We know that having a clean and tidy neighbourhood is important to you.
Depending on where you live, you may benefit from certain services such as communal cleaning, grounds maintenance and window cleaning. You pay for these services in your service charge.
Your tenancy agreement, lease, property title or annual charge notification will set out what services you can expect in your estate and your payment contributions.
Specifications
Our contractors may provide services on a frequency-based specification, meaning they visit your estate on a regular basis to carry out certain tasks, or an output specification. With an output specification, the contractor does not have to attend your estate at a specified frequency or at an allocated time, as long as they deliver the standard of work required.
Here are examples of our standard schedules.
Please note that some of our newer homes may not be due cleaning visits every week. If you would like to check the visits due at your scheme, please contact us or speak with your housing partner or your leasehold and home ownership partner.
Monitoring our Contracts
We monitor our contracts carefully to make sure our services are provided to the standards we have agreed with the contractor, and we routinely survey our customers to check they are receiving those agreed standards. We will always welcome your feedback if you want to tell us something isn't right, or if you want to report any circumstances where you feel the agreed standards are not being met.
Please get in touch if you have any comments, worries or questions about the estate services you are getting, or the charges you pay for them.
Our grounds maintenance teams typically cut grass 16 times a year between March and October. This is roughly once every fortnight but may be longer if weather conditions for grass cutting have not been suitable. The day of the week and the time of day that grass cutting is carried out may vary. Grass cuttings will reasonably be collected after each cut.
Hedges which form a boundary and overhead branches are cut three times a year (typically January, September and November so as to avoid bird-nesting season). Individual shrubs are maintained throughout the year.
Please see our helpful tree guide here.
Trees in your garden are your responsibility. This applies even if you have not planted the tree yourself. In exceptional circumstances, we will support residents where trees are dead, dangerous, or causing damage to property, but you may need to pay.
Trees in communal areas will not normally be pruned or felled due to problems with shade, falling leaves or fruit, pollen, bird droppings or obstruction of views. However, if the tree poses a health and safety risk, we will investigate. Leaves will be collected when the grounds maintenance contractors attend. They will try to collect as much as reasonably possible each time that they visit. Should leaves fall in-between visits, no additional visits will be made for further collections.
All trees in communal areas are professionally surveyed and any work needed to maintain them will be scheduled in.
Any problems with trees which are not on Accent land should be reported to your local authority.
If you have a health and safety concern about a road or footpath on your estate, please contact us. In some cases, the local authority is responsible for maintaining the roads and footpaths in and around your estate – so we may need to work with them to reach a solution.
Customers are responsible for correctly disposing of any rubbish or unwanted items. Please do not dump rubbish or unwanted items in communal areas. Your local council's website should tell you how to get rid of any unwanted items correctly in your area.
If you see anyone dumping rubbish or unwanted items on Accent land or property, please contact us so the appropriate action can be taken.
Our grounds maintenance contractors will collect any litter which the wind has blown into the estate when they visit. They will not remove any bulky waste which has been dumped there.
If any items or rubbish have been dumped on the estate, please report it to us.
We do not generally grit our estates unless it is specifically covered in your service charge. In some areas, we have arrangements in place to grit paved areas around our independent living schemes when the temperature is due to drop below freezing.
Cleaning teams periodically clean underneath furniture in communal areas, but they will not move customers’ possessions to clean underneath them. Communal corridors should be always kept clear for fire safety reasons.
Our window cleaning contractors clean communal windows once each quarter. They do not clean the windows to individual homes.
You may wish to consider appointing a local window cleaner to clean the windows to your flat if you can't do this yourself. Perhaps you and your neighbours could club together?
Our contractors typically visit several estates in one day and will sometimes take their breaks in their vans. Taking a break should not stop them from carrying out their work to the specification.
