Fairer Rent For All – Rent Review

Every year the Welsh Government set the guidelines for rent charges that all social housing landlords must follow to make sure that rents are fair for all tenants. We write to you about what your annual rent charge will be for the following year every February before it starts in April. We will be doing the same again in February 2021.

But this year we have also done a review of our homes using a model devised by the Joseph Rountree foundation called the ‘The Living Rents Model’. This method gives us a fairer picture if our rents are affordable because it looks at the property size along with the income of the local lowest earning households. 
We found we need to make some changes to make our rents more affordable and fairer depending on the size of home you live in and where you live. This would mean changes to the annual rent charge – some charges will be less, and some charges will be higher, but others will stay the same. To help tenants living in homes with a higher rent charge we will make this change slowly and in line with Welsh Government's rules for setting rents. 

Another change is to calculate our rent charge over 52 weeks of the year instead of 48 weeks. This would mean a lower weekly rent charge but no rent-free weeks in December or March. Many tenants often ask us questions about the rent-free weeks and tell us they find it confusing. So, we think this change will make it easier for tenants to understand and manage rent payments no matter the method or system used.

  
Tell us your views 

Before we make any changes, we want to talk to you and get your views. Your views on any changes we make are very important to us and can make a difference to the way we do things. That’s why we are asking tenants to answer four questions in the survey in this link by the 30th October.  Plus, we’ll enter everyone who completes this survey by this date into a prize draw with a chance to win £50 of love2shop vouchers.

 

Normally when we need to make important changes like this, we also invite you to come to a meeting to talk this through and ask questions. We can’t do that in the person now but can do this online. So, we are holding an event on Zoom on the 23rd October. Zoom is an App that lets you talk to and see other people in a shared online room. It is easy to use and download for most people, but we can also help anyone to do this and join in.