How the call-out fee works in Greenwich
One rate, any hour, no night or weekend premium on the call-out itself. There are two situations where you do not pay it at all, and both are worth knowing before you ring.
Charged once, 24 hours a day. Covers the engineer attending and diagnosing the fault. Labour is billed separately at from £110 an hour on weekdays and from £140 out of hours.
If the work runs past three hours, the call-out fee is waived and you pay labour and materials only. You are not charged twice for the same visit.
No call-out fee on any visit, on every property, for landlords, property managers, block managers and letting agents on a collaboration contract. Labour and materials only. Ordinary emergency call-outs pay the standard £60. See our property manager terms.
Every figure above is published in full on our pricing page, and the price for your job is agreed in writing before any chargeable work starts.
The heat network share here is the highest we work with
6.2% of Greenwich households heat with a district or communal heat network only, which is 7,020 homes. Across London the figure is 3.4% and across England it is 0.9%. Greenwich is not a borough where communal heating is an oddity, it is a borough where it is a mainstream way of heating a home and getting more so.
The largest single driver is the Peninsula. In January 2024 the UK government announced that 'the Greenwich Peninsula ESCO District Heating Network in London will receive £4.6 million' in order 'to connect more than 9,000 existing and new homes, as well as over 94,000 square metres of commercial space to low-carbon heating', and that 'This cleaner energy will be powered by an air source heat pump fixed on the roof of the Greenwich Peninsula Energy Centre.' That is a large number of homes with no gas appliance, no flue and no boiler to service.
What a home on a heat network actually has is a heat interface unit: a plate heat exchanger with a set of actuated valves, a differential pressure control valve and a strainer, sitting in a cupboard where a boiler would otherwise be. When the whole scheme goes down the fault is in the energy centre or the buried mains, and no engineer can repair that from your kitchen. What we can do is prove where the fault sits, confirm whether your unit and controls are working, and give you a written report the operator has to respond to.
When it is the unit itself, which is far more often than people expect, it is a repair rather than an escalation. Scaled plate packs reduce output so gradually that nobody can say when it started. A stuck actuator gives you hot water but no heating, or the reverse. A blocked strainer looks exactly like a dead pump. A failed differential pressure control valve makes the whole flat noisy and the temperature unstable. Those are all diagnosable and all fixable, and a contractor who only knows boilers will tell you to call the managing agent instead.
The rest of the borough splits conventionally. 66.3% of Greenwich homes run on mains gas only, below London's 70.5%, 13.0% heat with electricity only, 9.1% run two or more types of central heating and 2.1% recorded no central heating at all. Between the heat networks, the electric-only homes and the ones with no central heating, roughly a fifth of the borough has no gas boiler for anyone to repair.
A third of the borough rents socially, and the council owns 26,000 homes
The 2021 Census counted 114,054 households in Greenwich. 31.0% rent from a social landlord, 18.6% from the council or a local authority and 12.3% from another social landlord, against 23.1% across London. 41.1% own, 25.5% rent privately and 2.2% are in shared ownership.
The council quantifies its own stock. In August 2025 it announced a stock condition survey covering 'all 26,000 council homes in the borough', running over five years, 'part of Housing Our Greenwich, our widescale £430m housing programme to improve council homes in the borough'. The survey looks at 'the internal and external conditions of council homes occupied by tenants from kitchens, windows and roofs to insulation and heating systems'.
Twenty six thousand homes is a lot of communal infrastructure. Risers, storage tanks, boosted cold water sets, communal boiler rooms and shared soil stacks, much of it installed between the 1950s and the 1970s and much of it now well past the design life of its valves and controls. The failure pattern is consistent: a gate valve that no longer closes so you cannot isolate a single flat, a corroded riser that weeps until three floors are affected, or a stack that blocks on a low branch and delivers the whole block's waste to the ground floor flat.
Accommodation type follows the tenure. 43.1% of Greenwich households are in a purpose-built block of flats, 26.7% in a terraced house, 17.6% semi-detached and 4.1% detached. Only 6.0% are in a converted or shared house, well below London's 11.1%, which reflects that Greenwich built flats rather than subdividing houses. Overcrowding sits at 8.7% of households at an occupancy rating of minus one and 2.0% at minus two or less, giving 10.7% against London's 11.1%.
A World Heritage Site with a three conservation area buffer zone
Royal Greenwich publishes 'the 23 conservation areas in Royal Greenwich', and at their centre sits Maritime Greenwich. The council states that 'Our World Heritage Site is protected. This is to make sure new developments enhance its character and preserve its special buildings', and that the site 'includes the: historic town centre around Cutty Sark, the Old Royal Naval College whole Royal Park and the landmark buildings within it'.
