Woolwich leaseholders facing £3,000 bills for parking spaces they don’t use

Leaseholders in Woolwich face being stuck with bills of over £3,000 per year for parking spaces they may not even use because of a council deal with a property developer, The Greenwich Wire can reveal.  

Some say that the bills have made their flats at the Vista Building on Calderwood Street unsellable and that they have had to let out their flats to raise the cash to pay the charges to the block’s freeholder, which has leased three floors of the car park next door from the council. 

As part of the agreement, Greenwich Council collects £400 per year from each charge, a sum which has not increased since 2002 because it has failed to review the rent, despite being entitled to do this. However, the leaseholders’ bills have gone up by £500 every five years, whether or not they use the spaces.

The council’s failure to review the rent it charges the freeholder means that by next year the cash-strapped council will have lost £3.6 million in potential income, the leaseholders have calculated. 

The leaseholders are also on the hook for a 23 per cent share of the £8 million cost of fixing up the car park, which has had parts falling off it into the streets below. At present, the works mean the leaseholders do not have access to their car parking spaces that they are paying for – whether or not they are using them.

Greenwich Council signed a 125-year lease with the developer of the Vista Building in 2002, reserving the top three floors of the public Calderwood Street car park for residents’ use. The developer paid £3.75 million for the car parking spaces – but the leaseholders believe that money was recouped within a decade.

At least 183 people are currently being charged between £2,500 and £2,650 a year. The bills go up by £500 every fifth year – with the next increase due in April next year, to up to £3,150. This clause lasts until the end of the lease, in 2127.  By comparison, an annual permit for the floors below – a public car park – costs £1,053.  

Leaseholders estimate that the freeholder, Vista Building Ltd, is making a net profit of £384,000 each year on the lease, once it has paid the council’s share. 

The leaseholders want Greenwich to use a break clause in the agreement, which would mean the council taking back the top three floors in 2036. They say it would give them hope that the ever-increasing bills will eventually come to an end. 

“The problem is bringing down the price of the flats and making them unsellable,” said Mona Ibrahim, who moved into the Vista Building in 2008. She has since moved to Northfleet, Kent, and lets the flat out so she can afford the £2,500 bill for the parking space – which is due to rise to £3,000 next year.

The effect of the parking bills is clear when looking at the prices that homes in the Vista Building fetch: a one-bedroom flat sold for just £135,000 in 2020, while a two-bedroom flat with river views went for only £160,000 in 2023.

‘If it’s free, then why not?’

Habte Hagos, a chartered accountant from Charlton, bought the lease to one property in 2005, which came without a car parking space.

Two years later he bought a second property – with a parking space – from someone who had been repossessed. Shortly before contracts were exchanged, he was offered what he believed was a free parking space.  “If it’s free, then why not?”, he said.  “I was told that in five years’ time it would be £500 a year, and I said ‘fine’. But what I did not see was the details of the lease.

“The lawyers who told me this was a free parking space have gone under. So there is nothing I can do.”

Hagos said he had been losing money on the flat for more than a decade – and council was losing out on the deal too, compared to what it could make if it enforced a rent review.

“The most disadvantaged members of the community are seeing their council rents go up every year, but the freeholder here doesn’t.” he said.

“The council is essentially the landlord, they own the parking space. It can exert pressure on the freeholder because it has a contract with them.

“Given the amount of financial leakage, they can say, ‘Well, look, this isn’t working, and in June 2034 we will give you notice, which means in 2036 the contract will end’. But they say, ‘No, we’ve got plenty of time.'”

While Hagos has been buying and letting out properties since the Eighties, he said there were owner-occupiers also losing out. “There are a lot of leaseholders that actually live here, not everyone is trying to let their property out,“ he said. 

The leaseholders said that the freeholder was also losing out because its own properties within had also been devalued by the car parking charges.

‘I can’t give the car parking away’

Hagos said that Vista Building Ltd had raised the possibility of the leaseholders buying the freehold to the block, but nothing had been said since Greenwich announced plans in 2024 to refurbish the car park, leaving the leaseholders stuck.

“I can’t give the car parking away, so what can I do with it?,” Hagos said.

He added that he and other leaseholders had tried to negotiate a deal with Vista Building Ltd to revert the car park charges to £500 per year, but had walked away when asked for “in excess of £30,000”.

