'Where has our £250k service charge fund gone?'

Rosanna Heasman is one of a group of residents taking legal action

A group of residents say they are “heartbroken” and fear being unable to sell their homes amid a dispute over a £269,000 shared maintenance fund which has allegedly vanished.

The residents' group at The Heights in Bedford is taking legal action as a "last resort".

Rosanna Heasman - whose service charge is currently £3,800 per year - said the action against the building's freeholder, Samsons Limited, included claims over a "severe lack of service".

Samsons' sole director Mohammed Saleem told a tribunal hearing he was "happy for the police to check into" the missing money.

The Heights is situated near the centre of Bedford

Service charges are payable by leaseholders to landlords for services the landlord is obliged to provide under the terms of the lease.

Ms Heasman said The Heights had seen an "increased service charge and a decrease in service" since she bought her flat in 2019.

The 32-year-old, who runs a small local business, said coping with the service charges, mortgage increases and the cost-of-living crisis had led to "huge financial and emotional stress for the last 24 months especially".

Residents, she said, “could see that we are paying money for services that are not happening.

"So where is that money being spent?”

Ms Heasman continued: "In the end when we had pushed as much as we could, tried to be as reasonable as we could with our situation, we felt we were left no choice but to take matters legally."

She is one of the residents who took Samsons to a first-tier tribunal.

Judge Jim Shepherd, who sat for two days in June before adjourning the case, will make determinations over their service charges in due course.

The Heights is at the centre of a first-tier tribunal dispute

One of the main disputes concerns the reserves - money set aside to cover the cost of major works or other significant items of expenditure.

Under the terms of the lease, Mr Saleem is responsible for collecting the reserves, and the tribunal heard £269,000 was allegedly missing.

Mr Saleem, however, claimed at the tribunal he was “a franchisee” of another company which, he said, kept the money from the reserves.

Judge Shepherd described it as "remarkable" that Mr Saleem had not reported the allegedly missing reserve funds to the police.

Mr Saleem told the tribunal: “I’m happy for the police to check into this.”

Separately, a recurring claim throughout the hearing was an apparent lack of invoices for works carried out at The Heights.

Many of the invoices that did exist were from National Property Services Limited, a company of which Mr Saleem is the sole director.

The tribunal also heard leaseholders' parking spaces were put up for pay and display, and Mr Saleem admitted some of the money went to Samsons.

Mr Saleem told the BBC: "This is a very common practice when car parking companies are instructed to manage the car parks."

It has left leaseholders having to pay for bollards to stop people from parking in their spaces, some of which have since been damaged.

The leaseholders claim Samsons was “putting up obstacles to leaseholders buying and selling”, pointing to one email exchange in which a Samsons' employee stated it was “strictly forbidden” for a property to be sold via auction, which the tribunal heard was not correct.

Mr Saleem said there was "no advantage for the freeholder in putting obstacles to the leaseholders buying and selling".

Yashpal Jassal says the dispute has taken an emotional toll on residents

Yashpal Jassal, who has lived at The Heights for more than a decade, said people were feeling “desperate” and “heartbroken”.

He said the dispute had taken an emotional toll.

“People are so worried, so stressed, they can't think straight," he said.

"They don't know how they're going to pay when they just haven't got the money. What are they supposed to do?”

Mr Saleem told the BBC: "I really am sorry that the leaseholders are not satisfied that they are not getting the service, but unfortunately they do not appreciate the issues and the problems that are being faced on a daily basis."

He also claimed the building had problems at the time he took it on and that outstanding unpaid service charge fees have also had an impact on the situation.