Lambeth Homeowners Association held it’s Annual General Meeting on the 11th of October 2025.
At the AGM LHA Chair Anthony gave the annual report, then committee member Alasdair gave a presentation on his experience at the First Tier Tribunal, and then on service charges and how to challenge them.
If you missed it, you can watch a recording here. The slides are also available here.
The session was quite long, so the YouTube video has chapters. In the service charge section Alasdair references template emails you can send and the text is available in the slides.
To all LHA members
The Annual General Meeting for 2025 will be held 10am on Saturday 11 October 2025 at St Matthew’s TRA Hall, 10 St Matthew’s Road, SW2 1HN (map)
Chair Anthony Winn’s report is also below:
Report from the Chair for 2024-2025
There is new Leasehold Reform legislation coming before parliament shortly. The proposals for reform are many but superficial and fail to address the main issues. We have been working to produce our own document that we hope will be taken into consideration. In a nutshell, we are pushing for legislation that will oblige landlords to provide full transparency to service charges and major works bills and to section 20 Consultations.
In normal commercial practice bills from contractors have to be signed off by quantity surveyors before being paid, which does not happen in Lambeth. Our point is to force landlords to show that their charges are reasonable at the time of consultation in section 20 cases and at the time of billing. At present it is the other way about, in that the law puts the burden of proof that the charges are unreasonable on the leaseholder, which is very hard to do when landlords do not disclose information. Robyn Maybank and Bruce McGregor have put in a lot of time compiling our presentation.
One of our committee members, Alasdair Ross, has led a group of 12 other leaseholders on his estate to challenge Lambeth over huge bills in a five day trial at the First Tier Tribunal. The bundle of documents in the case came to 7300 pages and he spent many days compiling spreadsheets and gathering documents in evidence, as well as doing his own job. During the trial the judge made several scathing comments about Lambeth’s presentation of its case and the incompetence of its management. Judgement is expected at the end of the month.
Trying to take Lambeth to account, three of us have spoken at Lambeth’s Housing Scrutiny Panel and Corporate Committee, which deals with governance . A retired accountant has been energetic in helping us to point out serious auditing failures within Lambeth.
Thirdly, our Secretary has been guiding some members with particularly difficult cases involving large bills.
We are not alone in campaigning for leasehold reform. SHAC (Social Housing Action Campaign) are a strong active nation-wide group who have gathered support from a number of MPs. We are also working with Harry Scoffin of Free Leaseholders, who has been very helpful to us.
The recently introduced WhatsApp group has been very busy, but to work well users need to keep to specific problems they need help with, or to offer constructive advice. The forum is still there and is easier to use when searching for advice on specific matters.
We are a small committee of busy people and cannot deal with everyone’s problems. We would encourage you to use the forum and WhatsApp group in the first instance, where members can help each other with relatively minor problems. The committee keep an eye on it and will intervene if they can help.
We would welcome offers from members to help, particularly if they have skills in website management, project management or accounting.
I would like to thank the following: Alasdair Ross for his extraordinary work with helping people understand their service charges and how to deal with them, as well as running the WhatsApp group; Dan Calladine for keeping the newsletter and forum going and Bruce McGregor for his behind the scenes work helping people with serious major works overcharging problems and for guiding on housing law matters. Robyn Maybank, Tracey Gregory and Maureen Simpson have also been generous with their time offering advice.
Finally, I would like to thank those who have given up their time to distribute leaflets in an effort to recruit more members. We now have over a thousand signed up members, but there are 9000 leasehold properties in Lambeth, so we need to add to our numbers to give weight to our representations both to Lambeth and to Government.
Antony Wynn,
Chair, Lambeth Homeowners Association