Changes to your rent and service charges

Recently, you may have received a letter from us about changes to your rent and service charges. We are not a profit-making organisation, but we do need to be able to cover the costs of running and delivering our services. I wanted to share some of the reasons why rent and service charges have increased.

• Our energy costs have gone up. We’re doing our very best to negotiate these, but sometimes these price hikes are unavoidable
• Costs for things like cleaning and gardening are going up significantly. These services affect the price of service charges
• We’ve seen an increase in costs for some repair supplies. This can mean it costs more for us to carry out repairs
• Some materials are harder to source. This has meant that some repairs are taking longer than we would like
• People costs. The health and social crisis means we have more colleagues on a temporary contract, this makes it more expensive to deliver services
• We borrow money to build homes (a bit like a mortgage). The increase in interest rate means that it costs us more to borrow the money we need to build the homes we need to

It is costing us more to deliver our customer promise now because of the changes mentioned above. Due to this, we have increased rent and service charges to support the services we provide for our customers.

We know that every pound we spend is a pound of our customers’ money. The decision to increase rent and service charges was not an easy one to make.