Richard Blakeway: sector ‘deserves credit’ for positive changes in past seven years

“I remember in the first few weeks of the role meeting with Grenfell United and the survivors and [bereaved] families of that tragedy. You can imagine what that was like,” Mr Blakeway recalls.

“Listening to their experiences and expectations, it really crystallised in my mind that there needs to be a real step change, not just in terms of service delivery, but also what landlords are expected to do.”

At this time, the inquiry was hearing evidence of a “mindset” that existed within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea that meant Grenfell Tower residents were “not listened to as much as they should have been” by the council before the fire.

One Grenfell Tower resident who raised numerous fire safety complaints with the building’s management company before the fire has described how he felt “stigmatised as a troublemaker” for raising complaints.

The resident who gave this evidence, Ed Daffarn, told Inside Housing earlier this month why he believes so little has changed for social housing tenants since the fire.

More than a year before the ombudsman took on his role, the then-Conservative government had published the Social Housing Green Paper, aimed at making it easier for residents to access the ombudsman.

But looking back, Mr Blakeway saw the green paper’s proposals as “pretty narrow”, and focused on “the more transactional elements of complaints”, such as timeliness of responding to complaints, and access. Although he saw this “really mattered”, he believed more could be done.

“I was coming to the role with a view that that stuff needed sorting, but also that there was probably a wider role for complaints,” he says.

“Listening to their experiences and expectations, it really crystallised in my mind that there needs to be a real step change, not just in terms of service delivery, but also what landlords are expected to do”

Back then, the ombudsman service didn’t routinely publish its decisions or any data, it did not act as transparently as it does today, and the resolution of complaints – in Mr Blakeway’s words – was still a “postcode lottery”.

The Housing Ombudsman Service was established under Section 51 of the Housing Act 1996, but at first it did not have a prominent role. During a debate ahead of the legislation’s introduction, the government envisaged it would handle 300 cases a year.

When Mr Blakeway took on the ombudsman’s mantle, the service was dealing with 2,000 cases a year. This has since risen to 1,000 a month.

The sector’s response to complaints has also transformed in this time. Mr Blakeway recalls the case of one landlord early in his tenure that had a 16-stage complaint process that was almost impossible for tenants to complete.

With a service that was about to undergo dramatic change due to the watchdog’s role being strengthened, he began a fact-finding mission to see what could be learned from best practice by other ombudsmen around the world – not just in resolving complaints, but learning from them as well. For Mr Blakeway, the model was the Ontario Ombudsman in Canada, which covers a range of services, not only housing.

There was a serious case that began in 2012 that caused uproar in the country, involving a young Indigenous man, Adam Capay, who was in solitary confinement for four years without trial, even though Canadian law limited solitary confinement to 30 days.

“It was discovered that the record-keeping was lousy, because what was happening was a new person would come in and the clock would start again, and this is partly why this guy ended up there for four years,” Mr Blakeway explains.

The Ontario Ombudsman called for sweeping changes following this case, and to Mr Blakeway it showed the potential for an ombudsman to carve out a role where laws, regulators and other government departments already exist – to become “a complementary system to join up the dots”.

This approach was the early key takeaway he conveyed to civil servants and ministers about what his new role would become. And he got down to work with the housing sector on the types of cases that begin to land on his desk, which were “littered with missed opportunities”.

A shifting landscape

Mr Blakeway’s work wasn’t just about addressing shortfalls in how landlords conducted themselves, but also about feeding back to central government about how changing priorities for the sector over decades had led to a deluge of complaints.

During his time as ombudsman, the policy environment for England’s social landlords has had an almost complete reset. He has worked through the introduction of the new consumer regulations, Awaab’s Law and the lead-up to the implementation of a new Decent Homes Standard, as well as the Future Homes Standard.

Mr Blakeway was on a train travelling to a meeting when his office called to say he had been summoned to give evidence at the inquest for the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak.

He was called because the ombudsman had recently published a Spotlight report on damp and mould, his first time as an expert witness. The day sticks in his mind.

“I remember before giving evidence, it was very quiet, there was a police officer and others. But then Faisal, Awaab’s father, spoke, and it was harrowing, having to describe and relive the event, but he spoke with such dignity, so much dignity.”

He praises the coroner’s sensitive handling on the day, and after giving evidence for about an hour, he remembers travelling home and reflecting on the huge impact the coroner’s ruling was about to have.

Awaab’s death in 2020 from prolonged exposure to mould at his Rochdale home serves as a defining tragedy for the UK social housing sector. It prompted a sea change in asset management, legislation mandating strict timeframes for social landlords to investigate and fix severe damp and mould, as well as other emergency hazards.

Ultimately the sector had to act with real impetus to deal with the worst cases of this mould in its ageing stock.

“For me, it was again really about how we translate these lessons into a more immediate action,” Mr Blakeway continues. “Some of these hazards have been around for 20 years.”

He wanted to ensure the sector’s response was about “getting more consistent, transparent and effective practice against issues that have been an obligation for a very long time”.

Awaab’s Law came into force in October last year and forces social landlords to respond to emergency repairs within 24 hours. They must also investigate significant damp and mould within 10 working days of being notified and then make properties safe within five working days.