The buffer zone is defined by conservation area rather than by an arbitrary line: 'The three conservation areas of East Greenwich, West Greenwich and Blackheath form the site's buffer zone. Both this and the site are also protected by conservation area designation.' In practice that means a large slice of the Georgian and early Victorian housing in SE10 and SE3 carries two overlapping layers of protection.
For emergency plumbing the distinction that matters is between stopping water and changing fabric. Isolating a supply, containing a leak and making a building watertight is never the problem. The problem is the permanent reinstatement: a soil stack on a visible elevation, a boiler flue through a protected facade, a condensate discharge out through a sash window, or original cast iron rainwater goods replaced in plastic because plastic was on the van. In a World Heritage Site buffer zone those decisions get looked at. We do reversible work out of hours and specify the permanent repair properly, flagging where consent is likely to be needed before we commit you to anything rather than after an enforcement letter lands.
Selective licensing in five wards, additional HMO licensing everywhere
Greenwich runs three licensing regimes side by side and the geography of one of them matters. Mandatory HMO licensing applies as it does everywhere, to properties with '5 or more tenants from 2 or more households'. Additional HMO licensing applies borough-wide to smaller shares: the council says 'You'll need this if you manage a smaller HMO. This means 3 or 4 people from more than 2 households live there.' When the additional scheme was approved in October 2023 the council described it as 'another five-year scheme' coming into effect 'across Royal Greenwich from early 2024', covering 'properties which contain three or more residents living in separate households where a kitchen, bathroom or toilet is shared'.
Selective licensing is the ward-based one. The council states you need a selective licence 'if you rent your property to one household or 2 individuals' in Woolwich Riverside ward, Woolwich Common ward, Shooters Hill ward, Plumstead Common ward or Plumstead Glyndon ward. When the scheme launched in 2022 the council named the first of those as Woolwich Arsenal, which is the pre-boundary-review name for the same area, so both names appear in council material. Outside those five wards there is no selective licensing, and a single family let elsewhere in the borough needs no licence unless it is an HMO.
The council publishes the consequence directly on its licensing page: if you rent without a licence you need, 'we can fine you up to £30,000', or if the council takes you to court instead, 'you get an unlimited fine'. The statutory ceiling under section 249A(4) of the Housing Act 2004 was raised to £40,000 with effect from 1 May 2026, but Greenwich's own published figure is still £30,000 and we quote the council rather than the statute because the council issues the notice.
Greenwich's HMO licence conditions run to a schedule dated January 2026 and several conditions bear directly on our work. Where gas is supplied the licence holder must 'Ensure that the gas installation and appliances are serviced annually by a Gas Safe registered contractor', 'Produce to the Royal Borough of Greenwich annually for their inspection a gas safety certificate obtained in respect of the house within the last 12 months' and 'Produce to the Royal Borough of Greenwich within 14 days on demand a copy of the latest gas safety certificate'. On carbon monoxide, an alarm must be installed 'in any room in the house which is used wholly or partly as living accommodation and contains a fixed combustion appliance, including gas boilers or a solid fuel burning appliance, other than a gas cooker', conforming to 'Part 1: BS EN 50291', and kept in proper working order. On utilities, the licence holder 'shall not unreasonably cause the supply of water, gas (where provided) and electricity to the house to be interrupted', and 'Gas and electricity must not be supplied via any form of prepayment meter.'
Rebuilt at scale, from Kidbrooke to the Peninsula
Greenwich has been rebuilding large parts of itself for two decades and the numbers are published. At Kidbrooke, the council records that redevelopment 'has seen the demolition of 1,900 properties on the former Ferrier Estate', that 'These will be replaced on a phased basis by 5,268 new homes', that 'The first new homes were completed in 2010', and that the scheme 'is expected to cost over £1billion to deliver and is scheduled to complete in 2031'. 35 per cent of the new homes are affordable.
The Peninsula is the other end of the same story. The government funding announcement for the ESCO network describes connecting 'more than 9,000 existing and new homes' plus 'over 94,000 square metres of commercial space'. A new-build tower on the Peninsula and a 1960s slab block in Woolwich are both flats, but almost nothing about their plumbing is the same.
New-build apartment faults cluster on pressure and on shared plant rather than corrosion. Sealed heating circuits lose pressure through a weeping automatic air vent or a filling loop left connected. Expansion vessels lose their charge and the system starts dumping through the pressure relief valve. Thermostatic mixing valves scale up. Heat interface units do everything described above. Access runs through a building manager rather than a front door, the isolation valve is in a corridor riser cupboard, and much of the estate road is private rather than public highway.
