Rents and service charge performance

Rent

We are responsible for collecting the rent from around 23,000 council homes, at a total of over £190 million each year. It is important that we collect rent as it pays for all your services and for maintaining homes.
 
We help residents to make rent payment and contact residents who are falling behind with payments to lend support in keeping their tenancy with regular rent payments.

Where residents are having financial difficulty, the Income Recovery team supports them to make the most of their income by referring them to support services. We will also refer residents to the councils Income Maximisation Team as well as Citizens Advice and Islington Law Centre.

When tenants do not respond and we need to use enforcement, the council follows rent recovery protocols, encouraging the resident to seek support throughout the recovery process. Our aim is always to help residents keep their tenancy and access help and support.

How we performed in 2023/24 (council and Partners for Improvement-managed properties)

• We collected 99.3% of rent against a 100% target.
• The arrears as a proportion of the rent roll was 5.05%.

Service charge

Our priority is to meet our goal to provide “good value home ownership services to our leaseholders” as we said in the Housing Strategy 2021-2026: A Home For All.

It is important we collect service charges from leaseholders so that funds are put back into the Housing Revenue Account. This means that social housing tenants are not paying for leaseholder costs.

Service charge performance includes:

• annual service charges
• shared ownership rent
• front entrance doors invoices
• other leasehold recharges.

We monitor our performance from October to September because most of the charges are annual service charges which are invoiced every September. You can pay all our charges monthly in line with our terms and conditions.

How we performed from October 2022 to September 2023 (council-managed properties)

We collected 99.31% of service charges available income (taking into account payment plan due dates and excluding secured debts).

Major works service charge

We send invoices as needed once works are complete. Leaseholders have 12 weeks to decide how to pay their invoice and can choose from a range of payment options including monthly instalments for 10 years (depending on the charge), so the collection rate is always much lower than the service charge performance.

How we performed in 2023-24 (council-managed properties)

We collected £3.9m and the unsecured “arrears” at year end was 11.8% of the total major works debt.