Running a building committee
Budget, meetings, contractors, disputes and handover — what makes a volunteer committee’s job manageable.
What a committee is actually running
A building here holds 84 flats and more than three hundred and fifty residents, two lifts, a generator, a substation, an underground reservoir and a basement car park. Running that is running a small institution — except that everyone doing it is a volunteer, and it is nobody’s profession.
The rules have to be simple because of that, not in spite of it. A procedure that takes extra time is a procedure nobody follows three months later.
A budget at the start of the year
What the service charge should be is not a matter of opinion but of arithmetic: add up the costs and divide by 84. Written down, the budget also answers "why has it gone up" before anyone asks.
- Recurring — security, cleaning, the lift contract, generator fuel, common-area electricity.
- Annual — tank cleaning, hydrant testing, small repairs.
- The sinking fund — repainting, pump replacement, a lift overhaul. The line most often left out.
- A realistic allowance for arrears. Not everyone pays on time, and a budget that pretends otherwise fails in month three.
Meetings that are worth holding
A long meeting is not a good meeting. Three things make one useful: an agenda circulated beforehand, a written record of decisions, and a named person against each one.
- Circulate the agenda at least three days ahead.
- Minute the decisions — not who said what, but what was decided.
- A name and a date against every action. "The committee will look into it" means nobody will.
- Open the next meeting with what happened to the last one’s decisions.
Contractors and contracts
Lifts, security, cleaning, the generator — the building’s large costs are contracts, and that is where both the money and the suspicion concentrate.
- Take at least two quotes for significant work, and minute why you chose one.
- Put it in writing: what work, by when, for how much, and what is excluded.
- An annual lift maintenance contract is not discretionary. In a 15-storey building it is the safety measure.
- Keep the paperwork from every inspection and repair. The next committee will need it.
- No large cash transactions. From the building’s bank account, with receipts.
Disputes, which will come
Noise, parking, pets, use of the roof, arrears — nearly every building argues about the same short list. A rule written down in advance turns a dispute between two people into a question about the rule, and that difference is most of the battle.
- Write down a few basic rules and give them to everyone: quiet hours, when building work may be done, parking, roof access.
- Take complaints in writing, so both accounts exist.
- Apply the arrears rule to everyone equally. One exception and there is no rule.
- A committee member does not decide a dispute they are party to.
Handing over
Committees change, and in most buildings that is where the information is lost. Making the handover formal means the next committee does not start from nothing.
- The bank balance and the latest statement.
- Who owes what, flat by flat.
- Every live contract and when it expires.
- Last year’s income and expenditure.
- The building’s documents — test certificates, warranties, the tradespeople’s numbers.
- A list of all of it, signed by both sides.
If that list has to be reconstructed each time, the accounts are living in one person’s notebook rather than in the building’s.
Common questions
- Who decides a service charge increase?
- The number comes out of the budget; the residents approve it at a meeting. Proposing an increase without showing the costs guarantees an argument.
- What if someone stops paying for months?
- The rule has to exist in writing first — what happens, and after how long. Acting without one turns it into a personal dispute, and others stop paying too.
- Should committee work be paid?
- That is for the residents to decide. Whichever way, it should be written down and in the budget: informal arrangements generate more mistrust than any other single thing.
- What is the most important document at handover?
- Arrears flat by flat, and the bank balance. Without those two the incoming committee is blind from day one.
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