Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas! (but not for two pensioner owner-occupiers)
We have a really nasty situation on our block resulting from the actions of a renting tenant and the non-actions of her landlord. The flat above our pensioner neighbours has a laminate wood floor with no soundproofing. The number of occupants has steadily increased, so therefore the noise has increased too. Everyone has been asked to at least remove their shoes whilst in the flat but this doesn’t always happen leading to relations between the two flats becoming strained. Somewhere along the line, someone reported the tenant to social services for physically abusing her children. Instead of simply refuting the allegation, as made by persons unknown, she lodged a complaint of harrassment against her neighbours resulting in a heavy police attendance of 4 officers to their flat some weeks later. They nearly had a heart attack, thinking that one of their family had been in a fatal accident. After an informal interview in their home, then they had to attend a police station just after Christmas, where they were interviewed on camera.
The tenants landlord is keeping his distance from his tenant, instead approaching our neighbours asking them to confront her themselves! An eighty-year old couple, (one of whom has a heart condition) are supposed to deal with an aggressive woman in her twenties, who has friends who are as aggressive as she is? I don’t think so!
I visited their flat New Years Eve and I was horrified at the noise levels after only twenty minutes. At some points I honestly thought they were going to come through the ceiling! Living noise is one thing but the types of thumps and bangs and the deliberate stamping of shoes on laminated floors was something completely different! I contacted Noise Pollution and also spoke to the police but before they could send someone out, the flat was vacated for the night and all was quiet again.
Our neighbours are now on the council radar as vulnerable adults not just because of the involvement of the Noise Pollution team and the police but because of the sustained and deliberate noise being carried out by the tenant and her associates, the lack of action by the landlord (he can’t evict because he can’t afford to lose a tenant) and the fact that one of our neighbours has a heart condition!
Flat For Sale
I noticed that a flat on our block is up for sale and so I contacted both estate agents via Zoopla to advise them that we are an owned and managed block and providing them with the details. This was done in order for them to pass such information onto prospective purchasers. The agents were Churchill and Central Estate Agents.