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Home Your LeaseholdAbout your service charges

About your service charges

When you bought your home you agreed to pay towards maintaining the common parts of the building and the structure of the building. You also agreed to pay towards the costs of the services we provide such as caretaking and grounds maintenance. As a leaseholder you are required to pay a service charge to the council. H & F Homes acts for the council by issuing bills and collecting those charges. The amount you have to pay is stated in your lease a percentage. This is shown in schedule eight of your lease.

What are Service Charges?

Service charges are your share of the costs that we incur in maintaining and managing the building your home is in, and the estate it is on. If you owned a freehold house you would have to pay all the costs of running and repairing your house. As a leaseholder you share those costs with the landlord and any other leaseholders in your building. If you live in a building with 10 flats and 4 are sold the leaseholders pay approximately 4/10ths and the landlord will pay 6/10ths.

You will not be charged for any work we do in tenants flats, to garages or sheds.

As your landlord we have a duty under your lease to maintain the building to a reasonable standard. We also have a duty to our tenants to maintain the buildings. If we did not do this the buildings would deteriorate and the value of your flat would be affected, it would become more difficult to sell and less pleasant to live in.

What do I pay for?

The charges you pay will depend on the services we provide to the building, the repairs we have to do and the share stated in your lease.

The main charges are for:

  • Caretaking
  • Grounds maintenance
  • Concierge
  • Block and estate maintenance
  • Lift maintenance
  • Lift servicing
  • Door entry maintenance
  • TV Aerials
  • Landlords electricity
  • Booster pumps
  • Insurance
  • Ground rent
  • Management Costs
  • Major works – repairs
  • Major works – improvements

You may not get all these charges and there may be additional ones where the service is not common in all of our buildings. The charges you have to pay are shown on the invoice you receive.

How are service charges calculated?

To calculate the amount you have to pay we first pull together all of the costs that have been incurred in providing each service or carrying out repairs. For example landlords electricity, which is the cost of running the lighting, lifts, door entry systems and booster pumps. We add the four quarterly electricity bills from the energy supplier (currently the London Electricity Board) and then share these out to all the residents in the building (this is called apportionment). We use the same process for each service provided. In some cases we do not get an invoice, caretaking is an example. We calculate these charges by working out the wages of the caretakers, their other costs like equipment, tools and materials and then divide the total for caretakers by the total number of hours worked. We then charge your block for the number of hours you have a caretaker for and then charge you your share.

With each invoice you get there is a booklet telling you how we calculate each of the charges you receive.

When do I get the bills?

You will get two bills a year one in March and one in September. The March bill is the estimated service charge for the financial year starting on the 1st April. This bill is called the "Interim service charge".

You will get a second bill in September. This is called the "Actual service charge" and is the cost of services provided in the previous financial year. The invoice shows the total charge for each service and takes off the amount you paid in the interim bill for that same financial year.

Paying for Major Works

This leaflet describes the options currently available as shown below. 

Interest free 24 month installment scheme

Discretionary Loans

A Savings Account

Claiming Benefits

The Right to a Loan

Extending your mortgage

Private Loans

Exceptional Hardship

Delayed payment

Equity-release schemes

see this leaflet for further information on the above ways of Paying for Major Works.