For twenty years Margaret Wilson was chairman of the London leasehold valuation tribunal, and latterly a Judge of its successor, the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) until she retired in April 2015.
In 2007 she trained as a mediator, and subsequently carried out a large number of mediations for the leasehold valuation and First-tier Tribunals in the Greater London and Birmingham areas, specialising in service charge and similar disputes. She is now a highly experienced, proactive mediator with a very high record of success.
In April 2015, she joined Tanfield Chambers as a mediator, specialising in residential leasehold disputes.
“I became a barrister because when I was at school and had to decide what to read at university the Bar sounded like an exciting and glamorous job. There was no such thing as “work experience” in those days so I hadn’t a clue about how difficult it was for a woman to get into chambers then (much better now), and of course it never occurred to me to worry about combining the Bar with having children. And once I had got a practice together I found I had to stop at a critical time, when I was thinking about taking silk, because of horrendous nanny problems. Then, after a gap which was intended to last two years, but turned into a decade, it made sense to get a part-time judicial job rather than return to the Bar, and the first one to come up was what has now become the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber), where I was a judge for twenty years. Now I have retired I have been lucky enough to be invited to join Tanfield Chambers as a mediator of service charge disputes.
The best thing about being a mediator is the fantastic sense of satisfaction one derives from helping to bring about a settlement in the afternoon of a dispute which seemed utterly intractable in the morning.
If there was one thing I could change about the legal profession it would be that so many students are tempted to do the professional training courses for both branches of the profession at great expense, only to find that when they finish there is no room for them.
The highlight of my career was to appear in the great case of Wachtel, well known to all family lawyers, and afterwards to receive a letter from Ormrod J congratulating me on my performance in it.
The longest day of my career was in my early days at the Bar when I was instructed to appear at a planning inquiry (never done one before or, understandably, since) in Norwich which I thought would begin at 10.30 but in fact was supposed to begin at 10.00. I turned up at 10.15 to face a room full of rather angry people. It went downhill from then on.
I know I will have reached the peak of my career as a mediator when I have too many cases to handle.
If I had not been a barrister I have to admit, boringly, that I expect I would have been a solicitor. I should have loved to be a doctor but I think chemistry A level would have been a hurdle too far.
Personally I would prefer to live in a property managed by a property manager appointed by an investor freeholder than by an RTM company or a freeholder appointed after a collective enfranchisement because I would prefer to have someone I could usefully blame if the property was mismanaged. So many residential leasehold disputes involve tenants pointlessly chasing their own tails because if they succeed in showing that service charges were not reasonably incurred they bear the loss anyway.
Should property managers self-regulate or be subject to statutory regulation? I would prefer strict self-regulation by a professional body, akin to, but independent of, the RICS. Statutory regulation is almost bound to miss the point in some crucial way.
The biggest challenge currently facing property managers is the difficulty of persuading tenants to pay an adequate fee for management, particularly in small blocks where the recoverable charges for management may make the venture uneconomic for the manager.
I’m not sure that that challenge can be overcome except by constantly reminding tenants that if they pay peanuts they may get monkeys and will be worse off in the long run.
My favourite books of the moment are any novels by Anne Tyler or Alison Lurie, but perhaps the most gripping book I’ve read in the last year or so is An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, a marvellous account of the Dreyfus Affair, told as a novel.
My favourite film was Boyhood, or maybe The Squid and the Whale (or anything else directed by Noah Baumbach).
My favourite building is the Martello Tower in Aldeburgh, which is owned by the Landmark Trust. We stayed there as a family. It is lashed by the sea and there is a drawbridge.
If you come to London you should visit Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s human in scale and you can look at the pictures in peace. And it’s easier to get to than you think.”
