FAQs

No, not because of these changes. The rents that we set each year are controlled by a formula fixed by the government. If you are a leaseholder, these changes would not affect your service charge.

Affinity Sutton Homes. We would be a charitable housing association and a non-profit making Industrial and Provident Society that does not pay any dividends to its shareholding members. Our regulator, The Tenant Services Authority would oversee these changes and continue to regulate us.

We currently organise our services across five regions – North and Midlands, East, London, South and South West – and this would remain the same.

The conditions of your tenancy (or lease for leaseholders) would not change, but Affinity Sutton Homes would be the name of your landlord. We would not have to issue new tenancy agreements, but we would send you legal details about Affinity Sutton Homes. Your rights and responsibilities as a tenant or leaseholder would not change. It is also important to note that any statutory rights, such as ‘right to buy’ and ‘right to succeed’ are also unaffected.

Our plans wouldn’t make any changes to your local services. We are always looking at how we can improve our services and this would just help us to be more efficient behind the scenes.

We would be looking for residents to be part of the National Residents’ Council and the Regional Scrutiny Boards, and we would continue to recruit to the Service Task Teams. Resident Area Panels (RAPs) are open to all residents living in their RAP area and our aim is to offer more opportunities to get involved that aren’t just about attending meetings but by using our website, email and texting instead. We also hope to involve residents who haven’t got involved with us in the past.

As we said above, we have already been working together as ‘Affinity Sutton’ and most of our staff are already employed by Affinity Sutton Group, the parent organisation. Most staff would be unaffected and you would still deal mostly with the same staff.

Affinity Sutton Homes would have a single board, which would be responsible for the delivery of services to residents. The new board would work closely with the three new Regional Scrutiny Boards to make sure its resources deliver effective and efficient services.

Board members would be recruited for their particular skills. As we have said above, we see residents as key to our proposals and future operation and we would make sure that at least three of them are members of the board.

Bringing together the three housing associations would allow us to finish off the work we started to create a single organisation which is focussed on one set of priorities – the things that matter most to our residents. The boards of the three organisations, which include residents, have been able to take independent and legal advice on the proposals, and have consulted with resident involvement groups. We’ve made sure that the proposals are within the law and are acceptable to our regulator, the Tenant Services Authority.