Social Housing

We wholly identify with the aims and ethos of the social housing movement.

We take the view that whilst legal advice is a necessary evil in a highly regulated sector and this represents an obvious business opportunity for us, it is not an opportunity which we seek to ruthlessly exploit, but rather enables us to form business partnerships which are genuinely cost effective and deliver high quality advice in a very targeted way. To achieve that objective of creating partnerships we have developed a range of fixed fee advice and training courses which are not only extraordinarily competitively priced, but also designed to support and develop your own staff and reduce your reliance on external legal advice.

What we do

• We provide employment advice on issues ranging from conduct, capability, equal pay, ill-health, disability discrimination, working time and TUPE through to policies and procedures, senior executive remuneration and the role of non executive directors and board members.
• We have dealt with particularly complicated scenarios involving resident wardens in sheltered schemes and allegations of resident abuse as well as time on call and the National Minimum Wage.
• We provide housing advice on how to proceed in a range of situations, from simple rent arrears cases, anti-social behaviour injunctions, demotion of tenancies through to possession proceedings.
• We offer fixed fee advice services for both housing and employment law advice, backed up by on-going staff training and support packages which can be tailored to your needs.
• We deal with the whole range of property issues from site acquisition and assembly, conditional contracts, planning gain retention and Section 106 Agreements through to straightforward right to buy and Shared Equity sales.
• We advise on many of the more strategic aspects of housing association activities such as governance and tendering (i.e. for supporting people contracts).

In the South West we work closely with The Personnel and Training Officer Group (PATOG) and the regional office of The National Housing Federation. Our lead partner in the team is Simon Sanger-Anderson who has advised on legal issues in the sector for more than 20 years and was for many years a housing association tenant. He is currently Chair of Devon & Cornwall Housing Association and on the Board of its commercial property subsidiary, Westco.

Click here for information on conveyancing for private individuals and for information on our commercial property services.