Handbook contents

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Your tenancy type
If you are a student you will have what is called a ‘non-secure’ tenancy. If you are working you will have an Assured Shorthold tenancy. This means that your tenancy will end on the expiry date given in the tenancy agreement. If you are a student your tenancy has a fixed life because what we are offering you is temporary permission to use our property while you are studying or working. If you are a student, once your studies are over, we will want to offer the property to another student. When the expiry date has passed, we can ask you to leave. If you do not leave of your own accord we can force you to do so by serving a notice to end your tenancy. Your tenancy agreement has a clause that lets us take the property back if you cease to be a student before the date given in the agreement. You do not have the right to pass on your tenancy to anyone else.

Under no conditions may you let the property to anyone else. Anyone doing so is likely to be evicted, along with his or her sub-tenants.

Swapping Your Tenancy
Because ours is a specialised and temporary housing service we are not able to offer you some of the rights available to most tenants of other housing associations.
For example we could not let you swap your tenancy with another council or housing association tenant unless they too were a student and we might have offered them a tenancy in any case. We are also unable to take part in tenancy exchange schemes set up to help tenants move elsewhere in London or Britain because it is highly unlikely that any tenant wanting to exchange homes with you would match our tenant profile.

You might want to transfer between flats that we own and you can apply for a transfer by downloading an application form here but there may be others with more priority than you.

Changing The Dates On Your Tenancy Agreement
If you cut your stay short this should not normally cost you anything so long as you let us know two months in writing in advance and providing your original tenancy agreement was for more than six months. If you are a student and want to stay for longer you should send in your re nomination application form as quickly as possible. Your school should confirm your student status with us. In most cases the tenancy will be extended. But if you have already been in your property for three years we will need to discuss your circumstances with you. In this case we would not automatically agree to extend you tenancy.

Sharing Your Home
Residents in Vellacott House and the street properties are not allowed to share their home with anyone else. You are not allowed to regularly entertain guests overnight. This is because the communal facilities are designed to cope with a limited number of people. We do not want too many people trying to use them as this would cause problems for other tenants and means we would have to replace parts more often than we have budgeted for. We will only relax this rule in exceptional circumstances. If you think you have a special case, please discuss the matter with our Housing Services Manager.

If you live in one of our other properties and want to share your home with someone else, such as your mother and father, etc, you will need to get our permission first. Please come to the office to discuss your plans before you let anyone move in. In general we will deal with any requests sympathetically. However we would want to be sure that the arrangement you are proposing is fair and reasonable.

Other changes to your tenancy
It may be possible to vary your tenancy in certain circumstances. We have the right to increase or reduce the amount of rent, Service charges and water rates you have to pay. There may be times when we may want to make other changes to the terms of your tenancy, either as a one-off arrangement with yourself or a wider agreement with yourself and other tenants. If a change is likely to affect more than one tenant, we will only send out a formal notice about changes to the tenancy after we have discussed this with all the tenants concerned.

Consulting you about Our Housing Service
If we have any major plans to change our housing management service we will consult you first. The sort of changes we might want to make could include new ways of managing or maintaining your homes, the timing or number of services we provide or schemes to improve our older properties. In each case, we would want to explain the situation, say how we propose to deal with it, and then ask for your views.

We have drawn up a list of different ways we could carry out a consultation exercise so that we can choose a method which best suits the subject matter, the amount of time available to us and the number of tenants who need to be consulted.

• Sending a letter - If an issue may affect all or most of you, we will probably write to you to explain the situation and ask for your views
• Putting a notice up on the public notice board
• Personal visits — If the matter will only concern a small number of tenants and where individual tenants may be affected in different ways, we will arrange for our staff to visit you in person
• An open meeting with our staff for all tenants affected by our proposals
• Website notice — an electronic notice board on our website
• A tenants audit meeting
  

If we write to you asking for your views on any proposed changes, we will normally ask you to reply in writing. We would usually give you 14 days to get back to us unless we have to make a decision urgently. Where we ask for a YES/NO answer or give you a choice of options, the letter will include a tear-off slip for your reply. If we hold an open meeting, we will keep a written record of all the main points made. We will consider all views put forward by tenants before making a decision and we will tell you what we have decided using one or more of the methods outlined above.