These are carried out by an estate ranger and a neighbourhood housing officer, alongside other members of our team. During these inspections, we will work with you to identify any issues your community may have, such as fly-tips, anti-social behaviour (ASB) or grounds maintenance. We will then agree on an action plan and time frame to resolve these.
We use data we hold, including ASB cases, fly tips and grounds maintenance works orders raised, to identify which estates we will include in our programme of inspections.
What happens on our estate inspections?
When we are completing estate inspections, we monitor the condition of the neighbourhood, and we look out for the following:
- outstanding repairs to communal areas
- poorly maintained gardens and boundaries
- vehicle nuisance, including abandoned vehicles on communal land and obstructions
- untidy green areas and spaces
- vandalism and graffiti
- work required to trees on communal land
- the condition of garage areas, allotments and play areas
- the existence of pest infestations on communal land; and
- the cleanliness and condition of bin stores and refuse collection points
We are improving the way we carry out and review estate inspections, to ensure we can proactively work with you to improve your community and resolve any issues. We’ve introduced a scoring system for each estate inspection to highlight areas that our team might need to visit more often to carry out proactive work, such as litter picking.
If you attend an estate inspection, you will be asked to score the area on things like, litter, grounds maintenance, ASB and general upkeep. These scores will then be reviewed periodically by our team, to ensure we are making real progress in your local community.
Louise Whatley, our neighbourhood and estates manager, explains:
“These scores will enable us to compare the communities we have visited year after year to ensure we are
maintaining, or ideally improving them. We also look at communities where we could complete an environmental improvement project (like the one below) or work with partner agencies to target specific concerns or behaviours.”
Coming in 2025
We are in the early stages of looking at our 2025 programme, but we hope to resume inspections from week commencing 3 January 2025. We will start in Bury St Edmunds and Haverhill due to the number of homes we have in these areas and the number of communal
areas we are responsible for.
We will be renaming our ‘estate inspections’ to ‘Neighbourhood Check-Ins’ and we hope this new title will truly embody the purpose of why we do these reviews of your local area.
Your feedback about where you live is important, so please get involved if you can. If you live in the area, we’ll contact you directly via email and text message in the weeks leading up to the inspection.
As soon as we have the full timetable for 2025, we will add this to our website and social media pages.
For more information get in touch with our Neighbourhood and Estates team on 0300 3300 900 entering extension 7333 when prompted or you can email myarea@havebury.com
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