’ve got angry and now I feel helpless. If it is considered “moaning” to try and explain to someone our fear that we’ll lose our home over unreasonable, unneccesary, expensive bills turning up on our doorstep, then there really is nothing else I can do.

N.B – if you want to read my husband’s accounts of what’s been happening, and see the tweets themselves please go to www.electro-web.co.uk (his own website).

THERE IS AN UPDATE TO THIS STORY, PLEASE SEE THIS LINK http://pennyforthem.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/update-the-day-brighton-council-told-me-to-moan-to-someone-else/

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