Dear Letting Agent,

I have been renting your property at [redacted] for the last eleven months. I had hoped that this beautiful flat would be my home for at least the three years of my current NHS placement in Hastings. However it is becoming apparent to me that your organisation has shown significant negligence in regard to maintaining the flats in this building, in particular with regard to plumbing. I am writing to catalogue the time, money, and distress which this has cost me, in the hope that you can provide:

a) restitution for my time, money, and distress
b) a clear plan of action to improve your organisation's maintenance of my flat and the one above it.

I shall lay out the issues in chronological order. Should any individual item seem small or insignificant, please know that this list culminates in a large chunk of ceiling plaster crashing to the floor with such force that it shattered a plastic crate. Although I do not know the details of your maintenance of the flat above mine, I know that the tenants also rent through you, and it seems likely that a similar catalogue of low-level negligence of their plumbing may have culminated in this outcome.

To begin at the beginning:

On August 16 (the day before I was due to move in) I received a gas safety certificate telling me that the boiler was "unsafe for use" due to a catalogue of issues including a broken pressure gauge, broken pipework, and a leak. When I called you stating that I would not take possession of a property without a working boiler, you contacted the gas safety engineer who issued another certificate stating that the boiler was safe to use, despite containing the same list of recommended repairs.

On August 17 I was presented with an inventory / schedule of conditions which bore little resemblance to the property that I was moving in to. I made my best effort to amend this appropriately, as I understood to be my responsibility as a new tenant, but in retrospect I am concerned that this document appeared to have been completed by a member of your office staff, rather than by an independent inventory clerk.

On 19 August I emailed you about the issues which I considered most pressing, as follows:

Hi [letting agent] team,

Just sending over an electronic copy of my signed & amended inventory for [address]. Hopefully the paper copy is on your mat when you open up this morning? And a few follow-up points:

works needed

Most of the amendments I've made are just for the sake of accurately recording the condition of the property when I moved in, but there are a few issues which would affect my ability to use the property and so need urgent attention before I move in properly next weekend:

- repairs to the boiler as specified on the gas safety certificate: broken pressure gauge, pipework, and tap.
- door handle apparatus:
-- the bathroom door latch sticks closed (I'm concerned I may cause damage by using the force required to open the door, or that it may cause someone to become trapped)
-- the living room door latch is missing, so the door does not stay closed (which is a fire risk as there is no other door between the kitchen and the escape route / front door).
- the sealant around the bath is coming away from the walls (this may not directly affect my use of the property, but over time could lead to mould buildup or leakage into flat 1)

Also, regarding the windows: it appears that the promised window-clean (verbally by Aimee on 1 August, over email by Jackie on 12 August) has not been carried out - please could this be organised for this week?

information needed

Please could you let me know the procedure for urgent / out-of-hours problems - do you have a 24-hour phone number for tenants? And is email the best way to inform you of non-urgent issues?

Your reply made it clear that you did not feel compelled to fix any of the maintenance issues, but that "If the landlord wishes to complete the work we will of course let you know." You provided me with details of an app to use for fault reporting - but I have discovered that while this is, technically, available to me 24 hours a day, all it does is email your office. So in fact you never answered my question about how to handle urgent out-of-hours problems. It is also notable to me, given the current circumstances, that you did not respond directly to my concern that the damaged bath sealant may cause problems for my downstairs neighbour.

I emailed you again on 7 September: "what I had taken to be historic damp damage in the entrance hallway appears to have caused recent drips onto the meter cabinet, so I'm concerned that there may be an active leak". Ultimately this turned out to be coming from underneath my kitchen sink - I do not believe that the specific mechanism of the leak was ever identified, but the plumber suggested that it was exacerbated by the fact that there is no floor-covering underneath my sink, just bare floorboards.

I have no record of the precise date when I first noticed that the bath/shower was draining slowly, but it was early in my tenancy; and as I have short hair and do not shave in the bath I felt confident that I had not caused any blockage. On this occasion and several subsequent occasions I purchased supermarket drain-unclogging products, and I have come to see using these products ~monthly as a normal household expense - though in fact they have rarely been needed in other properties I have rented. In the context of these other issues, this now seems to me another potential example of inadequate plumbing / pipe maintenance in this building.

Starting on 21 October, we exchange emails about the boiler making unusual noises. I feel that this was not taken seriously, and although I sent several emails to yourselves and your contractor with details of my availability for a visit over the course of the follow four weeks, no visit took place.

On 10 December I submitted a maintenance request through your online portal: "I have woken to find a large area of sodden carpet in my hallway, with some water also on the windowsill and dampness in the plaster around. It is not clear where the water came from but there was significant historical water damage in this corner of the flat when I moved in."

Your organisation chose to take no action, so I aired out my property - in December! - and tried to hope that this was a freak accident due to recent storms.

On 21 December I reported another, larger flood in the same location.

The issue was then investigated and fixed, although I do not have a good understanding of why it occurred: the contractor who came to the property told me that it was caused by plumbing works to the toilet upstairs, while Northwood described the issue as a 'blocked overflow'.

On 28 Jan the boiler started to cut out and need resetting after a few minutes of producing hot water. Once again I felt that this was not taken seriously, and no contractor attended. The issue seemed to resolve itself after a month (of rushed showers and stressful mid-shower boiler resets making me late for work).

On 12 May I reported the return of this fault, and on this occasion you did send a contractor. He found that the problem was low boiler pressure, and once again recommended the replacement of the boiler pressure gauge (as he had advised on the gas safety certificate). Had this been working, he said, I could have diagnosed and fixed the problem myself without the need for all the cold showers (and costly engineer call-out fees for a five-minute boiler refill job).

On the morning of 12 July I made a report through your online portal: "Patches of discoloration & "ballooning" have appeared in the ceiling paper, suggestive of water ingress." On the evening of the same day, I noticed that the ceiling was dripping, and asked the upstairs neighbours to check their kitchen and bathroom for leaks. They could not find anything, but mentioned that they had been asking your organisation to fix their bathroom taps ever since they moved in, some months ago. I moved my sofabed (which had already become sodden at one end) and various other water-damaged possessions, and put down some plastic crates to catch the drips, before attempting to contact Northwood urgently. It was at this point that I discovered you had never actually given me an emergency contact number, and I realised that the '24/7' app was not suitable for reporting emergencies. My upstairs neighbours called the landlord, who advised that we should go to bed and he would send a plumber in the morning.

As I was preparing for bed, the ceiling caved in. This was loud, and dusty, and forceful enough to shatter one of the plastic crates. Just a few minutes previously, I had been bending over that crate to check that it was catching all of the drips that were falling. The distress caused by this near miss was considerable.

Despite the above, I love this flat, and I would like to keep living here. What steps will you take to ensure that it is and feels safe for me to do so?