For both types of hazard, landlords must also put their findings in writing to tenants within three working days of inspection.

Phase 2, which extends the same expectations to responses to other hazards, will create an additional layer of complexity. Mr Blakeway says he hopes the sector is stress-testing ahead of the expansion of the law later this year, particularly on how it defines an emergency or a significant hazard.

His particular recent focus has been on windows, where he points out there could be several hazards on one repair: damp and mould, risk of fall, ventilation, and overheating. Phase 2 of the law, he says, will be “a completely different world”.

“For me, it was really about how we translate these lessons into a more immediate action. Some of these hazards have been around for 20 years”

Mr Blakeway describes the first Decent Homes Standard reforms as a “thoughtful piece of work”. With that in mind, we discuss how policy changes can have knock-on effects in other areas, such as how retrofitting cold, damp homes can leave some being overheated.

But his experience is that feeding this back up the policy chain to the government has been “really enhanced and thoughtful”.

With the government’s ‘build, baby, build’ mantra, is there a danger of a drift in focus in the trade-off between new supply and maintaining existing homes?

“This zero-sum game cannot be the case,” Mr Blakeway says, as major works and energy efficiency issues will continue to drive complaints after he has left his role.

Mr Blakeway oversaw the introduction of the ombudsman’s complaint-handling code in 2020, and it became statutory in 2024. The code promotes speedier redress and greater consistency in complaints procedures across the sector.

It also places emphasis on learning from complaints to improve services, with members of the scheme required to review issues or trends arising from complaint-handling at least once a year, and discuss this in their annual reports.

Last year the ombudsman also revamped its special investigation process, replacing it with a three-stage approach after trialling the model with several landlords.

The ombudsman said at the time that the new system allows it to take action earlier in a bid to boost landlords’ accountability, prevent complaints and get them to fix problems sooner without the need for a full investigation.

A new era of transparency

Reflecting on his relationship with the sector, Mr Blakeway says the ombudsman now gets “relatively few challenges” to its work after encountering initial resistance with the new approach.

Very early on in his role, “very occasionally” a senior person at a landlord would be on the phone telling the ombudsman the investigation was wrong and it couldn’t be published. It was a new era of transparency, which he believes came as a “bit of a shock”.

He explains that his role has always been about making the right decision, and he introduced an independent team that triages and interrogates the ombudsman’s casework for his own assurance.

Sometimes, when interpreting the facts, Mr Blakeway holds his hands up and says “we may have got it wrong”, but normally that is when new information comes to light.

Some in the sector have previously expressed to Inside Housing concern with the ombudsman’s approach, and its speed and responsiveness, when working to address their concerns with its casework.

Despite this, Mr Blakeway has praise for the sector’s “genuine leadership in what has been a fast-moving policy environment”.

“The defensiveness has gone; boards and the sector deserve credit for the changes they have to implement,” he adds.

Mr Blakeway describes a cultural shift in the watchdog’s relationship with landlords that “is more open”, where there are far more senior leaders who now come to him and say that they have “learned from your determination report and met with the resident and [have] learned so much”.

Now he describes a system where landlords are connecting complaints to risk, horizon-scanning, budget-planning and data, and using complaints in a strategic way that often was being done only at a boardroom level.

For the ombudsman, the single biggest lesson around most complaints is better communication and use of data. But what does the future of the sector look like?

“Obviously we need a new generation of social homes to be built,” he says, and the shape of the sector will change thanks to local government reorganisation and mergers. However, he believes there is an “urban myth” that “small [landlords] are beautiful and big is bad”.

“So the future should be more social homes, but fewer social landlords.” He thinks there are other models for landlords to work in collaboration, but it’s “just inevitable the sector will consolidate”.

He praises the move to get more residents on housing association boards as a positive direction of travel, and reiterates the need for a national tenants’ body to address the imbalance of power and reduce stigma.

Mr Blakeway will be speaking at Housing 2026 on Wednesday in the Tpas Theatre. The session – titled ‘What does tenant influence in governance look like in practice?’ – is likely to be his last public appearance before he steps down in July.

Prior to his ombudsman role, he worked as an advisor in the Number 10 policy unit and at the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange.

During his time at the Greater London Authority (GLA) between 2008 and 2016, he served as deputy mayor for housing, land and property under Boris Johnson.

Does he look back on his own time at the GLA any differently after being the sector’s watchdog? “When I reflect back, I can absolutely see how systems that are there to protect people and produce lots of positive outcomes can also see people get lost in the system.”

Mr Blakeway says he is looking forward to chairing the Office for Legal Complaints after leaving his current role. But he sees opportunities to remain close to the housing sector. “I won’t go too far,” he says.

In the short term, though, he plans to help satisfy his son’s “endless appetite for cricket”. As for his successor, who will be announced after an MP-led appointment process, he warns them not to lose sight of the changes that have been made in his time.

He also warns against the sector returning to the “shadow of leadership” he witnessed in his earlier years. How can his successor ensure that doesn’t happen?

“Be outwardly impatient but inwardly patient,” he responds. “Effecting real change takes time.”

Richard Blakeway is speaking at Housing 2026, during the session ‘What does tenant influence in governance look like in practice?’ on 24 June at 9.40am, in the Tpas Theatre. Find out more below