Forty years ago when Camden Council decided to pull down the street I still live in, I cobbled together a Residents Association and proudly proclaimed it was there to protect the interests of everyone threatened by the Council plans, except those who owned a house but didn’t live in it – that nefarious group, the Absentee Landlords.

Thirty years later I became one myself.

To get my son off the housing list, I bought a flat from a Right to Buy family who were selling to move out of London.  Two years later, my son moved out of London too.  I now had to sell or to let. I chose to let, and so became the old enemy.  But, curiously enough, it is still Camden Council that I am fighting.

Camden hates leaseholders the way we hated absentee landlords, who deserved to be hated, as I found when I did a house by house survey in our street. In the early ‘70s, there were still a lot of mini-Rachmans about.

But things have changed and at least some of us who, for one reason or another, own and rent out what was once a council flat, expiate our guilt by doing our best to be good landlords.

In my own case, I took the Council on to get them to pay the rent direct to me and not to my indigent tenant during an imbecilic government initiative to teach the penniless how to handle their own affairs.    P***, whose last address had been a doorway, asked me to do this.   I pretended not to notice what I suspected was a marijuana jungle another of my council tenants was growing in the bedroom, and helped yet another (but all the credit is due to her) start a vegetable garden in the back area, the produce of which she shared with the other flats in our entrance.

Which brings me to the entrance.

Five years ago – they must have time to waste or, perhaps, a friendly manufacturer they want to support – Camden notified leaseholders that they intended to install a new ‘entry system’. This meant replacing a perfectly good front door and set of ‘loud-speaker bells’, with the door you see below.  And we now have fobs instead of keys.

The cost of this door to me – the bill arrived the other day, five years after the estimate – is £1,290.  Multiply this by six and, Behold, a door which cost £7,740!

At the moment a numerate friend is looking over the figures for me: not because I can’t afford to pay, but because there are now many families throughout the borough who have bought their flats in good faith and been driven to sell their homes by these lunatic and inexplicable costs.

Something is wrong.   And it needs to be put right.