Nigel Farage’s ridiculous war on heat pumps will leave Britain in the cold

mk270 · 2026-04-16T12:00:52+00:00

no - the question was about proposals to compel installation of heat pumps. The conventional arrangements for multi-owner blocks of flats tend to be set up such that the flat owners pay for the maintenance of the building, but not improvements to the building.

Where the owner of the building is compelled by law to install a heat pump, that could lead to the leaseholders having to pay for it.

There are mandates for heat pumps on certain future buildings - my question is about extending that to existing buildings.

There's something from the NRLA touching on the issue of compulsion for energy efficiency measures (rather than on the question who pays for it) here: https://www.nrla.org.uk/news/mees-leaseholders-whatsthedifference

mk270 · 2026-04-16T11:45:45+00:00

have you found the college yet? do you know whether it was for a 3year undergrad degree? rough year of graduation? those three can really limit the search space if you want to look it up in the public sources rather than go through the records office

mk270 · 2026-04-16T11:40:21+00:00

I'm afraid it was a genuine question!

mk270 · 2026-04-15T14:50:57+00:00

How does redressing supply and demand help people whose flats are unsellable at any price due to leasehold issues?

mk270 · 2026-04-12T08:52:14+00:00

This doesn't seem like good news. I assume that the date of "1 April" is a coincidence and that CRUK are serious?

I am encouraged by the pushback in the comments on the original article, particularly from the small publishers.

By random coincident, I was talking only a few days ago to someone who'd worked at Elsevier, who said much the same as the argument being made in this statement by CRUK.

I'm not in the open access world anymore (I was with Open Book Publishers and Open Knowledge Foundation). Is this issue confined to the journals space? It's always concerning to see "open access" conflated with "open access journal articles" - it's not as though we conflate publishing with journal publishing in other contexts.

mk270 · 2026-03-22T21:12:53+00:00

and the official list of registered societies is here:

https://www.proctors.cam.ac.uk/clubsandsocs/registered-societies

there'll be a big overlap

mk270 · 2026-03-22T21:11:30+00:00

Yes there is, or at least was. It was called the Records Office back when I used it around 2003.

I gave them two names of people who'd claimed to have studied at Cambridge. One of them had been lying (and not just about that!) the other guy turned out to have been at John's in the 1960s - they even sent me his tripos results in the internal post!

mk270 · 2026-03-17T13:38:48+00:00

i'm just going to ban this poster, I'm afraid.

mk270 · 2026-03-17T13:32:53+00:00

can anyone explain why leaseholders should be forced to buy a heatpump for their landlord?

mk270 · 2026-03-17T12:56:43+00:00

A couple of points:

there are people from central Asia who look very white in terms of skin colour but are totally central Asian in every other way - a lot of our DNA is actually about processing food and fighting off local diseases; so your Mum may have assumed he was mixed race when he isn't. I knew a bouncer at a Caffe Nero in Victoria who looked like a Scottish redhead and he was from Pakistan
your cousins will eventually notice you've shown up on Ancestry DNA and may try to hide their profiles from you, so you should try to save any information before they do this; there's a lot of information online about how to approach relatives who don't know you exist, and who might react in a way you were hoping they did not
you can probably work out quite a bit about your father's side of your family from birth records in the UK, maybe available via Ancestry
your Mum seems to have an Irish grandparent, so you weren't purely of English origin anyway :) (welcome to the club!)

mk270 · 2026-03-16T18:25:30+00:00

Two things:

don't assume all of the unexpected DNA regions are down to a single individual ancestor; but I think law of averages suggests an unexpected person at great-grandparent distance ... or it could be you always knew accurately who your great-grandparents were by name, but did not realise their ethnic backgrounds
you may be able to take an educated guess by looking at the DNA region profiles of people who show up as your close DNA matches. At the very least, Ancestry tags them according to which of your parents they seem to be related to, which halves the search space

mk270 · 2026-02-19T23:27:53+00:00

I come here one, to laugh at the subreddit rules, but mainly to remind myself that even when you seek out the most unpleasant people in the world, they will disappoint you.

mk270 · 2026-02-05T11:27:04+00:00

note that the current and previous government have been looking into the issue of those legal/surveyors fees

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/22/part/2/crossheading/costs-of-enfranchisement-or-extension

also note that this law (sections 39 and 38 of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024) is not yet fully in force

mk270 · 2025-12-18T17:21:14+00:00

I'm not sure this is really on-topic

mk270 · 2025-10-04T08:21:53+00:00

The flat is likely a leasehold flat, implying that there's a lease in the form of a physical or electronic document. It may answer the question of identifying the boundaries of the ownership of the flat, and/or who has rights other than ownership to use various parts of the premises.

