London and Quadrant (L&Q) are our managing agents.  They are responsible for maintaining the apartment buildings on the estate and the estate grounds including gardens, trees, roads signs and lighting; we the residents pay for this service through the Service Charge.  Burnell House (the building) is no longer managed by L&Q but they still maintain the estate grounds on behalf of all residents.  

Read the more about this.

The Chobham Manor ELE working group has the following to report. Regular meetings with the London Borough of Newham (LBN), LLDC, Councillors, ELE and the CMRA are enabling us to gain better transparency. Following the major outage w/c 11/12/23 the CMRA have requested an independent investigation to be completed to include the design, redundancies, resilience, Quality Management System, Planned Maintenance and historic major outages.

Ofgem have announced that they will be transitioning as the District Heating regulator in 2024. Any hot water or heating issues contact ELE directly on 08009993080

Enquiries eastlondonenergy.co.uk@equans.com and copy committee@chobhammanor.org.

The Chobham Manor roads system is, as you may know, still private and not quite so well integrated with the neighbouring roads. 

CMRA's Giulia Meloni helped establishing a relationship with Newham Council and the Mayor herself and has been instrumental in assuring Tfl funding to Newham to ultimately address a number of unresolved road crossing issues all around Honour Lea Avenue.  As a result of this work, a number of improvements were made and the zebra crossing was completed. In addition, the committee has liaised with the roads officer in ensuring a controlled road adoption for Abercrombie road and Olympic Park Road.

As Giulia is stepping back, the committee is keen to carry on her work and keep improving our road system. If. you are interested we have a longer story celebrating her work.

A working group of the residents association executive committee has been challenging the park charge.  Over the year we immediately challenged and defeated the plan by L&Q to make it an annual collection.  We have submitted our objections to the unfairness and arbitrariness of the charge to the Competition and Markets Authority and have had two meetings with Jules Pipe the Deputy Major of the GLA following his report and most recently we have made public our position paper on the charge and in combined action with the residents association from the East Wick Estate we have written to the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan to request his ruling on the RPI escalator on the park charge which we think should be removed.  We are continuing to investigate the workings of the park charge in forensic detail, for instance, see our Freedom of Information Request to LLDC.

Well over a quarter of homes on the estate are housing association tenants with L&Q as the landlord.  It is a central commitment of the residents association to be the voice and champion of all types of resident whether freeholder, leaseholders, tenant or shared ownership and housing and association residents.  Many issues of concern are common to all residents but to be sure all voices are heard equally, we have set up the Housing Association Residents Campaign and Support Group.  We have had two meetings and will have quarterly meetings from now on with two members of the group co opted on to the committee.  Helen Alleyne and Helio Cruz are co-leadeing this group in partnership with the chair of the residents association.  

Did you know that we have over 300 trees on the estate?  WOW!  Unfortunately, around 30 trees died, and others have shown signs of distress as a result of lack of care, the majority of these were from phases 3 and 4 of the development.  We raised the topic in April and kept on raising it on estate walk-abouts.  Nothing happened so we complained and harangued L&Q leadership to fix the problem.  L&Q promised to have all trees on the estate inspected/assessed and undertook to replace the dead trees at no cost. 

The survey was conducted, dead trees removed (Maggie Freegard had the chippings distributed on the flower beds) and we eagerly awaited the glorious replacement trees.  We were disappointed and annoyed.  The replacement trees were the wrong species and were seriously under sized; in many cases they were not much better than twigs.  We complained again - big time and received push back from L&Q.  As the specification of trees on the estate was subject to planning permission, we complained to the LLDC and asked them to take planning enforcement action to have L&Q plant the correct species and size of tree.  We have had a number of further meetings on this with L&Q but do not have a resolution yet.

We have further discussed the distressed trees that were not dead and what actions are necessary to help them to flourish.  We envisage that actions will include pruning, staking and watering, concluding how this will happen is work in progress.  We expect that we will need to engage residents to support tree care.  Neil Sinden is sponsoring the CROP project for the Orchard. We will very likely need volunteers to help with watering and perhaps some tree pruning.  We will report more on this as our discussions with L&Q develop.

Chobham Manor residents association is promoting a campaign to abolish leasehold.  Residents are invited to an open meeting 7.30-9.30 June 13th to explore the pros and cons of a leasehold campaign and form a campaign group.  An initial briefing paper with FAQs is available here.   If you are interested in supporting a campaign, please register your interest and we look forward to seeing you at the meeting by emailing chair@chobhammanor.org.