We know your communal areas are important to you, so we've put together some FAQs to provide answers about grounds maintenance, services provided and how to report a problem.
Helping you understand Grounds Maintenance
Here's what our Grounds Maintenance providers will achieve.
They maintain grass areas, offering a cut and drop service and ensuring grass is well cut and even. They make sure hard surfaces (like external bin stores and drying areas) are tidy and clean, as well as free from litter, leaves and moss.
Other tasks that grounds maintenance undertake are weeding flowers and shrub bed areas, maintaining hedgerows and shrub beds throughout the year* and making sure hedgerows, shrubs and trees are not restricting access throughout the year.
*Please note, we can’t do this if there’s evidence of nesting birds, which is approximately March - August
Grounds maintenance visits are scheduled by the contractor in the same week of every month. This means that visits may fall on a different date each month.
Each year, Pinnacle complete 22 visits and Tivoli complete 18 visits. If your visit falls on a bank holiday, they’ll make up the missed visit later on that week.
Sometimes because of bad weather, like heavy rain, our contractors won’t be able to cut your grass on their scheduled visit. If this is the case, they’ll do other tasks instead such as litter picking, sweeping of pathways and car parks.
The services we provide changes between the growing season (March – October) and the winter season (November – February). Visits take place fortnightly in the growing season and monthly in the winter season.
There’s a severe weather protocol in place for things such as continuous rain and flooding, settled snow, strong winds and extreme heat. You can look at our useful leaflet for more information on different weather and what will happen in those circumstances.
As with any company, our grounds maintenance contracts will occasionally come up against things like occasional staff sickness and low staffing numbers which means that sometimes a scheduled visit might be missed. We’ll always correct this by rearranging the missed visit and making sure we carry out the number of contractual visits each year.
We’ll always make sure we make up the missed visits, provide extra visits where necessary, spend longer on site to bring it up to standard, and offer refunds if there’s continued failures with grounds maintenance.
Tree works, control of invasive weeds (e.g. Japanese Knotweed), removal of bulk waste, animal or human waste is not included in the Grounds Maintenance service.
You can find out more about Grounds Maintenance in our brochure and Japanese Knotweed on our information page
If there’s an urgent problem, we urge you to call the Hub on 0345 60 20 540 as soon as possible. For non-urgent problems, you can report them on our social media channels.
