Depending on the type of property you live in, you may need to pay a service charge.

Service charges are payments made by you to cover the costs of providing communal services where you live.  

If you rent your home, the service charge includes the cost of things like:

• grounds maintenance
• cleaning of communal areas
• cleaning of communal windows
• maintenance of lifts, door entry systems, fire alarm systems, and emergency lighting
• communal electricity, gas, and water
• other services that will be listed on your service charge estimate.

In some cases, there may also be staff costs, such as a caretaker.

The full list of services you receive will be included on the information we send you each year.

If you are a homeowner, you will also pay for day-to-day repairs to the building and communal areas.

At the start of each financial year, we set a budget, which is our estimate of the likely costs that we need to recover from you for the services we provide.

At the end of the financial year, we review the actual costs against the budget and provide you with a yearend statement. This is usually issued by the end of September every year.

Any underpayment, known as a deficit, is charged to your account. Any overpayment, known as a surplus, is credited to your account.

You have the right to challenge the variable service charge amount based on whether you think the charge is reasonable, or on the quality of the service you’ve received. Information on how to do this is included with your notification letter.

At the start of each financial year, we set a budget, which is our estimate of the likely costs that we need to recover from you for the services we provide. 

At the end of each year if the actual amount we spent on providing the services is more than our estimate, we will be responsible for the difference. You will not be asked to pay more. If we spent less than our estimate, as the charge is fixed you will not receive a refund. We do not provide a yearend statement to you as the charge is fixed.

If you are a homeowner, you’ll pay a variable service charge, this includes if you purchased a share of your property through shared ownership. Paying a variable charge is included in the terms of your lease or transfer agreement and will set out the basis of how we charge you.

If you rent your home, you may pay either a fixed charge or a variable charge. Usually, the longer you have lived in your home the more likely it is you will pay a variable charge. All new tenancies from 2017 are on a fixed charge.

The paperwork we send you will clearly show whether your charge is fixed or variable.

We use a combination of known contracted costs, for example cleaning and grounds maintenance contracts, and previous costs of metered services like electricity. Some contracts will be linked to inflation rates such as the retail and consumer prices indexes so we’ll know in advance how much prices will go up by.

For some services we need to estimate what services will be needed in the year. For example, the removal of rubbish due to an increase in fly tipping or damage to trees caused by storms. These costs are often charged to us on an ad-hoc basis by our contractors and will vary each year. We try our best to charge a reasonable estimate for these based on our knowledge of where you live.

The prices we pay for services has increased significantly in recent years due to our supply chain passing on higher costs and increases in the cost of gas and electricity. These are beyond our control, and we need to pass on these costs in the charge we make to you. We don’t add anything else onto this other than recharging the costs of managing these services and we don’t make a profit on service charges and only charge what it costs us. 

We know the cost of living is high for everyone and we’re here to support you if you need it. Our Tenancy Sustainment Team can provide you help and advice if you’re struggling financially. You can find out more and contact them here.

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Usually, you pay a share of everything where you live even if you don’t personally use some of the services. For example, you pay for lift maintenance even if you never use the lift in your building or you live on the ground floor.

There may be occasions where your lease or tenancy agreement states you’re required to pay a different amount.

Depending on where you live you may be charged for communal energy costs and for personal heat or hot water for your own home, or both.

The communal charges include the costs of light, heat and supplying power to lifts, door entry systems and fire alarms and other equipment. We charge for this based on the standard unit of consumption, called kilowatt hours, and the estimated usage for each year, together with the unit price we pay and any standing charges.

Where we provide heat and hot water to you through a heat network, again we calculate the overall charge based on usage and unit prices. Depending on the type of heat network where you live will mean you either pay for the energy you personally use if a sub meter is installed, or you may pay a share of the overall cost. Unfortunately, not every building is suited to the installation of sub meters, and this means that the share you pay may not reflect the energy you actually use. We know this might not always seem fair.

With energy prices increasing in the summer of 2022, we were able to access discounts from the government. Where have received these, we have an obligation to pass these through to you as the end user. This will be the case where the price we have paid, including the discount, is lower than our charges to you. If this affects you, we will have already written to you.

You can find an explanation of the charge here.

This fee covers the cost of our own staff to manage the contractors we use and other administrative tasks on a day-to-day basis.

It includes monitoring our contractors to ensure they are performing to the standards we set out and are attending to the estates as agreed. It also includes the administrative tasks such as making payments to them and other checks on things such as ensuring they have the correct insurances in place.

The fee also covers the costs of dealing with general queries from you, the costs of our teams who produce the service charge budgets each year, monitor the costs, produce year end statements where required and ensure all income collected from you is correctly allocated and used in accordance with providing the services. Other costs covered include the provision of IT services, human resources and legal services relating to service charges.

Where there is a managing agent who uses their own contractors, they may also charge a management fee in addition to our fee.

A scheme is a group of properties that shares the same services. Your scheme name will be given at the top of your service charge estimate.

An estate is the external communal areas on your scheme, this includes the grounds which we maintain including car parks, play areas and other outside spaces.

A block is the physical building where you live, this is normally a block of flats. A block may contain any number of individual homes and there may be any number of blocks at a scheme.

If we charge you a service charge in addition to your rent, this will be shown on the paperwork we send through to you. You will need to pay the total amount.

If you pay by direct debit, we’ll automatically change your direct debit to the new amount.

If you receive benefits, it’s important that you tell your benefit provider of the new amount to be paid. We’ll often notify them on your behalf, but it’s always best for you to do so as well.

Not all service charges are eligible for benefits. We’ll let you know the amount of any charges that are ineligible on your paperwork, these usually include water, gas and electricity supplied directly to your home.

We have a number of teams who work with each other in managing the service provided.

Our Estates Team manage our contractors and internal colleagues who look after the grounds maintenance and cleaning where you live. They ensure the contractors are delivering the services they should and carry out regular inspections.

Our Neighbourhood Coordinators are usually out and about where you live and will be able to answer questions about your service charge. They also ensure the services being provided meet your expectations and will liaise with our other internal teams if there is a problem.

Our Service Charge Team are based in our offices and are responsible for setting the service charge estimates at the start of the year, monitoring costs and preparing the year end statement if you pay a variable charge. They are on hand to answer any technical queries relating to your charges.

We know we don’t always get things right and we’re sorry if, on occasion, you feel let down by our services.

If you have a concern about the quality of the service being provided our Estates Team and Neighbourhood Coordinators will be able to put this right.

If you feel that you are being charged for something you shouldn’t be then your Neighbourhood Coordinator will be able to talk to you about this to check everything is as it should be. If we find there is an error in your charge our Service Charge Team will correct this as soon as possible.

We’d like to be given the opportunity to put things right but if you are still unhappy you can find details on how to make a complaint here.

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