Name-changed for reasons that will become obvious but a regular poster.
I'm getting increasingly depressed/worried/frantic about the situation I find myself in due to the way my local authority acts.
I own a lovely flat in a historic building in a city. The local authority passed legislation about 30 years ago which allows it to force communal repairs on blocks of buildings and to have them carried out by its chosen, favoured contractors. This has been mired in controversy and criminal charges brought against various ex-employees for fraud alleging bribes, backhanders, money-laundering and so on, but all charges were dropped.
I've had 7 communal statutory repairs notices on my building, totalling nearly £30,000. They get sprung on you with no warning and some of them were questionable to say the least. You are expected to pay up instantly, as soon as you receive the notice, and theres an admin charge of 15% added. Basically, much of the work hasn't been done properly or at all, my roof still leaks, the door entry system still doesn't work, the communal entrance is still a mess and unnecessary work has been done. FOI requests have come back with sentences crossed out "for economic reasons", and the local authority has recently issued a press release that people who complain will be blacklisted by them. All of us in the building are having to get reputable trades to redo the work supposed to have been done. We have never had any problems getting the neighbours to pay up for work so we have no idea where these statutory repairs are coming from. Mind you, other buildings have faced bills of over £100,000 per flat!
The local authority has spent millions on paying auditors and lawyers to defend the claims made against them. Saying that, virtually all which have reached court have been successful. Various managers have been sacked and the local authority has refused to reveal the amount of any payoffs they received. It has recently announced yet another review of the scheme to cost more millions which is written in such Council-esque gobbldeygook it makes your heart sink at more of the same.
The local authority has failed in other areas too - a young girl died at a badly maintained school because a wall fell on her, baby's ashes have gone missing at crematoriums, public facilities are badly maintained because the authority wants to sell them off to its preferred private developers at profit, every public project it undertakes comes in years late and at many times the original cost, roads are crumbling, and meanwhile the former corrupt employees set up as private contractors and do the same again because trading standards do nothing about them and they seem strangely immune to any criminal charges. I'm convinced there are some very corrupt individuals in high places who have a vested interest in keeping this under wraps.
Its so depressing. I want to move away, I want to live somewhere with a local authority that has just minor, quite innocent levels of incompetence! I'm paying out my hard earned salary on keeping these people's nice little earner going and there seems to be nothing that can be done about it.