• NEWS that CityWest Homes are closing all but four of their estate offices in Westminster (West End Extra, April 7) is desperately worrying, given our experience here in Soho.

I believe that the CEO, Jonathan Cowie, genuinely wants to deliver an improved service, as do those who work with him. But how this is to happen without office staff on the ground is beyond me – and beyond CityWest Homes (CWH), as we in Dufours Place have learned the hard way.

Take what happened to us from January of this year onwards, when a lift-improvement plan began.
We have two lifts in our 15-storey block, and there had been problems for some time. But one at least had always been working, and needed to be, considering both the height of the building and the fact that disabled and elderly people are among the residents.

For the first time, from January on – our estate office had closed in December – we had lift engineers working without the eagle eye of anyone from CWH nearby. Result – mayhem.

First, we were circularised of a date at the end of January when both lifts would have to be out of order for two hours. Everybody planned around this, but the engineers had other ideas. Returning to the block at a time which should have been well after the restoration of a lift service, I found a cluster of anxious residents in the foyer. One lift was blocked off, as it had been for some days.

Now an engineer lounged in the open shaft of the other, his back to the residents but occasionally throwing us a contemptuous remark or two. The complete shut-down had been postponed till now, he said, and CWH should have told us. It was their fault.

It was freezing cold and I stood, in pain, and terrified, while more people gathered, ignored. I cannot climb up one storey, and live on the 11th floor!

Desperate, I went to ring the doorbell of the old estate office, in case anyone was there, and to my immense relief found two caretakers. Our caretaker took me into the warm premises and used his mobile to act as liaison with a housing officer far away in Lisson Green.

No, the change of times had neither been ordered nor sanctioned by CWH, it had been done without permission by the engineers, with whom a pitched battle ensued, conducted over another phone, and then reported back to us.

If only the housing officer had been able to come to sort it all out face-to-face, but she couldn’t. She was tied to that distant location.

She did, however, finally manage to get the engineers to switch the lift back on temporarily, but then had to fight to stop them turning it on and off again throughout the afternoon, and try to get them at least to fix a definite time. All this down a phone line, dealing with engineers whose attitude was one of indifference.

If the estate office had been in place, as it used to be, this could never have happened. A member of staff would have torn round to our foyer and read the riot act. More, notices of what was happening would have been posted in the hall or delivered around the building.

From then on there was no knowing whether there was any service or not, compounded when both lift indicators went blank, and stayed that way, and no explanation was posted anywhere.

Lift engineers have worked at various times all through the years and they’ve usually been very courteous. But that was when we had a staffed estate office within yards.

On February 4 and 5 we faced a weekend with only one working lift, and that the engineers had repeatedly taken out of service with no warning.

I was lucky to be spending my time lying on my bed to ease back pain, feeling sorry for myself – until I began feeling even sorrier for everyone else.

From noon on Sunday I heard people walking on the fire stairs and got a frantic call from a neighbour who’d arrived in a heap in the foyer and asked me to phone the emergency out-of-hours service. She didn’t have the number and dreaded having to climb back up again later.

The lift didn’t work until nearly 9pm. The sound of feet on the fire stairs went on all day. Residents who’d been stranded outside crawled up flight after flight to their homes, rather than remain for hours in the cold foyer.

There was just one emergency lift engineer in the CWH area and he was elsewhere. That the engineers in charge of this mess should have been the ones on call was obvious but I doubt anyone had realised just what peril they’d leave us in.

As I write the lift is still unreliable. Part of the upgrade was the installation of an automatic voice announcement as to which floor had been reached. It works perfectly in the reliable lift but has never functioned in the rogue one.

Our councillor Paul Church voiced opposition to the closure of the Soho estate office, but he wasn’t joined by his Conservative colleagues in our area, and it has been left to the Labour Party here to fight for residents. I pray someone has the sense to listen, because otherwise the welfare of all those living in CWH properties will be in jeopardy.

You can have as much email access as you want, and speak clearly, but these will not help you if you’re dealing with an engineer who, unsupervised by CWH, does what he likes.

I may be very suspicious, but these estate office closures appear to me to be too drastic to have been thought up by CWH all on their own. I suspect that dear cuddly Westminster Council, who love social housing so much (sardonic laughter), want more cuts to add to all those in other, once-essential, parts of their budget, and are asking CWH to slash everything to the bone. And guess who suffers – the residents. But since when has the council cared a damn about the residents?

How many more people will be stranded or suffer some other loss of a vital service, when CWH personnel are too far away to take effective, prompt action and deal with crucial issues on their behalf?

ALIDA BAXTER
Dufours Place, Broadwick Street, W1