Latest news with #southwestLondon
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
‘My flat's lift is permanently broken. Can I get compensation as a wheelchair user?'
Do you have a legal question to put to Gary? Email askalawyer@ or use the form at the bottom of the page. Dear Gary, I own a flat on the second floor of a block in south west London. The block has a lift, which is invaluable because I have a spinal cord injury and use a wheelchair for daily living. However, the lift has been out of action for six months now, and I have received a letter from the management company stating they are about to issue a further Section 20 notice to initiate repairs. The first repair has been unsuccessful, and once a new repairer has been identified, I suspect it will take another 30 to 45 days to complete. This is really impacting my quality of living, as I cannot get to my flat in my chair. I am relying on a rented chair in my flat while I leave my own chair downstairs to use when I go out. I can just about manage to use stairs, but it takes about 20 minutes to go up and down. I cannot carry anything, so am reliant on others helping me. Do I have any recourse against the landlord or management company, and can I deduct anything from the service charge to compensate for this significant inconvenience and difficulty? I would really appreciate understanding if I have any rights in this matter. – Pete, by email Dear Pete, You certainly do have legal rights in this situation, and they are being breached. Indeed, forgive me for saying this, but I cannot help wondering if it was the lift in the office building occupied by the management company that had broken down, it may have been repaired much sooner than six months. You should not have to put up with this, so let me help get a plan of action sorted, backed up with some legal clout. In legal terms, the starting point is your lease. As a leaseholder, you will have a lease for your flat carved out of the freehold. This should include terms which require the freeholder (aka landlord) or management company acting on behalf of the landlord to keep common parts of the block of flats (such as the lift) in good and proper working order. Six months of inaction and a failed repair attempt suggests they are falling short of this duty. In that sense, you have clear legal rights which have been breached. A further significant legal issue in this case is your disability. You are a protected person under the Equality Act 2010. This imposes a duty on service providers (including landlords and managing agents) to make reasonable adjustments to avoid putting disabled people at a substantial disadvantage. We must acknowledge replacing a lift is not exactly like replacing a broken light bulb, in that it takes a certain amount of logistics to organise a lift engineer and time to carry out the repair. But given the length of the delay and the severe impact on your daily life, I say you can reasonably argue that they have not done enough quickly enough. As such, there is on the face of it a case of indirect discrimination and breach of the Equality Act. Indirect discrimination occurs when a policy which applies in the same way to everyone (here, no lift available) has an impact which particularly disadvantages people with a protected characteristic. It can lead to a compensation claim, particularly if you have repeatedly made the managing agents aware of your needs and they have consistently failed to respond adequately. If you have not done so already, I would therefore urge you to write to the managing agent formally, outlining the impact of the ongoing situation on your quality of life, referencing your rights under the Equality Act, and asking for compensation and a firm timeline for repair. You also ask whether these breaches of your legal rights mean you can withhold the service charge, including the additional payment being sought under the Section 20 notice. For readers not familiar with leasehold living, a Section 20 notice is when a landlord has an extraordinary expense (like a lift repair), and is seeking extra payment on top of the usual service charge to cover it. I would actually tread carefully about not paying your service charge. You certainly cannot unilaterally decide to reduce or withhold payments. Doing so could leave you exposed to legal action for arrears with the ultimate sanction for that being forfeiture of the lease which would in effect mean you losing your flat. So, let's not go there. However, you may well be able to challenge part of the service charge on the basis that you are not receiving the services you are paying for – namely, lift maintenance. I would also ask for an explanation as to why the first lift repair did not work, and what has been paid out for the failed repair. In other words, scrutinise whether the management company are acting diligently in their role. Any challenge to the service charge being demanded would need to go through the First-tier Tribunal (property chamber), which deals with leasehold disputes. It is not necessarily quick, but it is designed to be accessible without the need for a solicitor. It seems to me you have been incredibly patient to date, and it is now time to take action. You should not be inconvenienced like this any longer, so let us hope the management company gets things moving soon. And in the right direction, namely up and down in the lift. And to be pragmatic, a claim for compensation under the Equality Act may well offset the service charge you are (understandably) reluctant to pay.
South China Morning Post
21-07-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Wimbledon courts wealthy homebuyers amid decline in London home prices
Wimbledon , the London suburb best known for being home to the tennis tournament of the same name, is resisting the decline of home prices in the UK capital, according to agents. With celebrities such as tennis legend Boris Becker and X Factor judge and executive producer Simon Cowell among the list of past and present residents, Wimbledon has outperformed the rest of prime southwest London in terms of pricing, according to Savills. In the second quarter, home prices in Wimbledon's prime district grew 0.6 per cent from the first, while in broader prime southwest London , they declined 0.2 per cent. And on an annualised basis, Wimbledon home prices recorded a 3.4 per cent increase in the second quarter from a year earlier, while the rest of prime southwest London saw prices rise by 0.5 per cent. From 2020 to 2025, Wimbledon home prices climbed 15.8 per cent versus 8.1 per cent for the rest of prime southwest London, according to the property consultancy. 'Buyers often perceive Wimbledon to be fantastically positioned between London and the country,' said Corey Askew, the director and head of Savills' Wimbledon office. 'For those living more centrally who had been toying with the idea of moving further out with their family, Wimbledon has been an attractive option in giving them the best of both worlds: green spaces and easy access to central London.' One of the area's most attractive drawing cards was the All England Lawn Tennis Club and the annual Wimbledon Championships, which is held from late June to early July, said Christopher Burton, the head of Wimbledon sales at Knight Frank.
