Repairs and maintenance Estate services

Your local authority is responsible for collecting your rubbish bins. You can find out when your bins will be collected on your local council’s website. 

We will arrange for additional waste collections to remove rubbish from overflowing bin stores. 

We normally recharge the cost of these additional rubbish collections back to the associated block.

Many local councils and charities will collect unwanted furniture and white goods, such as sofas, fridges or mattresses, for free or for a small cost. You can find information about who can collect your bulky waste on your local council’s website.

Our in-house cleaning team clean the communal areas in your block of flats. This includes wiping surfaces, vacuuming carpets, and sweeping and mopping hard floors. We also carry out weekly cleans at our extra care and sheltered housing schemes. 

Where there’s a communal notice board, our team will make a note of who cleaned the areas and when, so you know when to expect us next. They’ll also send before and after photos to our Estate Services team, so we can check your communal areas are in good condition.  

As well as cleaning communal areas, we’ll also remove any items that could be a potential fire hazard. This is an important part of our team’s visit, as we’re committed to providing you and your neighbours with a safe place to live. 

Hazardous items we’ll remove from communal areas include: 

• anything that could cause a fire
• anything that could release toxic fumes if it caught fire
• anything you, or a firefighter, could trip over

We visit all our public open spaces twice a month to look after the grounds and make sure the areas are safe. Depending on the time of year, our team will carry out certain types of maintenance.

We’ll pick up litter and clear paths and hard surfaces, such as communal car parks, every time we visit. We’ll also clear litter from other areas of our land if needed. 

From early spring into late autumn, we’ll cut the grass, strim the edges, and cut back shrubs. During the autumn and winter is when we’ll trim hedges, as we can’t do that while birds are nesting between February and August.  

We’re only able to look after our own land and we can’t clear or tidy neighbouring land belonging to local authorities. If you’ve got any questions about who looks after the open space near your home, please contact us.

We will remove any rubbish that has been left illegally on our land. Our Estate Services team will look out for this as part of their regular grounds maintenance visits, but please let us know if you see anyone fly-tipping near your home. You can also report any fly-tipping in your community to your local council. 

Fly-tipping is illegal. We’ll take action against any of our customers who illegally dump rubbish at any of our homes, garages or communal areas.

Japanese knotweed is a bamboo-like plant that can cause structural damage to properties. We monitor for Japanese knotweed as part of our grounds maintenance visits. If we find any Japanese knotweed near our properties, we’ll involve a specialist contractor to treat the issue.

We’ll remove all graffiti from our neighbourhoods when it’s reported to us, and we’ll prioritise removing any offensive graffiti as soon as possible. You can let us know about any graffiti near your home by contacting our customer contact centre.

We provide grit bins at our extra care and sheltered housing schemes. We refill the bins each year and we monitor grit levels in the bins during the winter period.

Keeping your home clean and tidy will help avoid pest infestations. If you do have pests in your home, such as ants, cockroaches or mice, it’s your responsibility to deal with the problem. Your local authority can often help you deal with pests. You can help keep your home pest-free by:

• wiping kitchen surfaces and floors regularly 
• clearing away food and rubbish 
• keeping bin lids shut
• checking your pets for fleas
• checking your external walls for holes or gaps around service pipes where pests could get inside your home, and letting us know if you spot any areas we need to repair

We’ll deal with pests in communal areas such as cockroaches, rats and wasps, as part of your service charge. We’ll be looking out for pests during our cleaning and grounds maintenance visits, but please get in touch if you see evidence of pests in shared areas.

We look after all the trees in public open spaces near our properties. This includes annual maintenance as well as sorting any damage. No one can carry out any work on trees on our land without approval from our Tree Manager. 

It’s your responsibility to look after the trees in your garden. If you need advice on how to look after a tree in your garden or you’re worried about a safety hazard, please get in touch as soon as possible. 

We clean the inside and outside of the windows at most of our communal buildings. It’s your responsibility to clean the windows in your home. Communal window cleaning is usually carried out every 8 to 12 weeks.