We are committed to giving you good quality information that is easy to understand. We also want to involve you in decisions that may affect your home, your neighbourhood or your future.
We will consult you on things that may affect your tenancy. We must consult you for example if we are making or changing:
In November and December 2023, we consulted Customers on their rent and service charges for April 2024 to March 2025. The law requires us to do this every year and we welcome the opportunity to get feedback from our Customers. We want to share the feedback from this year’s consultation on our rent and service charge proposals for April.
The survey was sent to Customers living in rental homes across Scotland, invitations were sent to those who we hold an email address on file for (4,770), but Customers also completed the survey face-to-face with our Colleagues and by telephone.
568 Customers responded with a response rate of 8%.
Rent
We asked Customers what they thought about a flexible increase (a flexible range of different increases applied across local authority areas to achieve affordability and fairness) and most Customers who responded did not agree with this approach.
We have decided not to take the flexible approach and we have set a flat increase across all local authority areas.
A rent increase of 7.7% allows us to continue to maintain our services as well as invest in our homes in line with our business plan. This includes £11m which is allocated to replacing kitchens and bathrooms, as well as improvement of other areas such as enhancing building safety systems to make your home safer.
Service charge
In the consultation, we asked for feedback on changing our rent policy to separate rent and service charges.
Following feedback, we will change our policy from 1 April 2024 to provide a rent figure and actual costs for service charges, rather than a point value. This means that Customers are only charged for the services received, and the breakdown of charges will be clearer.
What should you do next?
If you are worried about paying your rent, please get in touch with us straight away, so we can talk about how we can help and support you. Please call us on 0131 657 0600.
If you are worried about the impact of cost of living, please click here to see the help and support that is available to you.