Greenwich Council was wasting money by repairing the car park, Ibrahim said.  “If the car park is that bad, why is the council letting us pay all this money, and where does it go?” he said. “Why don’t they take it down and do something useful for the community instead?”

Ibrahim said that if the council demolished the car park and built a “useful building” instead, nobody would not ask for much compensation as they would benefit from increased property prices.

“Why don’t we try to be reasonable about something that is not working for any of us?” she said.

Hagos said: “I’m really disappointed in the council. When we present them with the facts, they still try to defend themselves.”

Last month the Calderwood Street car park was included in the council’s draft local plan as a site that could be developed in the coming years – suggesting that the town hall has realised that it is losing out under the deal. A council spokesperson told The Greenwich Wire that it would now activate a clause in its contract for a rent review.

A former home for journalists

What is now the Vista Building was built in 1973 for the magazine publisher Morgan-Grampian. One account written by a former staff member said that 600 people worked there, including about 200 journalists working on titles such as Estates Times and Design Engineering – with some staff getting free passes for the car park, which was built at around the same time.

Sainsbury’s has had a store on the ground floor of the car park for more than 50 years, while the council also has some offices there. 

What was Morgan-Grampian House closed after the company was bought and broken up in the 1990s, a blow to Woolwich’s economy at the time. The block was redeveloped as the residential Vista Building in the early 2000s by Kerrington Developments Ltd, which signed the original lease with Greenwich Council on the car park and built a pedestrian bridge linking to it.

Kerrington later sold the block to Vista Building Ltd. In September 2024, Paul Fellows, a Vista director, won permission to extend the block towards Calderwood Street, although no work has begun on this project. The council had turned down a similar proposal in 2018, but this refusal was overturned by a planning inspector.

What does the council say?

Greenwich Council said: “These spaces were originally let as part of the development of that building from disused offices to much needed housing for Woolwich residents.  

“Timings of any proposed development of the car park would be dependent on the terms of this agreement. We aren’t party to private contracts signed between resident leaseholders of the Vista Building and Vista Building Ltd.  

“Separately, the council is in the process of initiating the rent review clause in the lease with Vista Building Limited.   

“As with any concrete building, repairs are required from time to time to keep the structure safe. The repairs are under way and the cost of these works is shared with Vista Building Ltd as our tenant. The public section of the car park rarely reaches full capacity, so we’ve been able to provide free permits to residents who can’t use their leased parking spaces while repairs are taking place. “

What does the freeholder say?

In a statement, Vista Building Ltd’s solicitors said: “It is our client’s position that the terms of the car park leases are reasonable, fair and fully enforceable. All lessees were, or should have been, subject to the legal advice they received at the time, fully aware of these provisions and had ample and fair opportunity to consider the wording at the time the leases were granted.

“The car park leases were offered to flat lessees without obligation and in every instance the lessee who chose to take one was legally represented and so advised of the terms of the lease. In essence, there was no premium payable by the lessees for the car park leases, but instead an annual rent would be payable, rising each fifth year, at a minimum of £500 per annum increase. Our client has only ever applied this increase at the minimum level and has never sought to do otherwise.

“In 2023 our client confirmed to all lessees that it was willing to consider a pragmatic resolution of rent reviews.  These terms have since been reconfirmed to lessees on a number of occasions.  Several lessees have indicated wishing to take up our client’s offer to remove only the uplift clause, and reset the passing rent to its original level, in return for paying a retrospective premium. Whilst this has happened, we cannot comment on the individual arrangements, but the same offer remains open to all.

“In respect of the freehold of the Vista Building, our client also engaged in discussions with a group of leaseholders in early 2025 in respect of a possible sale of the freehold of the Vista Building to them.  Our client has at times been approached by large investment-type landlords, or their agents in respect of sale of the elements which make up Vista.  These include the car park headlease, the main residential building and the commercial elements. 

“Our client entered into dialogue with this group of lessees, and openly offered to work with them, on behalf of all lessees, to bring about a lessee purchase.  Our client has not heard further from the lessees and it had been understood that there was insufficient interest amongst them to proceed.”

To comment on the council’s draft Local Plan, visit the Commonplace website.

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