Older estate flats fail on the things that were installed sixty years ago: gate valves, storage tanks, boosted cold water sets, cast iron stacks and communal boiler plant. Neither type is harder than the other. They are just different, and turning up with the wrong assumption costs an hour you did not have.
What actually fails in Royal Greenwich property types
Greenwich contains a Georgian town centre, some of the largest council estates in south London and a river frontage of new towers, and each of them breaks in its own way. These are the calls we take most often.
Labour is £90/hr on weekdays and £120/hr out of hours, billed in 15-minute increments, with a fixed written price agreed after diagnosis and before the repair starts. Full rates are published on our pricing page.
Getting a van to your door in Royal Greenwich
Greenwich has one access problem no other borough on our patch has: the river is on one side and crossing it now costs money at almost any hour. Everything else is estate access and controlled parking.
The Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels are charged, and the charge runs sixteen hours a day
TfL charges for both crossings. For cars and small vans the Auto Pay rate is £1.50 off-peak and £4.00 at peak, with £4.00 payable when paying by phone or online. 'Charges apply from 06.00 - 22.00, 7 days a week in both directions.' Peak is defined as 'Monday to Friday only northbound 06:00-10:00 southbound 16:00-19:00'. For a firm that dispatches engineers from both sides of the river that is a real and recurring cost on Greenwich work, and it is inside our rate rather than added to your bill.
Tradesperson permits are weekly here, not daily
Royal Greenwich sells trade parking by the week: 'A tradesperson permit costs £31.10 per week and is a virtual permit. It can be valid for between one and 6 weeks and you can apply up to 30 days before you need it.' You can apply for up to two per property. There is a vehicle size limit worth knowing about: 'The permit can only be used for vehicles less than 1.95 metres wide and less than 3 metres tall.' A high-top van does not qualify. Not every address in a controlled parking zone is entitled to one either, which the council flags on the same page.
Yellow line dispensations, priced per day
Where a permit will not do, Greenwich issues a virtual parking dispensation to park on a yellow line 'for example to carry out work on a property'. It 'costs £34.30 per day' and 'You must apply online at least 7 working days before you need it.' Seven working days is not a thing an emergency has. The council does note that 'There's no charge for some businesses like glazing and scaffolding companies, but they must still apply for a dispensation.' On unplanned out-of-hours work we carry the parking risk ourselves rather than passing you a PCN.
Estates, blocks and who holds the keys
With 26,000 council homes plus housing association stock, a large share of our Greenwich work sits on estates where the fastest route to the fault runs through a caretaker or an estate office rather than a front door. Riser cupboards and plant rooms are frequently locked, and the isolation valve that actually stops your leak is often behind one of them. Tell us the estate, the block and whether anyone is on site out of hours when you call, and we will tell you what we can and cannot do before we set off.
ULEZ applies, the Congestion Charge does not
The Ultra Low Emission Zone operates across all London boroughs and the City of London at £12.50 a day for non-compliant vehicles, every day except Christmas Day, so all of Greenwich is inside it. The Congestion Charge covers central London only at £18 a day between 07:00 and 18:00 Monday to Friday and 12:00 to 18:00 at weekends and on bank holidays, and Greenwich sits outside it, so there is no £18 daily charge on a job here. Both costs, and the tunnel charges, are already inside our labour rate.
Tidal frontage and what the Thames Barrier does and does not do
Greenwich has a long river frontage and the Thames Barrier sits at the western end of it. The government describes it as protecting '125 square kilometres of central London from flooding caused by tidal surges' and notes it 'became operational in 1982'. What a barrier does not protect you from is a surcharging combined sewer coming back up through the lowest fitting in your property during a downpour, or a sump pump that fails in the storm it was fitted for. Those are inside your boundary, they are ours, and a non-return valve on the foul connection is usually the answer.
Home Services in Greenwich
Gas Safe and NICEIC certified engineers working across Greenwich's estates, period houses, riverside towers and licensed lets. Where a communal system or a heat network is involved we give you the written evidence to put in front of a landlord or an operator.
Emergency Plumbing
Burst risers, communal tank failures and flat-to-flat leaks across 26,000 council homes and the housing association stock alongside them. We find the right isolation point first.
Learn more →Boiler Repair & Service
Professional boiler repairs and installations for all makes.
Learn more →Blocked Drains
Estate stacks that block on a low branch and deliver the whole block's waste to the ground floor flat. CCTV proves whose blockage it is before anyone is billed.
