Grounds maintenance

If you live in one of our homes, your grounds maintenance service will either be provided by Moat's contractors or by your managing agent.  If your service charge includes a separate item for grounds maintenance, then the service is provided directly by one of Moat’s contractors. You can find details of your service charges on the statements that we send to you every February and September.

If you’re still unsure whether Moat provides your service, please phone us at 0300 323 0011 or email [email protected] and we’ll let you know. 

Some communal areas on your estate may be owned and maintained by your local council. We have a map of your estate that shows which areas our grounds maintenance partners are responsible for. If you would like a copy of the map; please call us on 0300 323 0011 or email us at [email protected] to ask for a copy. 

Your contractors will visit your estate every two weeks. There is a standard set of duties we’ll expect your contractors to carry out but we’re also able to tailor these services to the needs of customers and their local communities. 

Your grounds maintenance service will run all year, except over the Christmas and the New Year period. 

Our contractors should visit each site twenty-five times a year. Grass cutting will be prioritised during the growing season, usually starting in mid-March and finishing in late November. The weather and ground conditions will also affect when grass cutting can happen – so, in high summer when the grass may not need a cut, we would expect the contractors to focus on other tasks, such as weeding, pruning, and spraying. 

At each visit, your contractors will focus on the work which needs the most attention and is most appropriate for the season or time of year. During the early summer, this is likely to be grass cutting. We would expect most hedge trimming to happen in the autumn and winter months. Our contractors will be careful not to disturb wildlife during bird nesting season (the end of March through to late August) and will leave areas of hedge untouched where birds are nesting until the autumn.

Hedges and shrubs that are overhanging paths or car parking areas or preventing access for meter readings will be pruned back throughout the year.  

Your grounds maintenance contractors should visit your estate on the same day of the week every fortnight. You can find out when this is by visiting the My Community page in myMoat.

Sometimes a visit may need to be rearranged because the weather is poor, or the contractor has had staffing or equipment issues. If this happens, they must reschedule their visit and let us know of the new attendance date; we’ll let you know this new attendance date, too. The contractor is expected to return to their original schedule for future visits.

If your contractor misses a visit, it will be picked up and confirmed through our regular estate inspections, through the attendance checks that the contractors complete, and through the regular meetings we have with our contractors. We will also investigate reports of missed attendances raised by customers with our contractors, so please do let us know, either by phone: 0300 323 0011, email: [email protected], or web chat: www.moat.co.uk if you have any concerns. 

If our contractor has missed a scheduled estate visit and did not attend on an alternative day, you will not be charged. We’ll ensure customers’ service charge accounts are only recharged for visits that have been completed. 

Our Neighbourhoods Team completes regular estate visits and grounds maintenance surveys every month. Our contractors and our specialist Estates Services Officers will visit each site regularly to troubleshoot problems and complete audits and quality checks. We publish dates of our inspections on myMoat and you are more than welcome to join us when we visit. 

If the grounds maintenance contractor misses your scheduled visit without rescheduling it, they won’t be paid for that visit. If contractors visit and do a poor job, they will only receive partial payment for that estate visit. At each visit, the contractor will take photos at the start and end of their visit to capture what work has been done. We’ll use the photos, regular site inspections and the reports of customers to judge the quality of the service provided.  

We have separate contracts with local tree management specialists who we’ve appointed to look after trees in communal public areas on your estate. The contractors we use are:

Chevron Green in Kent
Connick Tree Care in Essex
Southern Land Services in London and Sussex 

We’ve asked each of the contractors to visit all the sites where we have trees. They’ve recorded the condition of trees we own in shared and communal spaces and produced a schedule for planned maintenance. Tree works identified as urgent are completed as soon as we’re aware that they need to be done. Tree maintenance works will be completed in autumn and winter each year.  

If you’re a shared owner or leaseholder and have trees within the boundaries of your front or rear garden, it is your responsibility to maintain these trees. If you are a tenant, check your tenancy agreement as it will set out your and our responsibilities for trees. 

In the first instance, you should contact our Customer Service Centre and we'll try to answer your query. You can contact us by emailing [email protected], calling 0300 323 0011 or chatting with us via webchat at www.moat.co.uk. If our Customer Service Advisors can’t resolve your query, they’ll pass it onto our specialist teams who manage the grounds maintenance contract for your area.