The Burtons took legal advice, but solicitors said although they had a case, it would not be worth it financially since the claim of \u00a32,200 was less than the costs would have been.<\/p>\n
At one point, Mr Burton decided to stop paying his service charges and council tax until he could recoup his losses, but the council took him to court. He later agreed to pay \u00a31,800 arrears, plus \u00a3200 in court costs.<\/p>\n
Conservative councillor Simche Steinberger, who has been involved with the case for years, said the dispute should “go into the Guinness Book of Records” for how long it’s been going on, with so many councillors and so many officers involved.<\/p>\n
Mr Burton told the LDRS: “Even if tomorrow [the council] came round and said ‘OK, we’re paying’ – if you assess it now, the amount is probably three or four times the value.<\/p>\n
“It’s a disgrace \u2013 how many more people have been affected by this?”<\/p>\n
The council said it sympathised with Mr Burton and had been in regular contact with him.<\/p>\n
“Following our investigations, we have no record promising to reimburse service charges, as Mr Burton suggested. <\/p>\n
“We now consider this matter closed. If Mr Burton remains unhappy with this outcome, he should seek independent legal advice.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Burtons took legal advice, but solicitors said although they had a case, it would not be worth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-346131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}