Learn more →Leak Detection
Acoustic and thermal tracing for the Georgian and early Victorian stock in the World Heritage Site buffer zone, where opening the wrong wall is the expensive mistake.
Learn more →CCTV Drain Survey
HD camera drain inspections including Home Buyers Reports. Same-day reports.
Learn more →Electrical Work
NICEIC certified electricians for fuse boards, rewires, sockets and emergency faults.
Learn more →Central Heating
Heat interface units, communal plant and individual boilers in a borough where 6.2% of homes are on a district or communal heat network, nearly double the London average.
Learn more →Redecorating
Interior painting, plastering and decorating after repairs or for full property refresh.
Learn more →General Repairs
Handyman services, property maintenance and general repairs for landlords and homeowners.
Learn more →PPM Contracts
Planned maintenance for Greenwich block managers, housing associations and licensed landlords. Communal plant that gets serviced does not fail at midnight.
Learn more →Unvented Cylinders
G3 qualified engineers for the cylinders serving the 13.0% of Greenwich homes that heat with electricity only.
Learn more →Power Flushing
Restore heating efficiency with professional power flushing and system cleansing.
Learn more →Compliance & Specialist Services in Greenwich
Landlord and freeholder compliance across SE2, SE3, SE7, SE9, SE10, SE18 and SE28, where additional HMO licensing covers the whole borough and selective licensing covers Woolwich Riverside, Woolwich Common, Shooters Hill, Plumstead Common and Plumstead Glyndon. Gas safety, carbon monoxide alarms to BS EN 50291, cylinder certification, drainage surveys and restoration, documented as the council asks for it.
Gas Safety Certificate (CP12) Greenwich
Gas Safety Certificate coverage across SE3 and the wider south-east london area.
Book gas safety certificate →EICR (Electrical Installation Condition Report) Greenwich
EICR coverage across SE3 and the wider south-east london area.
Book eicr →Commercial Plumber Greenwich
Commercial Plumbing coverage across SE3 and the wider south-east london area.
Book commercial plumbing →Water Damage Restoration Greenwich
Water Damage coverage across SE3 and the wider south-east london area.
Book water damage →Why Choose Us for Greenwich?
A borough of estates, heat networks and protected fabric needs engineers who can work in all three. Here is what we bring to a Greenwich call-out specifically.
- Heat interface unit diagnosis and repair, not a shrug at a communal system
- Engineers who isolate estate risers and boosted cold water sets correctly the first time
- Written fault reports identifying which side of the tenancy or lease line a failure sits on
- Reversible emergency work in the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site buffer zone
- Licence-condition documentation for landlords in the five selective licensing wards
- Fixed price agreed after diagnosis, before the repair starts
- Available 24/7, 365 days a year
Areas Within Greenwich We Cover
Greenwich runs from Blackheath and the World Heritage Site in the west, along the river through the Peninsula and Woolwich, out to Thamesmead and Abbey Wood in the east and Eltham in the south.
Georgian and early Victorian stock inside the World Heritage Site and its buffer zone, where the permanent repair matters as much as the emergency one.
New towers on the ESCO district heating network, funded to connect more than 9,000 existing and new homes. Heat interface units rather than boilers.
Woolwich Riverside and Woolwich Common wards are both under selective licensing. Large estates alongside substantial new residential development.
Plumstead Common and Plumstead Glyndon wards are under selective licensing. Terraced streets and estates with shared stacks and communal cold feeds.
Interwar and postwar suburban housing, so buried supply pipes, external waste and frost damage rather than communal risers.
SE7 sits wholly inside Greenwich. A mix of terraced housing, estates and the riverside regeneration area.
Blackheath is one of the three conservation areas forming the World Heritage Site buffer zone. Larger period houses with original rainwater goods.
5,268 new homes replacing the former Ferrier Estate, first completed in 2010 and scheduled to finish in 2031. Pressurised systems and communal plant.
Large-scale estate housing with extensive communal infrastructure and a low-lying setting behind the tidal defences.
Shooters Hill is a selective licensing ward. Abbey Wood shares SE2 with Bexley, so check which authority an address falls in before reporting a highway problem.
30–45 minutes to Greenwich
Based on current engineer positions across South-East London
Greenwich plumbing questions we get asked
There is no boiler in my flat, just a metal box. Who fixes it?
