Service charge requests

We’d like to update you on where we are with service charges, as a number of customers have posted about this recently.

Customers who have a variable service charge (mostly former Raglan tenancies) receive an annual breakdown of their service charges and this is continuing.

Customers who have fixed service charges (mostly former Jephson tenancies) didn’t have a breakdown of costs, just a breakdown of eligible or ineligible costs for housing benefit purposes.

Customers who pay affordable rent have rent which is inclusive of communal services costs (as required by the government).

Following the merger, we decided that we wanted to be able to provide a summary of service charge costs to all our customers whether on fixed or variable service charges and are bringing in a new Service Charge Accounting system to enable this, which will be implemented fully in the next 6 months.

We are aiming to provide a summary of the cost of providing communal services such as cleaning, grounds maintenance and health and safety checks for example.

In the meantime, there is data available in a number of different databases across the business, which are being used to populate the new system. Unfortunately, though, it is not in a format that is easily produced on an individual account basis.

Please bear with us as we make the improvements necessary to bring all our customers up to the same standard very soon.

P.S. Someone mentioned Freedom of Information requests - these only apply to public bodies. Housing associations aren’t classed as public bodies and so this does not apply. We do try to be as open and transparent as we can and are working to make sure that we provide a consistent service to all our Stonewater customers.

In the coming weeks, there will be an article post on the main Stonewater website.

Thank you for your feedback