Leasehold issue - need advice

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We own a flat in a block of 4 flats. It's a leasehold agreement. One year ago the tenants in another flat (owned by the freeholder) had BT fibre internet installed - to do this they had to drill a hole in our wall and lay a cable across our garden. The wall and garden are owned by us - they are not shared. The cable has been left just lying on top of the soil - it doesn't look great and has been getting in the way of us planting etc. It's not been put under the soil nor tacked to the fence. I had asked the freeholder to sort this out and they asked me to work with their letting agent, which I have been doing for over 1 year now despite not wanting to but in the interests of resolving it I did. I wrote to the freeholder today to say that I've had enough of trying to resolve this issue, I don't think I should have been spending the time trying to resolve it in the first place anyway and there's been no resolution with the fibre broadband provider. The freeholder now wants me to raise a complaint to the provider which I am refusing to do as I don't see why I should be involved in trying to sort this out any further and that responsibility should lie with them. They have said I am being unreasonable and that I should work with them to resolve. I'm really at my wits end here, I've had enough of trying to resolve something that was done to my garden and property without my permission! Does anyone know what rights legally I have here? Or any sensible suggestions on how to resolve this?

It's the freeholder who needs to raise the complaint, how awkward of them not to get it resolved and say that you are being unreasonable !

Thank you for your response! They were starting to make me think I was going crazy!

IANAL

• do you have home insurance that includes legal cover? They can often help especially with issues which are causing simething unsightly that could affect the value of the property.

• you may need a court order to force someone to take action but it is not 100% clear who should take action.

• it may be that the cable company would not normally be involved in digging up a channel through your front garden to bury the cable? Perhaps if the customer having the cable installed is the owner of the garden they would be expected to have the channel dig in advance? But given that the customer didn't own the land they definitely couldn't have touched it - imagine the legal cases if they regularly dug up someone's prize roses in order to get cable to an upstairs neighbour!

• probably what should have happened would have been your neighbour getting your permission in advance and arranging for a channel to be dug. Obviously this didn't happen.

• whilst you are quite right that you shouldn't have to deal with the cable provider, and in fact it's probably not their fault or their problem but your neighbour's responsibility, the quickest way to a resolution is probably to attempt to contact them anyway. This will result in either them refusing to deal with you because you aren't their customer and telling you to get your neighbour to call, or telling you that it's not their policy to dusturb garden soil and the customer should have sorted this. Either way you will then be armed to return to your neighbour and demand action.

Possibly this isn't helpful, but it would be a shame if the cable got damaged whilst you were doing some gardening wouldn't it? Then I would refuse permission for them to come into your garden to fix it.
You've tried being reasonable and that hasn't worked, so maybe being unreasonable is the way to go,

Thank you, this is all really helpful.

I can't tell you how tempting this is!