If you are a council tenant or leaseholder, you should have received a letter about how we intend to ensure your home is maintained to a good standard and compliant with all the relevant rules we need to follow.
You can find a copy of the letter and further information on this page. We have put together some frequently asked questions, to help you:
We wrote to every council tenant or leaseholder advising you that we have decided to review the standard of our properties to ensure they continue to be a decent standard. We will continue to check your property on a regular basis. In the meantime, if you have any concerns, please let us know.
You do not need to take any action, we wanted to keep you informed of our news and we will contact you in the coming months to arrange a time to check your property. In the meantime we will keep this webpage updated with any developments or include an update in our regular tenant newsletter.
Yes, we will need to check other attributes of the property such as electrical safety, gas safety and to check if asbestos is present.
Your safety and wellbeing is our priority, and we are working on a detailed survey of all our homes so that we have more detail about the conditions of our properties. If we need to inspect your home further, we will be in direct contact with you.
We arranged the independent audit to help us understand how we can improve our policies and processes to give us and you the assurance that we are meeting our legal obligations and best practice.
We wanted to make sure that we had a good understanding of where we needed to focus our efforts in preparation for some tougher monitoring from the housing regulator.
The outcome will help us develop a comprehensive maintenance plan that ensures your home has regular upgrades and replacements, helping to keep it safe, modern and energy efficient.
You will not need to move out of your home. If an item in your home does need checking, or we need to make any specific improvement, we will be in touch with you directly to organise this.
No, this is important both for you and us to know if there are any areas that require immediate improvement.
Carrying out our regular maintenance and repair work is still really important to us and this will not change, please use our website to request a general council housing repair.
We expect the condition survey to take a number of months, and then we may need to visit you once we understand if there is any important maintenance we need to carry out. Some maintenance or repairs may be urgent and these will be prioritised based on safety, but non-safety critical issues may take a bit longer.
No, your rent goes towards paying for the upkeep of your home and for the services that you receive. If you do not keep up with your rent payments, you could risk losing your home.
You won’t need to pay more than you do already for the routine general servicing and maintenance. You may be required to contribute to additional works required to the communal areas of the building where you lease a property. This will be dependent on the nature of the works and statutory consultation will be undertaken in advance in this case.
A copy of the letter can be downloaded Audit of our housing service - update letter [pdf] 146KB.
View a letter from our Chief Executive, Tracey Kerly, to the Regulator of Social Housing [pdf] 152KB.
View our Service Improvement Plan [xlxs] 151KB.
If you have any queries, please email housing.compliance@ashford.gov.uk.
