Major Repairs and Improvements
We charge you for major repairs and
improvements we carry out as part of our maintenance
responsibilities.
We will normally hold meetings to consult you
about this work, starting at an early stage of the design process.
At the meetings surveyors will explain the planned work. You will
be able to ask questions, give your views and make suggestions.
When a new scheme has been fully designed, we will send you a
notice of intention, telling you about the work we plan to do.
If the work is to be carried out by
one of our partnering contractors, we will send
you a notice telling you that we are going to carry out the
work. The notice will give you a cost estimate and give you 30 days
to write to us with your comments. Although we have to consider
your views we do not have to act on them.
If the work is not going to be
carried out by one of our partnering
contractors and we are going to ask for quotes
from other firms, the notice will ask you for your comments. It
will invite you and any Tenants and Residents Associations to
nominate a contractor that you feel should be allowed to bid to do
the work. The notice will give you 30 days to send us your comments
or nominations for a contractor. After the 30-day period given
in the notice of intention, we will invite a number of contractors
to provide an estimate for the work, within a specific time limit.
At the end of this time limit, we will assess the estimates and
choose the one that we think will give the best overall value. We
will then send you a notice giving details of the estimate we have
chosen as well as details of at least one other estimate. If we
receive an estimate from a contractor nominated by a Tenants
and Residents Association or by a leaseholder, the notice will
include details of their estimate. The notice will also ask for
your comments on the estimates and will tell you where and when you
can inspect them. You will have 30 days to inspect the estimates
and to give us your comments. Although we must consider your views,
we do not have to follow them.
Limits to charges during the ‘initial period’ of the lease
If you bought your flat after 1987, there is a
limit on the amount we can charge you for repairs and improvements
during the initial period, roughly the first five years of the
lease from the date of the original sale.
Whatever major repairs or improvements are
carried out during the initial period of your lease, we can only
charge you for any work we listed in the Offer Notice we sent to
you under the ‘Right to Buy’ process. For this work, we can
only charge you the amount shown in the Right to Buy Offer Notice,
plus an extra amount to allow for inflation.
The amount that we can charge you for other
repairs during the initial period is also limited to a certain
amount for each year plus an allowance for inflation.
The conditions of the Right to Buy Scheme say
that a property must be valued ‘as at the date we receive your
Right to Buy application’. This means that whatever date our
valuer actually carries out the valuation on your flat, the value
the flat would have had on the day we received your application
must be used.
The initial period of your lease can begin on the same date as
the valuation, (the date we receive your Right to Buy
application). This means that if we carry out work to your
home after you have applied to buy it, we can charge you for the
work after the sale has completed.
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