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Service charges from 1 April 2017 – important update

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…

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Rents and service charges from 1 April 2017

Hyde is currently sending out notifications of our rents and service charges for the coming financial year. The Government has instructed Housing Associations like Hyde to reduce rents by 1% (roughly £1 per week) but there is no such restriction on service charges. The charges we have to pay from 1 April are estimates and we advise everyone to look at the figures very closely. Check them against last year’s bill if you still have it. Hyde should have sent out statements of how much was actually spent on services during 2015-16 before Christmas; these figures are meant to form the basis of the estimates for the coming year. These statements are now several months overdue. The Tenants Association has made it clear that we find this unacceptable, particularly since we submitted comments on the invoices for the Estate at the beginning of November. The contract to monitor the CCTV…

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Our Rents for 2016-17

  UPDATE 14 April 2016 – KPE RESIDENTS – MAKE SURE YOU CHECK YOUR SERVICE CHARGE, RENT AND DIRECT DEBIT NOTIFICATIONS CAREFULLY. WE HAVE FOUND A NUMBER OF ERRORS! Contact your TA reps (see contact details in the right-hand column) if you need help in understanding these bills.  ****************************************************   Tenants will have received a notice from our landlord, Hyde, this week notifying us of the amount of rent due from 4 April 2016. The TA considers this notice misleading, to say the least, as it gives the impression that tenants will have to pay less than we currently pay. This is very unlikely to be the case because we pay service charges on top of our rents. Last year some residents saw their service charges nearly double and the TA has no expectation that they won’t be increased again this coming year. Indeed, most residents have already been informed (in the…

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News and Information from the Tenants Association – March 2015

Those Service Charges   Our rents and service charges are going up from 6 April. As we warned in our last newsletter and at the Tenants Association meeting, Hyde’s service charge increases are outrageous. Residents in some blocks are being asked to pay double! Particularly outrageous are the continuing irrational charges we are being levied for communal electricity (the external and staircase lights), which the TA has been complaining about for over three years now, and new charges for fire safety and legionella (a waterborne disease which can spread from communal water tanks) which have been introduced without any consultation or explanation. And the standard of the cleaning and gardening work carried out on the Estate most certainly does not justify any increase. A number of residents have complained to us about the service charges and it is important that you voice those complaints to Hyde at customerservices@hyde-housing.co.uk or by writing…

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Service Charges

Last year, outraged at the size of our service charge increases, the TA demanded an explanation, highlighting in particular that residents in Blades House were paying more for a single light outside their front door than they did for the whole of their domestic electricity use. It emerged that for a number of years these residents had in fact been paying the electricity charges of the businesses housed in the old builders’ yard at 8a Harleyford Street, who had never even been sent a bill by Hyde. The TA had repeatedly queried Hyde’s failure to manage this property properly, but we’d been ignored. Finally the message got through, and Hyde was forced to pay more than £35,000 to the residents of the twenty flats in Blades House last summer. Now their bills for the coming year have been reduced by another £6,000! In future TA reps will be checking all…

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