Under the terms of the lease, the council is responsible for maintaining the building and estate where your leasehold property is.
As a leaseholder, you will have to contribute towards the cost of us meeting this obligation. When you signed the lease, you agreed to meet the cost of any repairs and maintenance to your home, including major work.
Often, we carry out small-scale repairs to your block and estate, such as a repair to the guttering or replacing a roof tile. This type of maintenance work is carried out as routine maintenance and does not require any access arrangements to be made with tenants or leaseholders.
We charge the cost of this day-to-day maintenance to you through the repairs part of your day-to-day service charges.
What is a major work?
We treat larger repairs and improvements, such as a new roof or windows, differently. These are known as major work.
Summary of major work process
• The work is identified.
• We carry out an informal consultation.
• We hold a formal consultation for leaseholders.
• Work begins on site.
• The work is completed.
• We inspect the work.
• There is a liability period for any possible faults which may arise.
• We make the final payment to the contractor.
• We work out your contribution.
• We send you an invoice.
Process
.While some work is necessary because of repairs identified during inspection, other work may come about for some other reason. You will have to contribute towards the cost of any work as a leaseholder.
We value the input our tenants and leaseholders have when it comes to major work. By the time we issue our consultation notice, you may have already been consulted by other members of our technical staff.
Often the tenant liaison officer or the estate monitoring officer will have written to you to ask for your opinion on a particular scheme of work. You may have been invited to a consultation meeting or been offered the opportunity to suggest amendments to the proposed work. Perhaps you have been asked to choose a colour during a colour consultation for a contract of decorating in the shared parts of your block.
Our formal consultation usually takes place following these consultations, but only if the likely contribution from you is more than a set amount.
As previously mentioned, as a leaseholder, you must contribute towards the cost of carrying out this work. Because the cost to you as a leaseholder is greater than £250, the law says that we must consult you about proposed work before we carry out the work.
The council must consult you about proposed work, but only when the likely contribution from you is going to be more than £250. The council must also consult you if they enter into a contract for over a year and the likely contribution from you is going to be more than £100 a year for the work, goods or services provided under that contract.
As a result, you will not receive a formal consultation notice if the work is likely to cost less than this amount. Instead, the customer liaison officer or the community housing officer will let you know about the work.
Because of this, we may carry out a lot of individual repairs and improvements to your block and estate without having to let you know. You still have to contribute towards the costs of this small-scale work.
The rules on leasehold consultations are in section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 and section 151 of the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002.
The council must give you specific information about the work and consider any comments you might make. This information is normally presented in a notice commonly known as a ‘Section 20 notice’. The notice forms part of a minimum two stage consultation process. We have summarised this briefly below. Sometimes consultation is more limited, for example if the council advertises for contractors by following European-Union tender processes.
- The first notice asks you to nominate a contractor.
- There is then a 30-day consultation period.
- We invite estimates for the work, including the contractor most leaseholders have chosen (if there is one).
- We send a second notice including a description of the work and details of the estimates received.
- There is another consultation period of 30 days.
- We instruct a contractor to carry out the work.
Our initial consultation notice will invite you to nominate a contractor, which is a new right as a result of an amendment to the law in 2003.
The first notice must include:
- a description of the work;
- an invitation to you to nominate a contractor.
- the length of time for consultation and its end date; and
- a person within the council to whom you can make comments.
When making your choice, you need to consider the following, which your contractor must be able to keep to.
- Their ability to do the work.
- Whether they have enough insurance cover for both personal and public liability.
- Health and safety regulations.
At the end of the first consultation period, we collect the nominations, and identify which contractor has received the most. If we have not received nominations, we note this on the contract records.
We then let the contract manager know the name of the contractor most people have nominated (or if they haven’t nominated one at all). The contract manager will then try to get estimates for the work (including from the contractor the leaseholders have nominated).
When we have received estimates, we then carry out the second stage of the consultation. The notice is almost the same as that for the single-stage consultation, but includes details of the estimates received for the work.
- A description of the work.
- Justification for the works. (See the note below.)
- Details of contractors who provided estimates.
- Details of the estimated cost of work (total cost) provided by the contractors.
- Estimated cost of work per individual. (See the note below.)
- The length of time for consultation and its end date (30 days).
- A person within the council to whom you can make comments.
(Note: we do not need to give these items by law. We include this extra information for your benefit.)