The Guardian
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges review – ‘I miss his love. Oh god, I loved him so much'
Three years ago Amol Rajan's father died unexpectedly of pneumonia. Ever since, as the BBC journalist and broadcaster puts it at the start of Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges, 'I've been in a bit of a funk.' I get it. As a fellow second-generation kid of Indian immigrants (and journalist from southwest London to boot) I, too, have been in a funk since my mother died (two years before Rajan's father, at the same age, 76, as him). In Rajan's case, his grief plunges him into a search for belonging and an attempt to reconnect with his Hindu roots. Where might such a quest take him? To the largest gathering of humanity on earth. The Kumbh Mela, where over 45 days at the start of this year half a billion Hindus gathered on the sacred banks of the Ganges. The question Rajan poses, and it's a pertinent one for many, is whether 'an atheist like me can benefit from a holy pilgrimage'. This is the deeply personal premise of what turns into an intimate, moving, entertaining yet oddly depoliticised documentary considering both the day job(s) of its presenter and the fact that the Kumbh Mela is the world's biggest Hindu festival, funded by a prime minister whose success is built on his identity as a Hindu nationalist strongman. Only once is Narendra Modi mentioned, halfway through, and it's in the context of his government investing £600m in the biggest Kumbh Mela to date: a mega-event owing to a specific celestial alignment that occurs once in 144 years. We know, watching Rajan's film in the aftermath, that at least 30 people were killed and many more injured in terrifying crowd crushes. As much as he is spiritually shaken, even altered, by the experience, he's also traumatised by what he sees. 'The people in front of me were just stepping on women,' Rajan says after he and his fixer are forced to turn back due to reports of a stampede 800 metres ahead. 'Lots of very poor, very old, very fragile, possibly quite sick women … they were like human debris on the floor. Kids as well.' Before he flies to Delhi, Rajan returns to his childhood. Born in Kolkata, he was three years old when his family moved to southwest London in 1986. On the three-year anniversary of his dad's death, he goes home to Tooting with his mum. 'This was my field of dreams,' he says wistfully as they drive past the pitch where he played cricket as a boy. 'You were very chubby … pleasantly plump,' his mum recalls with a giggle. The loving, mischief-laden sparring between mother and son make for the most touching moments. Like when Rajan's mother watches him flip a dosa and quips: 'You are already getting spiritually enhanced!' Or when he jokily asks, 'Do you want me to come back a mystical yogi?' and his mum gets serious and says, 'No. I want you to be calmer, to take life in your stride.' What emerges, above all, is how grief-stricken Rajan is by his father's death. 'I've avoided thinking about him because I found it too painful,' he admits, sitting on a bench with his mum overlooking the Thames where they scattered his ashes (the exact same stretch where we scattered my mother's ashes). Weeping over a framed portrait of his father, the rawness of the loss overwhelms him. 'I really miss that smile,' Rajan says. 'I miss his love. Oh god, I loved him so much.' In India, the documentary ups its pace as Rajan heads for the city of Prayagraj, joining the millions of Hindu pilgrims seeking moksha (liberation from the cycle of birth and death and the end of suffering). He spends the night in an ashram with sadhus who, hilariously, stay up on their phones watching YouTube and WhatsApping videos to one another. He's astonished by the magnitude of the megacity temporarily built on 15 square miles of flood plain to house the Kumbh Mela – the 30 pontoon bridges, 250 miles of road and 150,000 toilets. He's just as blown away by all the men who look like his father. The pilgrimage to the Sangam – the sacred confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati river – takes three days. Along the way Rajan, a congenial, very English guide, becomes more and more introspective. He puts on orange robes, talks to pilgrims in the smattering of Hindi he's barely spoken since childhood, and begins to feel a 'tremendous affinity and fellow feeling with others'. It's moving and subtly handled. By the end Rajan has failed to make it to the Sangam because of the dangerous crowd surges. Instead he performs an ancient funeral rite for his father, finds a safe spot to enter the Ganges, releases his dad's soul and plunges underwater. Has the atheist been healed by the largest gathering of people ever recorded in history? Kind of. 'There's a power in doing something that a lot of people have done for a very long time,' is how he carefully puts it, high as a kite. What Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges expresses most powerfully of all, certainly to this fellow bereaved Hindu, are the irresolvable particularities, and commonalities, of second-generation grief. Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
