People living in Chichester Court – a former school building – have had an apology from One Housing

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RESIDENTS living in a former school without consistent access to heating and hot water have criticised their housing association for raising service charges.

Chichester Court in Royal College Street is a block of social housing run by One Housing, which in 2021 merged with the larger Riverside Group.

At the beginning of March, tenants were told their service charge would more than double from £25 to £63 a week.

Residents have come together to “fight” this increase, citing a range of ongoing problems on top of unreliable heating and hot water access, including malfunctioning CCTV cameras and security gates.

Speaking to the New Journal, One Housing apologised for “issues with the supply of heating and hot water”.

Formerly St Richard of Chichester School, the old building has high ceilings and large single-glazed windows that make it difficult to regulate room temperature.

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Nadia Pereira is a mother who lives in the block with her two children, one of whom has cerebral palsy. She said the building is “either too hot or too cold”.

The heating is “either completely on or completely off,” Ms Pereira said.

“I’m just constantly trying to regulate the temperature.” “We’ve been extremely cold and [then] turned the heating on full blast – I had to open all the windows because there was no way of turning it down,” she said.

Em Rennards is another tenant who has been forced to make her own repairs after housing officers failed to fix the problems she had reported.

“We’ve all now decided we need to come together and fight this,” she said of the rising service charges. “We can’t afford it.”

A spokesperson for One Housing said it was planning on “undertaking major works” before next winter to “prevent outages happening on a regular basis”.

Of the service charge rise they said: “The huge rise in inflation means we’re seeing cost increases across the board on all new and existing contracts and, inevitably, this has had an impact on service charges.

“Residents in Chichester Court have seen an increase in service charges which is largely down to rising utility bills.” They added that struggling residents should contact them for “financial assistance”.

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