'I paid £300 to council when I didn't owe it - you could be due refund too'

A South London homeowner was incorrectly charged hundreds of pounds for lights in a random car park and maintenance to non-existent grounds by her local council. Janet Wertli, 55, believes she may be one of over 15,000 Southwark Council leaseholders who have been wrongly billed for items in their yearly service charge bill.

Ms Wertli, who owns a one-bed flat in the Devon Mansions apartment complex in Bermondsey, only found out about the incorrect charges after requesting an itemised breakdown of her service charge bills from the council which is the freeholder—a process which can take up to two months.

Among the things wrongly included in her service charge were repeated high bills for grounds maintenance, despite the apartment block backing directly onto the street and having minimal outdoor areas. Ms Wertli also discovered she had been charged for fixing communal lighting in a car park around the back of Devon Mansions, which doesn't belong to the building.

She said: "We [leaseholders] kept saying 'Why are we paying grounds maintenance? Where are these grounds that we're supposed to have?' There's a lot of people out there who don't know that they can get a full breakdown and there could be all sorts of stuff on their service charge."

Since challenging some of the items listed on the full service charge breakdown, Ms Wertli has won £150 off the ground maintenance costs billed to her and is awaiting a yet undisclosed amount of money back for car park lighting which a council employee told her by email in February were 'incorrectly allocated to the estate'.

Southwark Council previously returned £150 to Ms Wertli for scaffolding costs that were wrongly included in her and other leaseholders' service charge bills. The error only came to light after another leaseholder in the block took the council to a tribunal over the charge and won.

Since she began challenging the council over the rogue charges, Ms Wertli has been in touch with multiple other leaseholders in the borough who have faced similar incorrect bills. She believes there could be many other Southwark leaseholders who could have wrong items in their service charge and are eligible for refunds from the council.

Ms Wertli is among over 500 people who have signed a petition calling on the council to include a detailed breakdown of costs in each service charge bill, which will be presented to the Labour council's Cabinet on Tuesday (March 11). A separate petition with the same demands on change.org has been signed by over 1,500 people.

Ms Wertli said: "If you go to the supermarket and the woman [at the till] goes 'that will be £85 please' you're like 'hold on a minute, do I get a list of what I've paid for?' You get that everywhere: in a restaurant, if you take your car to a garage. That's what we think they [the council] should do."

She added: "I think if they included us [leaseholders] and had more transparency in the billing process, then they [the council] could uncover things they shouldn't [be] paying for as well. We don't want to pay for things we don't get. But Southwark shouldn't want to pay for things they don't get either."

Southwark Council was contacted for comment but hadn't replied at the time of publication.

Got a story? Email robert.firth@reachplc.com

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