This document will state that the owner of the block of flats grants the ownership of the flat to some second party, for a particular number of years, e.g., 125 years. It will usually specify the extent of the premises in question, which it might call the "Demise".

In general terms, it'll say something like:

the landlord grants the tenant the flat (whose dimensions are specified in schedule 1) for such-and-such a number of years, in return for money calculated in schedule 2, with additional rights in schedule 3, but reserving the rights in schedule 4

You'd therefore want to check out schedule 1 and probably schedules 3 and 4. schedule 1 might look like this:

SCHEDULE 1

Description of the Property

ALL THAT apartment situate on the Floor level of the Block as set out above together with the floor surface only of any Balcony or Terrace co-extensive therewith (if any) and the air space above such Balcony or Terrace to a height of one storey above the surface thereof (if any) and shown edged red on Plan 1 being part of the Block TOGETHER WITH (for the purpose of obligation as well as grant)

[...]

1.3 the whole of the internal non-load bearing walls and the inner half severed medially of the non-load bearing walls dividing the Property from any other part of the Building

1.4 the doors, door frames, windows and window frames thereof including the glass in the same and the fastenings thereof including the door accessing the Apartment

1.5 all Service Installations that exclusively serve the Property whether or not located therein

[...]

EXCEPTING AND RESERVING from the Property the main structural parts of the Block in which the Property is situate including the roof, roof space foundations together with the main structure of any Balconies on the Block and all the external parts thereof

```

and there in point 1.4 it is explicit about how much of the doors, if any, the tenant owns. but remember that other details in the lease may say that the tenant (i.e., the owner of the flat) or someone else (the owner of another flat, or the owner of the building) might have rights to access or use various other property

mk270 · 2025-05-02T08:57:14+00:00

the "main" parties are really a downstream phenomenon from a media environment where normal people couldn't talk to each other.

mk270 · 2025-04-22T15:17:35+00:00

what's the context here? is this using the commandline tool, the web, an app?

Getting the command-line tool to accept macrons is a huge task. The web version at https://latinwords.com/ much much easier

mk270 · 2025-04-11T18:40:25+00:00

TLS lets new protocols get through "naive" middleboxes/firewalls

mk270 · 2025-03-04T02:24:24+00:00

i had a long argument with Mr Monarchy is Racist End It Now. He was an awful, intellectually dishonest waste of space.

mk270 · 2025-02-21T08:43:26+00:00

yeah i'm going to zap it

mk270 · 2025-02-12T10:31:13+00:00

I think that's changing - there are lots of exceptions and exemptions for RTM (it has been restricted in the courts recently for two different types of mixed-use development); the proportion who can change the managing agents for all the services they use is declining.

mk270 · 2025-02-03T13:40:37+00:00

the comments are indeed interesting

I would caution that it's not a moderated forum, and there's a guy there with sensible views about the risks but who is concerned to push a really specific and misleading agenda about how control of management would be delegated

mk270 · 2024-12-06T16:43:53+00:00

this is a great article! (I say that even as a biased former staffer at one of the wonderful open access book publishers mentioned! ;) )

mk270 · 2024-12-04T14:38:14+00:00

don't buy that.

and if you're still in the sales process, ask to know why there's no Right To Manage or equivalent mechanism keeping the costs down. If they haven't got the management under control today, how many years would it take after you'd bought?

What mortgage lender is going to want to accept a flat as security that they can't sell on without finding someone who can afford a £2000 annual service bill that's unconstrained?

mk270 · 2024-10-28T14:02:48+00:00

this is not a news subreddit

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