COMPLAINTS PROCEDURE

 

The whole Team at Westbury Residential are committed to excellence in everything that we do, providing a responsive and accessible service to our Clients, Leaseholders and Residents alike. If, for any reason, you believe that we have not met your expectations, we would ask that you make the problem known to us, either verbally or in writing, at the earliest possible opportunity.

 

All complaints received by Westbury are treated in confidence, and we aim to ensure that a satisfactory resolution is achieved with minimum stress and inconvenience to the party making the complaint, and in an agreed time frame.

 

The first point of contact for any complaint should generally be the Property Manager as they are often best placed to quickly resolve the issue. However, we understand that there are times when this is not an appropriate option, and in those circumstances you should contact Director, Alison Mooney, via alison.mooney@westburyresidential.co.uk or via the Westbury office at 200 New Kings Road, London SW6 4NF.

 

Stage 1 - upon receipt of a complaint a file will be set up and you will be advised (in writing) within 10 working days, of who will be dealing with your complaint and the anticipated time scale for resolution (this will be a maximum of 28 days after the date that the complaint was first raised).

 

Stage 2 - where complaints cannot be resolved within 28 days, or if you are unhappy with the response provided then your complaint will be escalated to a senior member of the management team (normally Alison Mooney as above). A letter will be sent to you and resolution sought within 28 days as per Stage 1.

 

Stage 3 - if, following a further 28 days after escalation, you are still unhappy with the outcome of your complaint it may be necessary to contact an external dispute resolution service. For consumer client dispute resolution, please refer to:

 

The Property Ombudsman

Milford House,

43-55 Milford Street,

Salisbury,

Wiltshire, SP1 2BP•01722 333306

•Email: admin@tpos.co.uk

•Website: www.tpos.co.uk

 

For Business-to-Business alternative dispute resolution please refer to:

RICS Dispute Resolution Service

55 Colmore Row,

Birmingham,B3 2AA

T: 020 7334 3806

F: 020 7334 3802

Email: drs@rics.org

website: www.rics.org/drs

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Westbury Residential – Client Money Handling Procedure

Dated 27/06/2024

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Introduction

The purpose of this document is to set out Westbury Residential’s (WR) Client Money Handling procedures, in particular the controls and procedures needed to observe best practice in the industry as per the RICS and TPI consumer standards. Specific attention must be made to the RICS professional statement, Client Money Handling 1st edition, October 2019.

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Definition of Client Money

Money of any currency (whether in the form of cash, cheque, draft or electronic transfer) that:

• An RICS-regulated firm holds for or receives on behalf of another person, including money held by a regulated firm as stakeholder and

• Is not immediately due and payable on demand to the RICS-regulated firm for its own account,

Excluding fees paid in advance for professional work agreed to be performed, and clearly identifiable as such, unless the fees are for work undertaken as a property agent as defined by the Rules of the RICS Client Money Protection Scheme for Property Agents. Source; Client Money Handling 1st edition, October 2019

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How and where client money is held

Client money held by WR is banked into discrete and undesignated client bank accounts. Undesignated client bank account is set up to hold client money for a single or multiple clients. For the discrete bank accounts, the name of the client is incorporated into the account name as is the term, ‘client account’ to comply with best practice.

The banking systems currently used are HSBC and Lloyds.

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Access to funds

WR staff have defined access to funds and the authorisation of payments in line with their individual roles and the set hierarch within the company. This can be defined as follows;

• Service Charge Accountants and Financial Administrators have the ability to allocate receipts and identify payments and upload them for authorisation

• Accounts Payable have the ability to upload payments for authorisation

• The Senior Accounts Manager and the Director set up and authorise all clients’ accounts payments with no limits

• The Head of Accounts is able to sign off all payments with no limits

 

The Accounts Payables and Receivables team at WR log all monies received on the day of receipt and where possible allocated to the appropriate client money accounts.

All cheques are normally banked within two days of receipt, but not more than five working days.

Any unidentified funds will be logged into the suspense account and if not identified within three months, the funds will be returned if the originator’s details are present.

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Controls for authorisation of payments from a client account

A withdrawal from a client account, can only be made if;

• We have permission through contract or direct instruction from the client to do so

• All internal procedures have been followed in line with ‘Access to Funds’, set out above

• Sufficient supporting evidence is provided and checked, so the payment can be validly made

 

How interest and bank charges are handled

WR’s discrete client accounts are interest bearing, instant access accounts. The maintenance and transactional banking costs are paid for by the clients, the maintenance costs are recovered on an annual basis.

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WR has agreed with Lloyds that an aggregated rate of interest is applied to all the client accounts. WR has agreed interest share rates with some of its clients in writing but not limited to letter, email communication or explicitly through the contract to split the interest. The interest will be receipted into the WR business account on a monthly basis and the proportion due to each client will be paid within five working days or as near to that deadline as possible.

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Bank reconciliation procedures

All the client bank accounts are reconciled monthly. We do this by performing a three-way reconciliation between the bank statements, cash books and the individual client ledgers.

All bank reconciliations are reviewed by the relevant client accountant.

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Providing information to clients about monies held on their accounts

As per the RICS Code, 3rd Edition, we provide in writing to all clients the details of account and banking institution in which their funds are held. In addition, for some larger clients, we provide further client money information i.e. balance and a review of their spend against budget on a quarterly basis.

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Approved by: Sherif Mankarios Head of Client Accounting Dated 27/06/2024