The consultation notice invites you to comment on our proposals, and we must consider any comments you make. However, you are not allowed to say that work cannot go ahead, even if you are worried about your ability to pay for the work.
After considering any comments we receive within the consultation period, we will normally let the person managing the contract know that the work can begin.
We will respond to any comments we receive after the end of the consultation period but will not include them when considering comments before letting the contract manager know to begin work.
After consulting leaseholders, the contract manager finalises the paperwork and instructs the contractor to begin work. Normally you will be told the start date for the works by letter, but it could also be presented on the notice board in the communal area of your block or estate.
Depending on the size of the contract, the contractors can be on site for a few hours, weeks or even months. However large or small the contract, if you have any concerns about the work (including the behaviour of any contractors), you must let us know.
There will normally be a site office for large-scale work, with a site manager. If there isn’t, we will have a contract manager for each contract. Your customer liaison officer or the community housing officer is also available.You can contact any of the above to raise your concerns. However, if you have any problems raising your concerns, you can contact us, and we will forward your concerns to the contract manager for them to investigate
An inspection is carried out after the work is completed. This is to check that the work was carried out in line with the terms set out in the contract.
If certain aspects of the work have not been carried out, or perhaps have been carried out but to a poor standard, the contractors will have to return to the site to sort out any problems.
Liability period after the work is finished.
Each contract has what is known in the trade as a ‘defects liability period’. This is a period of twelve months after the work is finished on site, during which time the contractor legally has to return to your block or estate to sort out any problems .Once this period is finished, if any problems are reported, we may have to carry out work which will result in further costs, which we will charge leaseholders for over and above the cost of the contract. Unless you raise your concerns during or shortly after the work is finished, we will be unable to investigate or put right any problems.
Once the ‘defects liability period’ is over, we pay the final payment to the contractor. We then review all the costs of the work and prepare a final account which details the cost of the work carried out.
Working out your contribution
We will work out your contribution to the cost of the work. Our calculations are based on your lease, and any limits set in the landlord’s offer notice. The lease sets out our obligation to carry out work and your obligation to pay. The landlord’s offer notice is more detailed in a leaflet called “Your Right to Buy your home” issued by Department Communities and Local Government”.
However, to summarise – during the right-to-buy process, you receive a notice with details of the terms of selling the property. It identifies the valuation of the property, the discount, and the sale price. More importantly for major work, the notice also includes a list of specific items of work and a cost for each of those items. These costs apply for the first five full financial years following the date of the original right-to-buy sale. As a result, if we carry out work during this period, we will not charge you more than the set cost (plus an allowance for inflation).
Sometimes we do not need to consult you about major work, for example if something needs to be done urgently for health and safety reasons. We can only do this if the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal (LVT) has given us authority to do so.
We have a duty to make sure that we get back contributions due under the lease from leaseholders. If we fail to recover these contributions, the council’s housing revenue account (into which tenants pay their rent) will have to pay the equivalent leaseholder contribution.
As a result, we will follow up all charges you owe. Your lease says that you must pay these charges when we send your invoice. However, we know that this may not always be possible. Our policy is that you pay contributions for major work within 21 days of receipt of your invoice.
Because of this, please make sure that you pay or make arrangements to pay within this period. By the time you receive your invoice for major work, you will have been aware for some time that you would need to pay a contribution. The formal consultation notice, issued before the work starts, gave you an idea of your likely contribution.
You will find detailed information on how to pay for major work in section 5 – Service charges and ground rent.
The lease does not take account of your circumstances. However, we are aware of this, and if you cannot pay the demand in full, you must contact us within the 21-day period.
12 Monthly Instalments (with Bury Council)
You can arrange a repayment schedule over a 12 month period for which you will not be charged interest.
You can arrange a repayment schedule over a two year period. There will be an additional interest charge at the local authority rate, (which is normally higher than rates from a high street lender) for the second year but the total costs will be spread over 24 equal monthly payments. We will consider extending this arrangement over a longer period but this will be subject to an income and expenditure assessment by Bury Council.
Repayment problems?
You must contact us within 21 days of receipt of your invoice, if you cannot pay the full amount.
You must also contact housing services if you are having difficulties making payments in line with our agreement with you (if you are paying over a set repayment term).
If you are having difficulties keeping up with your payments in line with your lender, you should contact the lender direct.