Scrutiny exercise 8 – rent and service charge statements

CCHA provides rent and service charge statements to residents, to let them know how much they need to pay, to provide a breakdown of charges, and the balance of their account. The aim of this scrutiny exercise was to review the effectiveness of the rent and service charge statements provided to residents by CCHA.

You Said

When the new format for leaseholder and shared owner statements is designed, the RSP would like the template to be shared with the Resident Feedback Group (RFG), so all involved residents have the chance to make comments before they are issued to residents.

We recommend that the contact details for residents to use if they would like help with their finances should be more prominent across every statement and review document issued to residents.

We recommend that font size 12 is the minimum size used on rent and service charge statements, to make sure they are easy to read by residents.

We recommend giving more detailed explanations to leaseholders and shared owners when their service charge items have gone up or down.

We recommend adding a sentence to the statements and review documents explaining that CCHA can provide the document in other languages or formats as required.

We Did Further action being taken if required

We will provide a copy to residents in advance and endeavour to take their comments on board.

The documents will be reviewed by the RFG, ahead of being produced in 2024.

We will ensure this is implemented for the next Statements.

The documents will be amended for the 2024 Statements.

We will ensure this is implemented for the next Statements.

The documents will be amended for the 2024 Statements.

We will ensure this is implemented for the next Statements.

The documents will be updated to reflect this when the next Statements are produced.

We will ensure this is implemented for the next Statements.

The documents will be updated to reflect this when the next Statements are produced.

The RSP is currently reviewing our performance against the commitments set out in our Residents’ Charter. The findings of this review will be reported in the next Residents’ Voice Report.

If you’d like to be part of our Resident Scrutiny Panel, or want to find out what’s involved, please get in touch by emailing our Customer Experience Team on feedback@castlesandcoasts.co.uk or by using any of the other contact details on the back of this report.

CCHA’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy

Our five-year Equality Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) Strategy was launched in 2022 and our vision is:

To support the Strategy, we have a Delivery and Communications Plan. The Delivery Plan has 35 key actions, to support the delivery of the strategy.

These actions include the creation of an ED&I Charter, which was co-designed by our Resident Feedback Group. All CCHA Staff and our key delivery partners have signed up to this.

In line with this, we run events to celebrate diversity such as LGBT+ History Month in February 2023, where we raised awareness of LGBT+ communities through news items and promotion, meetings and interactive quizzes.

We’ve also created an updated equality impact assessment process. This is a tool we use to make sure all new policies, services, and procurement of goods and services are assessed, to ensure they are inclusive.

We’re pleased to report that all actions which were due to be completed within the ED&I Delivery Plan for 2022/23 have been delivered on time.

We also recently also undertook ED&I training with ED&I specialists, our staff ED&I Champions and our Board ED&I Champion, Helen Forsyth.