Good point from No Rock’n’Roll Fun:
Ed Stourton summarised the position of the Digital Britain report as seeing access to broadband as being on a par with access to power and water: an essential service for the way we live now. It’s impossible to see how you could square a belief that broadband is an essential service with arbitrary removal of that service on the whim of a record company.
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Was at our local tenants and residents association meeting the other night. Residents of one close have been waiting for the Council to install a locked doorway access system in their close since 1972. Good to know they’ll have broadband before a front door lock.
Aye, took us years to get ours when I was in Glasgow. The trouble is the communal ownership of closes, a deeply flawed idea. Sharing responsibility between eight or so different owners, who don’t tend to know each other, some of whom might be absent, and many of whom are too damn busy for such things, is insane. ‘Course, you hire a factor to solve that problem, but then the fact that you can’t switch factors without getting most of the owners to agree to it at the same time — and, let’s face it, if you could do that you wouldn’t need a factor in the first place — gives the factor an incentive to do sod all and take your money.
You’d be better off making the stairway the property of one of the flats and making whoever buys that flat sign an agreement that they will look after it, in return for which they get to charge the other owners rent for their use of the right of way. Wouldn’t be anywhere near perfect, but it’d be an improvement.
God, I don’t miss factors. Or communal areas, come to think of it. When we first lived in a flat pretty much everybody who lived there was a long term tenant or owner occupier, so all the communal things got done. Over time the mix changed and it became short term (ie one uni term, students away from home for the first time) rents, and all the communal stuff stopped because the absentee landlords either didn’t give a shit or did a very good impression of not giving a shit. You can spot the blocks where it’s largely first-time rentals from space, btw. The gardens are like jungles, the windows are covered in grime and somebody in the block is playing the drums.
Aaaaanyway… a friend down south has had to spend a terrifying amount of money bringing up the communal area where he stays. It’d have been cheaper to get a hitman to kill the other residents.