Residents bemoan poor responsiveness while ‘complex’ merger process completes

Several described having to use the formal complaints process to get responses to requests for repairs or service fee invoices as they never got responses from the company’s generic help email. 

Julia’s* north London block was built less than 10 years ago, but has been riddled with disrepair problems since she moved in four years ago.

The lifts regularly break for weeks at a time with only short-term fixes to carry it over to the next break, and the building has had to deal with unaddressed mould in communal areas in the past.

But the worst repeat issue is the propensity for the building’s underground parking structure to flood with sewage because of leaks from the block’s pipes.

“We have to walk through sewage, and drag all the sewage through the common parts through the carpet into our homes for three to four weeks, and then it gets fixed,” she explained. “And one or two months later, it happens again. And then we wait again for three to four weeks for a fix. And then it happens again.”

Despite those failures, she said tenants have seen a huge spike in service fees – 80% for 2023-24, despite it turning out that the building’s service charge account for the previous year delivered a surplus.

When they have asked for invoices explaining the rise and where the costs have come from, they have been largely ignored. In one case, they were sent an invoice listed as being for “multiple sites” rather than their building.

A first-tier tribunal is due to decide soon whether it is reasonable for landlords to charge a flat-rate service charge across its portfolio instead of on a specific estate basis.

“I pay two grand a year in service fees to have to walk through sewage,” Julia added. “In a nutshell, it’s absolutely broken.”

Ella* said she feels trapped in her building in Hackney. After a 400% increase in service fees last year, she has been left struggling to afford fees.

“I am lucky because I have a partner who I can share the financial burden with but when I moved in here, I didn’t. I don’t know what state I would be in right now if that had happened beforehand,” she said. 

But more than the cost, she says the way One Housing has treated her has been a bigger burden. The company, which she describes as “grossly incompetent”, failed to initially explain the reasons behind the service fee rise. 

After months of pushing, it has since clarified that the new build’s timber construction has left the company with high insurance fees. Ella said that a year on from the fee rise, the association had failed to provide the finalised accounts it based the rise on, despite having an obligation to do so under the Landlord and Tenant Act.

In the years building up to the Riverside takeover and during the process, One Housing was no stranger to news coverage.

In August, Inside Housing reported on serious problems at new build properties – including broken toilets and mushrooms growing from walls – several of which were managed by One Housing Group.

In a response, a spokesperson for Riverside said that it was “committed to working with residents” to improve their experience but that it was “going to take time for the full integration to happen” between Riverside and One Housing as merging two big organisations is “complex”. 

They said that Riverside had left merging One Housing’s operations into Riverside “until last as this was part of the merger promises agreed with customers”, and that as part of that programme they were now merging the two companies’ service charge team “under one leadership”. 

They claimed that they had now resolved issues with sewage leaks, broken lifts and other disrepair in Julia’s building and clarified that tenants in her building only paid for their proportion of invoices that referred to multiple buildings. After challenges on bill estimates, the company said that some amendments will be applied to end-of-year accounts.

For Ella’s block, the firm said it was “sympathetic” to residents’ concerns around service fees, confirming that much of the fees levied by their managing agent for the building were caused by higher insurance fees, and that they were now working with a new managing agent to try to reduce the fees levied on tenants.

In October, the outgoing chief executive of Riverside admitted that it is still working through “short-term financial challenges” related to it taking on One Housing as a subsidiary, as the expanded group’s operating surplus fell 38%.

*Inside Housing has changed the names of the residents to protect their identity at their request