The HOS will not protect tenants
Regarding your report that the Tenant Services Authority is to be scrapped (Inside Housing, 18 June), I think this is good news for taxpayers and tenants.
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As for a wider remit for the Housing Ombudsman Service - when I took my own case to them, I found they swept the worst offences of my landlord under the carpet.
After that I did a bit of digging. I downloaded their last eight annual reports and worked out how many cases were upheld (ie the landlord was found at fault). It was less than 5 per cent. I have been a tenant ‘activist’ for years and all my colleagues believed that about 35 per cent were upheld. I worked out that HOS had used all sorts of statistical gymnastics to create the 5 per cent impression. It does this by subjecting cases to several layers of filtering, using various pretexts to reject many of them. It does uphold 35 per cent of cases but only reports the 5 per cent that remain after the filtering process.
Colin Worthington, tenant