Hitting the roof – £40,000 cost of repairs

Published: 24 September, 2010
by PETER GRUNER

A FIREMAN’S widow revealed this week how she cashed in her late husband’s pension to pay almost £40,000 for improvements to her former council flat.

Pamela Mullen, 68, a retired manager of a publishing company, is a leaseholder on the Spa Green estate, in Clerkenwell. It was designed in the 1940s by Berthold Lubetkin, the modernist architect who created London Zoo’s penguin pool.

Because the estate is grade II-listed, English Heritage supervised the repairs and improvements, during which special materials were used, increasing costs to leaseholders.

Ms Mullen, whose husband Danny died aged 58, will criticise “exorbitant” leaseholder charges in a BBC documentary, Inside Out, on October 25. “I think even the BBC cameramen were astounded at what I’ve had to pay out over the last five years,” said Ms Mullen, secretary of Spa Green residents’ association.

A mother-of-two, she was saddled with a bill for £34,000 by housing agency Homes for Islington for seven new windows, electrical work and roof repairs in 2006. Then she was asked for £4,000 for an updated communal heating system.  

With additional service charges of £140 a month, she estimates she has paid more than £50,000 over five years.

“I don’t like big bills hanging over me,” she said. “So rather than pay over a long period I decided to cash in Danny’s pension and pay most of it all at once.

“It was money that would have contributed to improving my quality of life as I got older. But at least I don’t have huge bills hanging over me.”

Ms Mullen admitted she bought her former council flat cheaply in 1998 under the right-to-buy scheme. Flats on the estate sell for up to £400,000.

“You daren’t spend any money on yourself because you don’t know what is round the corner,” she said. “You don’t know when you are going to be financially clobbered next.”