Major Work
As the freeholder we may have to carry out work to the outside of your block, such as decorating the outside, repairing the structure including the roof, or maintaining any installations in the block such as lifts. Your responsibility to contribute to any work will be set out in your lease agreement.
Communicating with and involving residents
We will tell you about the work we are planning through Homefront| and our other publications.
We have a draft five year Major Works Programme|. All leaseholders have been advised of works that may be take place to their block and given the opportunity to feed back their comments. If there are any changes we will advise our leaseholder customers.
Everyone living on a block or on an estate affected by work will receive a major work pack. This contains useful information about the stages of the contract and useful contract details.
Depending on how much work is involved, we will hold meetings with all residents and on some larger schemes we may form a working group where we involve residents in choosing and monitoring the contractor.
Consulting you
We must consult leaseholders about Major Work and services in specific circumstances. This applies if Major Work is needed and we will charge you £250 or more towards the work or in the case of services where your contribution will be more than £100 in a financial year, and the contract is for longer than 12 months. Services might include letting a new contract, for example, a grounds maintenance or cleaning contract.
With Major Work, we write to each leaseholder and any Residents’ Association affected by the plans setting out what work is planned and why we want to carry it out. This is known as the ‘Notice of intention’. You can inspect a description of the work, give any comments you may have and suggest a contractor to do the work.
We must consider any comments that we receive from you
Once we have got the estimates, we will send you a second notice with details of the work and information about any comments we received following the first notice and what action we took. You can look at the quotes and make any other comments if you need to.
We may send you a further notice if the chosen contractor did not give the lowest estimate or they were not suggested by the residents’ association or the leaseholders.
Urgent work
We may sometimes have to carry out urgent work. In this situation, we cannot follow the two-stage consultation process before we carry out the work. In these circumstances we may apply to the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal to ask them for permission not to meet the usual rules. However, we will send you information about the work that we have had to do.