A journey of improving service charges at PCHA
Owning and managing 700+ homes across Bromley and Bexley, PCHA is a small social housing provider who are committed to serving their residents and local community in a sustainable way. After a merger in 2023, the team at PCHA identified issues with their service charges and sought external expertise from Ad Esse.
“Kate from Ad Esse took us on a journey from being in a bit of a pickle to getting to a point where we feel confident that we have a clear, correct process in place and can manage service charges effectively in-house with support from Ad Esse when needed.”
(Sian Llewellyn, Director of Operations at PCHA)
Keep reading to see Sian’s experience of working with Service Charges by Ad Esse.
The Challenge
We first contacted Ad Esse because we identified an issue with our service charges. When merging with another housing provider, we understood their service charges to be fixed, rather than variable, but discovered this wasn’t the case when checking tenancy agreements for budget setting. We realised a need for external support to review the entirety of our service charges, looking across our whole stock.
Once we were introduced to Kate Innes, a Service Charge Consultant at Ad Esse, the project escalated as it became clear we had a much bigger challenge than we first thought.
Internal audit and review
Beginning the project in 2024, we embarked on an internal audit of our whole service charge process and Kate subsequently put in place an improvement plan. She helped us unravel the problems and pulled together a plan to resolve any issues. Instead of tackling problems in isolation, we reviewed the complete process from start to finish, and now have full confidence in our new policy and processes that have been approved by our board.
It was useful to be able to debate some of the policy items with Kate’s expertise, because it helped us understand why things had to be done in a certain way. After the first year of working together, Kate flagged opportunities for streamlining our processes, and we’ve since introduced more efficient ways of working. As PCHA has grown and acquired more complex stock, unravelling all the nuances and requirements with experts on hand has been helpful.
“Kate was extremely easy to work with and very efficient. She set clear timetables for when we need to do things and would check in and make sure we were on track. It was incredibly well structured with plenty of lead time and each person knew what they needed to do and by when.”
(Sian Llewellyn, Director of Operations at PCHA)
Managing service charges effectively in-house
In a small organisation, you don’t have the budget or bandwidth to always hire the subject matter experts you need, so we’ve been able to build up in-house service charge expertise whilst working with Ad Esse. One of the things we found most helpful is having Kate work closely with us, not only did she fix a lot of things for us, but she enabled us to reach a point where we could seamlessly take back control of our service charges. I think that was constructive. Reaching a transition point at the end of March 2026, we now manage service charges effectively in-house and can turn to Ad Esse for support when needed.
The impact of improving service charges with Ad Esse
We’re in a much better position, we can be more accountable to our residents with greater transparency over our charges, and we are fully equipped to answer queries. We’re also in a better position to challenge ourselves to achieve better value for money with services and cost to residents, creating a positive long-term impact.
“I would not hesitate to recommend Ad Esse, and in particular working with Kate. She was easy to work with, constructive, professional, and fun as well. It’s always been an excellent experience. Kate understood what it’s like for smaller organisations as well as larger ones and could adapt to our size well, which not every consultant can do.”
(Sian Llewellyn, Director of Operations at PCHA)
Sian Llewellyn, Director of Operations at PCHA