We do. That is a heat interface unit and it means your home is on a district or communal heat network. 6.2% of Greenwich households are, which is nearly double the London figure of 3.4% and almost seven times England's 0.9%, and the number is rising: the government has funded the Greenwich Peninsula ESCO District Heating Network with £4.6 million 'to connect more than 9,000 existing and new homes, as well as over 94,000 square metres of commercial space to low-carbon heating', powered by 'an air source heat pump fixed on the roof of the Greenwich Peninsula Energy Centre'. If the whole scheme is down, the fault is in the energy centre or the buried mains and nobody can fix that from inside your flat, so we prove it and document it for the operator. If your flat is cold and your neighbours are warm, the fault is almost certainly your unit: a scaled plate pack, a stuck actuator, a blocked strainer or a failed differential pressure control valve. All of those we repair on the visit.
Water is coming through my ceiling in a council block. What happens now?
We stop it first and sort out responsibility second. Royal Greenwich has 26,000 council homes and a great deal of housing association stock alongside it, most of it built between the 1950s and the 1970s, so the failures are usually in communal infrastructure: a riser, a storage tank, a boosted cold water set or a gate valve that will no longer close. In practice that means the isolation point that actually stops your leak is often not in your flat at all. We attend, isolate at the correct point, contain and dry, and then produce a written fault report identifying which side of the tenancy or lease line the failure sits on. That report is what you hand a housing officer or a managing agent, and it is frequently worth more than the repair itself.
Do I need a licence to rent out my Greenwich property?
It depends on the ward and the property type. Additional HMO licensing applies across the whole borough to smaller shares, and the council describes it as needed where '3 or 4 people from more than 2 households live there'. Mandatory HMO licensing applies where there are '5 or more tenants from 2 or more households'. Selective licensing is different: you need it 'if you rent your property to one household or 2 individuals' in Woolwich Riverside, Woolwich Common, Shooters Hill, Plumstead Common or Plumstead Glyndon wards. Outside those five wards, a single family let that is not an HMO needs no licence. The council states that if you rent without a licence you need, 'we can fine you up to £30,000', or 'you get an unlimited fine' if it takes you to court. The statutory ceiling under section 249A(4) of the Housing Act 2004 rose to £40,000 on 1 May 2026, but Greenwich's own published figure is £30,000.
What does Greenwich require on gas safety and carbon monoxide in a licensed property?
Its schedule of HMO licence conditions is specific. Where gas is supplied, the licence holder must ensure that 'the gas installation and appliances are serviced annually by a Gas Safe registered contractor', must produce annually for inspection 'a gas safety certificate obtained in respect of the house within the last 12 months', and must produce a copy of the latest certificate 'within 14 days on demand'. On carbon monoxide, an alarm must be installed 'in any room in the house which is used wholly or partly as living accommodation and contains a fixed combustion appliance, including gas boilers or a solid fuel burning appliance, other than a gas cooker', must conform with 'Part 1: BS EN 50291', and must be kept in proper working order, with a declaration of positioning and working order supplied within 14 days on demand. The conditions treat a hall or landing as living accommodation for this purpose, and a bathroom or lavatory too. The licence holder also must not unreasonably interrupt the supply of water, gas or electricity, and gas and electricity 'must not be supplied via any form of prepayment meter'.
My house is in the World Heritage Site buffer zone. Does that limit what you can do?
Not on the emergency, only on what comes after. Royal Greenwich publishes 23 conservation areas, and states that 'The three conservation areas of East Greenwich, West Greenwich and Blackheath form the site's buffer zone. Both this and the site are also protected by conservation area designation.' The council's stated purpose in protecting the site is 'to make sure new developments enhance its character and preserve its special buildings'. Stopping a leak and making the property watertight is never a problem. What needs thinking about is the permanent reinstatement: a soil stack on a visible elevation, a boiler flue through a protected facade, a condensate run out through a sash window, or original cast iron rainwater goods swapped for plastic. We use reversible methods out of hours and flag the consent position before we do anything permanent, rather than after.
Will the tunnel charge or parking end up on my bill?
No. Labour is £90/hr on weekdays and £120/hr out of hours, billed in 15-minute increments, and all of the access cost is already inside that. For reference it is not small: the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnel charge for cars and small vans is £1.50 off-peak and £4.00 at peak on Auto Pay, applying 'from 06.00 - 22.00, 7 days a week in both directions'; Greenwich's tradesperson parking permit costs £31.10 per week and only covers vehicles under 1.95 metres wide and 3 metres tall; a yellow line dispensation costs £34.30 per day and has to be applied for at least seven working days in advance, which no emergency allows; and ULEZ adds £12.50 a day for non-compliant vehicles. We absorb all of it. Greenwich is outside the Congestion Charge zone, so there is no £18 daily charge here either.
Question not answered here? Ring 07456 975436 or the office landline on 0207 046 1363 and an engineer will talk it through before you commit to anything.
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