Today, we are obviously highlighting the issues with the Peverel Retirement Home side of the Consensus Business Group, following the BBC Breakfast report.

However, it’s not just Peverel Retirement Home owners that are being ripped off or ignored by ‘Peverel’ herein. 

We’ve been contacted by ‘Laurie’ who has asked us to publish there experiences and issues with PeverelOM – although it is PeverelOM – they are all part of the Peverel Group.

Peverel OM Ltd
Marlborough House
Wigmore Place
Wigmore Lane
Luton
Bedfordshire
LU2 9EX

PA to the Managing Director
FORMAL COMPLAINT

3rd November 2009

Dear Sir/Madame,

It is with regret that I am contacting you in order to make a complaint about the service I am receiving from PeverelOM regarding my property. I have previously contacted the Manager of the property in writing, on the telephone and via numerous emails as per the recommendations laid out in you complaints procedure leaflet.

My complaint has many aspects, but to summarise, I feel that I am paying an extortionate amount of money for a service that I am yet to see any benefit of. I get very little response to any requests made, and I also feel your company has broken some fundamental laws (punishable by fine) which are stated in the Landlord and Tennant Act.

I moved into my flat in July 2008 and started to pay my maintenance fees from that very first month as this was what I was instructed to do. At this stage the development was just being completed, in fact the developers were still present on site when moving in. I then found out that PeverelOM did not take over ownership of the site until mid October time. Therefore I was paying your company for no service at all; I still have seen no sign of a rebate on these monies, even though I have asked, in now over 18 months.

After 1 year of paying my management fees I received my yearly summary letter stating what I had paid so far and what the new schedules for the next financial year were going to be. I was shocked to see no sign of rebate details and an increase of 9% on the management fees for the next year! I immediately called up the customer service centre and enquired when I should expect my rebate and why the prices had increased. I was bluntly told that no rebate would probably happen and I would not be informed of any such decision until the accounts had been audited. Now I am not an accountant but I do know that auditing accounts should not make any difference on how your company manages the funds and how your company estimates your next year’s charges, auditing is simply for tax accounting purposes. As it stands your system seems to wait 6 months for auditing to occur and then to adjust the charges, but by that point you have already been billing the new rate for 6 months! It is ridiculous that you are not basing your pricing on your current outgoings. A large company like yourself should easily know what the rate of expenditure is, long before you audit your accounts.

My complaint also lies with what has been happening on site. When your company signed off the site as satisfactory, I am not sure who carried this audit out, but they did not do a good job. Your company signed over control to a site that was in no way complete and have passed this burden over to the residents who are now paying to correct mistakes that should have been spotted by your staff and informed the developer to complete. A good example is the internal finishing which were damaged during carpet fitting and the external landscaping and parking. The landscaping is absolutely shocking and still contains large amounts of building rubble. Despite many conversations with the PM about this and explaining to him that it should never have been taken over in the state it was, we are now still being billed with 3 day “intensive work” periods to fix it.

As I was not happy with my management costs I have written to the PM asking for proofs of expenditure and invoices for the period of July 2008 to May 2009 which I am entitled to do by law, after receiving a summary letter from you for that period. The PM had one month to provide this to me. After 6 weeks I called to ask why it had not been done and was simply given the same rubbish about audited accounts. After pointing the customer services to the laws outlined in the Landlord and Tennant Act I was then provided with this information.

Now imagine my surprise when inspecting these invoices that most do not even seem to apply to my building costs, and are certainly not estate costs. Loads of them are wasted callouts costing large amounts of money (such as people not having access due to PecverelOM changing the locks). There are also some alarming invoices stating clearly that some cleaning work on the sewage pumps is required, yet there are no invoices showing that this work was ever carried out. I also went ahead and made some quick calculations on the set of invoices. I calculated the total invoices cost and split it amongst the flats, then adding the appropriate sink fund charges and administrative charges as outlined in your documentation. My outcome was less than half the amount you are charging me!

I have brought all of these points to the attention of the PM and to your service support staff. Most of the time I get useless answers, excuses of emails not getting through or false promises of answers by the end of the working week. I am yet to receive any satisfactory answers and I have attached all the email chains at the end of this letter.

Moving on to the actual “service” we are being given. I have read extensively through my lease documentation which outlines the responsibilities of the management company. My lease, your website (Avenue), your welcome pack and your staff do not even have an up to date plan listing my building and the responsibility areas. There are no landscaping plans, nothing! How are you managing my building without these? The landscapers who attend are supposed to sweep bi-weekly in summer and monthly in winter. I can 100% guarantee that not a single person has swept the parking and concreted areas of my building for 18 months. In fact if you would like to come and inspect it you can still see the original building waste and rubble present along most of the building. Litter picking had not occurred until I kicked up a fuss about it, and then I got an earful from the landscaping company for complaining about them. Why should it be up to me to lodge these complaints? Please provide me with information on your exact responsibilities at my property as none of your staff seem to have these details anywhere. Surely you must have some signed documentation detailing what you are responsible for and a management plan diagram to show the areas covered?

The lift within the building is faulty more than it is not. Quite honestly I think that it is a defective unit and I have witnessed about 4 repairs within its first 12 months. All of the repairs have been invoiced and are therefore at a cost to me. Surely there are warranties and guarantees on these products, and why do you not have an annual invoice for maintenance? All the invoices seem to be individual callouts.

The only work that I currently see (and have ever seen) take place at my property are bi-weekly cleaning and hoovering of the internal corridors, the occasional visit by the “landscapers” to “tidy” (This has recently improved to bi-weekly after 12 months of my complaint, but they still do not do a full job) and regular lift repairs. Now I paid you £120 per month for 12 months, and now pay £137 a month (for the past 5 months) and all I have received is the above and a whole load of phone bills to your customer support line. I feel that you are completely ripping me off for a non existent service and find your back office workings both slow and quite honestly useless. Please explain what you are doing with my money!

In accordance with your governing body, ARMA’s advice, this is now the last step in your internal complaints procedure and my next step would be to report you to ARMA for failing to provide satisfactory information within a reasonable time, for failing to provide satisfactory evidence of expenditure within one month of written request, for failing to bill me at a fair and reasonable rate. I am very interested in hearing how you justify a 9% service charge increase when the previous year obviously has not cost as much as charged, let alone the fact that inflation is negative and we are in a recession! Obviously I will await your response to this letter and also for my end of year statement (due this month for money I paid 18 months ago!) before I progress any further, but unfortunately I am at my wits end with your company and with the amount of money I am paying you. I also urge you to “Google” your company name and see how many people have bad things to say about you. Not surprisingly most of them seem to be saying the same thing as in this letter.

Kind Regards,

Laurie

Laurie, also provided us with an e-mail trail that had been sent to their Property Manager for this development – yet nothing is being done.

The above is an all to familar story of how the Peverel Group treat their customers and those regular visitors to TheTruthAboutSolitaire, will not have been surprised to have read the above.

Peverel’s Online Feedback Manager – Andy, will reply to this post asking for Laurie to e-mail him direct and advising that he’ll forward it onto the property manager in question. 

However, we are all becoming tired of ‘Andy’ using this site as a tool to make it appear that they are helping people, because they only want to help people who complain publicly and are ignoring those of us that e-mail them wanting answers.

I recommend that those people that have a problem with Peverel, ring them today and see what the response is that you get, and then let us know how you get on.  We’re confident that you’ll get 1st class service and if not – well, that just proves that they aren’t bothered!

If anyone that has a complaint they’d like us to promote, please e-mail us.