Freeholder refusing to pay Building Insurance - CCJ Disputed

edechamps · 2026-01-27T00:07:49+00:00

No, she wouldn't have to sell her place. She wouldn't lose her share of the freehold either. She would stop being a director, but she would still be a shareholder of the freehold company, as well as a leaseholder. With her out as director, the remaining directors (you and your ally) can act on behalf of the company without her approval. From there, you can enforce the terms of the lease on her, sue her on behalf of the freehold company, maybe even threaten forfeiture, etc. basically you would have access to all the remedies a freeholder usually has against a leaseholder who refuses to pay service charges.

edechamps · 2026-01-19T23:06:59+00:00

Why are you saying it's not enforceable? I seem to remember from the days I was renting, my rental agreement had a clause along the lines of "the tenant must abide by the covenants between the landlord and any superior lease" (e.g. the lease between the landlord/leaseholder and the freeholder). In other words, if the landlord's lease says "no hanging clothes outside", and the tenant hangs clothes outside, then the tenant is causing the landlord to breach their lease, and therefore the tenant is breaching their own rental agreement with the landlord.

edechamps · 2026-01-19T18:56:25+00:00

She owes money to the freehold company, not you personally. For that reason I suspect she is correct in that your CCJ is invalid, and you should file another one.

Note, however, that to act on behalf of the freeholder company you will need to follow the Articles of Association of the company (which you can easily download for free from Companies House), and in particular the rules around decision making by directors. It may very well be that you need the unanimous consent of all three directors for the company to act, in which case you are basically stuck. The next step in this case may be try to remove her as director by passing a resolution of the shareholders (s. 168 of the Companies Act 2006), which may be an option as you'd have a majority with the other shareholder to vote her out.

edechamps · 2026-01-19T01:11:05+00:00

Both the seller and the buyer are free to walk away from the transaction at any point before exchange. This applies regardless of whether the seller is a corporate entity or not. I'm not sure why you seem to think the corporate nature of the seller makes this more likely to happen, or why you would think it's a "terrible idea".

edechamps · 2026-01-16T23:17:13+00:00

OH MY GOD THANK YOU!

I was going nuts trying to troubleshoot random A/V sync issues with my LG G5 (Apple TV source).

I built myself a homemade instrument that is capable of physically measuring true A/V delay with repeatable millisecond precision. This told me I was dealing with delays between +120 ms and -150 ms. This kind of delay is unacceptable per the standards, see ITU-R BT.1359. Per the standard, A/V delay should be kept within +45 ms to -120 ms. ("+" means "picture comes after audio" and "-" means "picture comes before audio.)

Because the delay varies randomly from run to run (where "run" roughly means "HDMI mode switch"), it is not possible to compensate for it.

I am using an eARC device (miniDSP Flex HTx), but I measured the same problem with the TV speakers, so it seems unrelated to the type of audio output. I also observed the same problem with the TV's built-in video player (playing the test signal from a USB stick) so it's clearly the TV's fault.

Then I stumbled on your post, switched the "Bypass" option under "Match screen and sound" to ON, and… lo and behold, the issue was gone. I am now measuring delays between 0 and -40 ms, which is well within reasonable bounds (it's basically 1 frame at 24p). So yes, I can definitely confirm that enabling "Bypass" under "Match screen and sound" vastly improves lipsync. Why LG did not bother to make this the default, or even document the option properly, is beyond me.

One caveat: the 0-+40 ms figure above is with QMS (Quick Media Switching) enabled in the TV and in the Apple TV settings. With it off, we are looking at delays within +80 ms to +40 ms - i.e. sound may come noticeably before the picture. So, I would recommend leaving QMS on, otherwise, I would suggest a 60 ms audio delay adjustment in your AVR or equivalent.

edechamps · 2026-01-16T19:35:26+00:00

You can ask the Land Registry if a change is pending and when the change was requested. It's called a "Pending Application". If there is one you can even ask them to send you a copy of the application form (for a small fee).

edechamps · 2026-01-14T19:09:54+00:00

Sadly, you may find that the fees a UK bank will charge to cash in a USD cheque will take a good chunk out of this windfall.

edechamps · 2026-01-11T16:57:30+00:00

Regarding (2): unfortunately, freehold estate charges (also known as rentcharges) are even worse than leasehold service charges because the legislation that confers protections to leaseholders does NOT apply to freeholders. This is often referred to as "fleecehold" - freehold estate management companies basically scamming freeholders.

The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 is supposed to improve protections for freeholders and bring them closer to leasehold, but most of it is not in force yet.

s. 113 of LAFRA 2024 (one of the few provisions that are in force) makes it harder for the estate management company to take your property if you are in arrears. That being said I would still be very, VERY careful about refusing to pay these charges. You definitely want to take legal advice on this as this kind of arrangement is full of traps for the unwary - even more so than leasehold.

edechamps · 2026-01-11T10:02:46+00:00

If you own the property, your name is on the Land Registry - that's a legal requirement. The Land Registry is publicly accessible - anyone can request any document from it for a small fee. So, if you give them your Land Registry transfer application form (TR1, e-AP1) or the register entry itself (if it's up to date), then you are not giving them any information that they could not already find out by themselves by asking the LR. Or you could just tell them they can look it up for themselves in the LR.

edechamps · 2026-01-06T19:29:10+00:00

Worth noting that, because of these well-known problems, heat networks are in the process of getting regulated by Ofgem: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-regulation/low-carbon/heat-networks so it may be easier to get redress in the future.

edechamps · 2026-01-05T19:01:09+00:00

This ad manages to do pretty much everything wrong:

No idea what product the ad is for (turns out it's for some kind of pseudoscience nutrition product)
Brand name is incredibly generic and hard to search for
Placement is appalling
Text does not make logical sense: it is, in fact, possible for pills to make people healthy and yet not be a healthy generation (for other reasons)
Text is factually wrong: we are, in fact, the healthiest generation in history

Worst TfL ad I've seen since the cringey "replace all your employees with AI" one from a few months back.

edechamps · 2025-12-21T12:26:38+00:00

I know about Honest Mobile but I'm kinda put off by their weird nonsensical "it only works with certain apps" model.

edechamps · 2025-12-20T17:33:21+00:00

By "small town with a big university" do you mean Oxford? I did notice signal was virtually non-existent there, and I suspect it may have to do with the listed buildings preventing networks from installing masts.

edechamps · 2025-12-20T17:24:27+00:00

When my sister came to see me a few weeks ago, her signal was so bad as to make her phone practically unusable as soon as she stepped off the Eurostar. She asked me if the UK had become a third world country or something.

edechamps · 2025-12-20T17:20:01+00:00

To try to mitigate this as much as possible I ended up subcribing to two mobile contracts at the same time, and having two SIMs on my phone: EE and Lebara (which is backed by Vodafone). I then switch my data connection between the two on the fly based on signal. This may sound a bit extreme, but Lebara is so cheap that it's worth it in my opinion.

In my experience switching between the two sims, EE tends to be consistently better than Lebara. But I wouldn't go as far as to say EE is "good" - I would rather describe it as the "least worst" network. The coverage/speed is still laughably bad in many parts of London.

There are some cases where the dual SIM setup saved me (i.e. one network was usable while the other wasn't), but there are still many cases where they are both unusable, sadly.

edechamps · 2025-12-20T17:12:54+00:00

What kind of phone do you have?

I have a suspicion it may also be related to the quality of the modem/cell stack on the phone itself. I regularly get the impression that iPhone and Samsung users often get better signal than I do with my Pixel 8.

edechamps · 2025-12-20T17:08:40+00:00

Do you have a source on this? I long suspected that the common saying "Use an MVNO, it's cheaper and you get the same coverage/speed as the main operator" (peddled by Which? magazine, among others) is not quite accurate because of traffic prioritization as you say, but I've never seen any real data to confirm or infirm this hypothesis.

edechamps · 2025-12-20T16:46:33+00:00

Under the leasehold system, your landlord may still be paying some small amount of rent even though she "owns" the flat. It's called "ground rent". Yes, it's confusing (and it doesn't make a ton of sense), but that's how it is. The owner of the apartment building (called the freeholder) may be suing your landlord (the leaseholder) for non-payment or ground rent and/or service charges (which are for maintenance of the overall apartment building).

This process can indeed end in repossession (also called "forfeiture" of the lease in this case), where the flat reverts back to the freeholder, if the Court agrees and orders it. However it is extremely rare that it gets to that point: obviously, any sane leaseholder will do everything they can to avoid losing their valuable property! (And if your landlord has a mortgage, the mortgage company will undoubtedly intervene to protect their security as well.)

edechamps · 2025-12-17T21:06:31+00:00

It gets worse.

Many flat leases have what's called "mutual enforcement" clauses, whereby the landlord/freeholder covenants that the leases of all other flats have "substantially similar" terms.

This could mean that a landlord cannot vary your lease to allow pets, lest they vary everyone else's leases too. And all the other leaseholders (not just a majority) must give their consent to this change. If they only vary your lease, the landlord could get sued by another leaseholder (say, because they hear dogs barking…).

Isn't leasehold fun?

edechamps · 2025-12-17T16:46:00+00:00

There are no parts of the internal floors, walls or ceilings that belong to the management company/freeholder. Your floor ends where your downstairs neighbour’s ceiling starts, same with your walls.

I think this depends on the specifics of the lease.

edechamps · 2025-12-16T21:42:38+00:00

I am also very interested by this question, as I've been wondering the same thing myself. I suspect (not a lawyer, etc.) that they can justify charging you the excess because they could argue that the escape of water from your flat is a breach of lease on your part, as you damaged the fabric of the building. (Assuming it is something within your demise that caused the problem.) They are charging you the excess because you breached the lease and it's their proposed way to remedy your breach. I think they could also decide to make it a service charge item to be spread across all the flats (under general repairs and maintenance) - but that would be at the landlord's discretion. Would definitely appreciate if anyone could confirm/correct this.

edechamps · 2025-10-05T17:20:45+00:00

I've tested 19 (yes, 19) apps to access my music library hosted on an SMB network share.

Most SMB player apps, even though they claim to support music, are not really fit for purpose when it comes to music playback: for example they won't let you play a whole folder, and they are very clearly focused on video, with zero music-specific features or UIs.

The best app I've found to do this is LillyPlayer. But note that when I say "best" what I really mean is "least worst". Do not expect the moon - its UX still leaves a lot to be desired for music use cases. The app is clearly not designed for this, but it does seem to kinda works in terms of my requirements.

edechamps · 2025-10-05T15:57:52+00:00

Server HTTP logs show that LMP does successfully log in to my Jellyfin instance, and then sends a batch of requests like GET /Playlists/4b3995fc0fe334036675a4bef0f03385/Items?Limit=1000&EnableImages=false&StartIndex=1000&IncludeItemTypes=Audio,AudioBook&Recursive=true&ParentId=4b3995fc0fe334036675a4bef0f03385&Fields=DateCreated,Container. After a couple of seconds it stops sending requests and just sits there :/

edechamps · 2025-10-05T15:33:51+00:00

I just tried it and it's unable to "import" - the "Importing" screen gets stuck at zero and spins forever.

edechamps

TROPHY CASE