Rent & Service Charges - Information and Support for tenants

You will find all your charges, (including your new rent), explained in your rent and service charge booklet for the financial year 2023/24. Your charges change every year. We send you details of your new charges at least one month before they start.   

If you live in one of our independent living schemes, it is likely you receive more services than someone who lives in their own rented home. This means your service charges are likely to be higher. 

We calculate rents using the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The Office for National Statistics, (ONS), calculates the CPI by noting the prices of everyday items and services in what is known as a ‘basket of goods.’ The ONS looks at how much these prices have risen since the same date in the past year and, every month, publishes a CPI figure. The figure is available on the ONS website, https://www.ons.gov.uk/

 The formula the government uses allows housing associations and councils to increase rents by a maximum of the CPI from the previous September, plus an extra 1%. The CPI was recorded at 10.1% in September 2022. This is the highest rate for many years.  

When we set your rent, we consider a number of things. We are a housing association, regulated by the government and our remit is to provide affordable, good quality housing.  

We must continue to maintain our homes to ensure they are safe and comfortable, and it is important that we continue to invest in improving the thermal efficiency of our homes to help tackle fuel poverty and work towards meeting the government’s decarbonisation targets. 

We also need funds to meet our legal and regulatory responsibilities, for example, under new building safety and fire safety regulations, and the changing tenancy standards the government will soon introduce for customers who rent and own their homes.    

We are seeing rising costs in all the services we provide, which is why we must make sure we have the money to provide the services you are entitled to receive as part of your tenancy with us.   

We are committed to playing our part in tackling the housing shortage in this country and have plans in place to build more new, affordable homes every year.   

If we didn't put up your rent, we could not meet our landlord obligations to you or our regulatory responsibilities set by the government.   

Events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, among other changes to our economy, have had an impact on the supply chain for all goods and services, and together with labour and skills shortages have caused economic uncertainly and rising costs and inflation. This has resulted in the highest cost of living we have seen in over 40 years.  

One notable increase affects those customers who pay for heating, lighting and any other items that run from a utility supply in their service charge.  

As well as communal heating and electric supplies, we recover the costs of the gas and electric supply to some of our homes through our service charge. There has been a huge, unforeseen rise in utility costs in 2022, and costs are expected to rise again in April 2023 when the current Government support reduces.  

We set the service charges for 2022-23 in November 2021 and had no way to foresee the climate we currently find ourselves in and accurately budget to cover the true costs in 2022. We now have projections of costs for 2023, and these have been reflected in your charges for this year. The charges cover the large rise in costs for 2022 and 2023.   

There has also been a steep rise in the costs for services such as grounds maintenance, window cleaning and communal cleaning services. These come from higher demands for materials and fuels, and because of the shortage of skilled operatives, which has also increased the cost of labour.   

We are committed to providing safe, affordable and good quality housing and services. We could not continue to do that without increasing our rent and service charges. 

However, we are also committed to providing a cost-effective, value-for-money service, and we make sure we regularly review our processes and ways of working to do this.  

We work closely with our contractors to keep costs as low as possible. 

Where we provide energy to customers, through shared heating systems, (heat networks) for example, we are continuing to closely monitor the cost of utility supplies to make sure we secure energy at prices that demonstrate value for money for our customers in the future, however at the moment there is no price competition in the energy market and consequently no advantage to switching. 

No, we are a not-for-profit organisation and make no profit from service charges; they simply help us to cover the cost of providing services to customers.

Yes, we provide information in our annual performance report to customers which shows exactly how every £1 of rental income is broken down and spent. We’ve tried to show how we spend it in the most clear and simple way, but if you would like to ask us anything, please get in touch.

We understand that many of you may be worried about the higher charges, and we are committed to supporting anyone who is struggling. If you are worried, please talk to us. Our specialist team can offer support and advice and also if needed, refer you to agencies and charities which can help.

If you would like more information, or you’d like to use our online support, please visit our 'supporting you' webpage to use our budget and benefits calculators, the ‘money navigator’ for your own personal plan, Universal Credit advice and to look for debt advice services near you.

Please speak to us if you are worried you can’t pay your rent or check our online help and support.