As a direct result of the Tenants Association’s complaints, Hyde is sending out revised rent and service charge bills to residents of Kennington Park Estate.
Not only did Hyde include charges for a non-existent service (CCTV monitoring – see item below) but, for the second year running, they failed to include any charges for caretaking. We had to point this out to them. We don’t know what effect these two very large mistakes will have on our individual bills but we are sure we are not alone in wanting to have something approaching accuracy in what we have to pay for the coming year.
We have pressed Hyde to ensure all consequential changes to Direct Debits and Housing Benefit are properly and quickly processed.
We still have many questions about the actual and estimated service charges and Hyde acknowledges that there is much still to be resolved. Residents will receive letters to this effect.
Because of the possibility of further overcharging, we are negotiating to make changes to the system so that in the event of overcharging tenants receive a refund in the same way as leaseholders do. At the moment leaseholders get a credit on their account but for tenants it just gets ‘rolled over’ into next year’s bill. We have proposed that if the surplus is over £50 per year tenants should get a cash refund.