Apartment service charges go through the roof

Tenants and residents of apartments in England are facing escalating service charges, paid to landlords to maintain their properties and carry out necessary repairs, sources tell The Sentinel.

The unexpected service charge hikes are affecting tenants renting lower-cost social housing as well as those who own their own leasehold properties, and even those living in retirement apartments.

Suzanne Muna, secretary of the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC), says it is easier for landlords to extract extra cash from service charges than from rents, which can attract more scrutiny.

Service charges have been rising for a number of years. Britain has been struggling to tame inflation since the Brexit vote, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and costs of building materials and labour have risen. Insurance and safety costs have also risen after a deadly fire at Grenfell Tower in west London in 2017. However, service charges are often rising far more quickly than inflation, Muna says.

“It’s not just insurance for which people are being charged hundreds of percentage points in increase every year, it’s all sorts of things — cleaning for example, going up hundreds of percentage points. Well, why?”

Fiona, for example, lives in a one-bedroom shared housing apartment — seen as an affordable way to get on the housing property ladder — in the New Capital Quay development in Greenwich, southeast London. She says her service charge has unexpectedly risen this year, to more than 3,500 pounds. Fiona did not give her last name because of the sensitivity of the issue.

“The services provided are sub-par. One of the lifts in our block has been out of service for two weeks…and weekly cleaning hasn’t been carried out for weeks, despite us paying for this service,” Fiona says.

Fiona pays her service charge to Hyde Housing Association. However, a Hyde spokesperson told The Sentinel that Hyde mainly collected the service charges on behalf of the development’s managing agent, Galliard Homes.

“We’re working with our customers at New Capital Quay to ensure that the managing agent delivers good services that represent value for money,” the spokesperson said, adding that “costs associated with essential lift maintenance and necessary repairs to the building have also led to some increased costs.” 

A Galliard Homes spokesperson said the increased service charges at New Capital Quay were mainly related to an increase in reserve fund contributions “to fund known capital expenditure projects over the next 20 years, as well as to provide for any unanticipated major works.” 

Many apartment owners in England own their properties on a leasehold basis. This means they do not fully own their homes but own it on a long lease, agreed with a freeholder. Freeholders collect a service charge to maintain the apartment buildings, or may appoint a managing agent to manage the property on their behalf. 

Mithuna Maran, who owns a three-bedroomed leasehold apartment in the Waterside development in Watford, north of London, says her service charge has nearly doubled this year, to more than 3,500 pounds. This is despite gaps in the maintenance of the building.

“Essential services are being neglected, serious issues remain unresolved, and large companies are repeatedly failing in their obligations without accountability,” she says.

“If no one challenges this behaviour, they will continue increasing charges without justification — effectively taking money from residents in broad daylight.”

Waterside developers Bellway Homes said it could not comment on service or maintenance charges, as these were managed by PBM Management.

“We can confirm that we remain in dialogue with leaseholder representatives regarding service charges for the development,” Bellway added. 

PBM Management told The Sentinel that the service charge had risen at Waterside “primarily due to new statutory requirements under the Building Safety Act.” 

Freeholders say that inflation has been a major factor in rising service charges, and that errors in the charges are often a result of administrative mistakes, rather than a deliberate attempt to overcharge leaseholders, according to a report published in June 2025 by the housing committee of the London Assembly. 

However, Muna says bad practice is widespread.

“It might be something like — it says that our windows are being cleaned regularly, but they still look really dirty — and then you’ve got the really black and white stuff, like — they are charging us for lift maintenance, but we don’t have a lift in our building.”

SHAC is proposing a system to make it easier for tenants and residents to dispute service charges and is campaigning to get the topic debated in Parliament. 

Muna says the issue of escalating service charges “is not individualised, it’s systemic. It’s happening everywhere, it’s on an industrial scale.”