Rise in complaints is good news for us
‘Complaints soar 42 per cent’ was the dramatic headline on the front of Inside Housing (16 July 2010) and I for one was certainly drawn in.
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Indeed it’s true, Inside Housing was as good as its sub-editor’s word, complaints have increased.
The anecdotal reasons put forward for this made sense; the impact of the economy and rising expectations of tenants. However, here at Housemark we like to add a quantative and qualitative understanding.
From a qualitative perspective, Housemark has just completed the pilot for Complaints Accreditation, a service launched in partnership with the Housing Ombudsman Service. All the pilots demonstrated an increase in complaints over the past year and are projecting an increase this year.
Far from being disheartened by this trend, our pilot organisations were encouraged. They saw this as a result of the work they’d done to improve access to the complaints service.
Second, from a quantitative aspect, Housemark’s complaints benchmarking data shows that while complaints are increasing, so to is tenant satisfaction with specific regard to how complaints are handled and with complaint outcomes.
So, counterintuitively this bad news story might actually be good news.
Gez Kinsella, assistant director, Housemark