Hello, hoping for some advice. I live in a ground floor Victorian maisonette which is a share of freehold with the upstairs flat. Upstairs flat is uninhabited but the owner occasionally pops in/we contact him by email (not phone as he doesn’t answer us). He’s quite a difficult guy and slow to reply and has previously said some things about the previous owners of our flat and how he believes they were trying to sabotage his flat, so we have to tread quite carefully with him. We weren’t aware of any issues between him and the previous owners before we bought but it transpires there were legal cases between them, although we don’t know the details. Tbh if we’d know we’d have thought twice about buying but we were naive first time buyers.
Our problem at the moment is his garden, which backs on to our kitchen and bathroom, has rats. It’s really overgrown in there and there are bags of rubble which we have seen them coming in and out of (the fence between the gardens is lower than waist height so very easy to see in). We’ve contacted him multiple times asking him to address the problem ASAP as obviously we’re terrified of them coming in to the house, but he’s just not responding and we’re getting more and more anxious as I’m about to have a baby so even more reason to not want rats in our home!
Does anyone have any advice on what we can do to get him to sort it out, I tried contacting citizens advice who weren’t much help, short of just getting pest control in myself I don’t know what else to do, and obviously I don’t really want to do this because I don’t want to be accused of meddling with his property. Thanks in advance and sorry for the essay!