Housing Ombudsman investigating five social landlords over failure to deal with complaints

Today’s report means that Lambeth Council has now been deemed non-compliant for two consecutive quarters. In the summary of its case, the ombudsman said that the council had failed to respond to numerous complaints by a resident and after the body issued an order to the council, it failed to comply with the ombudsman’s order.

Greenwich Council, Lambeth Council, A2Dominion and Housing for Women were all issued ‘type 1’ orders, which relate to “the landlord’s unreasonable delays in accepting or progressing a complaint through its process”.

In the case of A2Dominion, it failed to escalate a complaint over a four-month period and then failed to comply with the ombudsman’s order following the delay in correspondence with the tenant.

Housing for Women had repeatedly failed to respond to a complaint and when they did eventually contact the resident, it was not to do with the initial complaint, the report said.

Abri was issued two separate ‘type 2’ orders, meaning the ombudsman discovered “unreasonable delays in providing complaint information requested by the ombudsman”.

Alongside its quarterly report, the ombudsman published new guidance on the effective involvement of board members and councillors. It said they have an important role in promoting a “positive complaints culture” within their organisations.

The ombudsman said the guidance shares best practice, outlines its expectations of governing bodies and sets out how complaint information can support them to improve services delivery.

Housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway said: “The issuance of failure orders shows landlords in ‘real-time’ problems with their complaints-handling.

“This is the second quarter of issuing orders and in most cases landlords have responded well. However, it is disappointing that in six cases the landlords did not comply.

“Complaint-handling performs an important strategic role for an organisation. It is important for governance to understand the complaints their organisations are receiving and the impact of their complaint-handling on residents.”

Gary Blatcher, director of transformation and customer experience, A2Dominion, said: “In this particular case the customer is taking legal action and therefore requested that we communicate with them solely via their solicitors. We will continue to explore this matter with the Ombudsman, as we believe classing cases like this as a failure to comply going forward would impact how most registered providers deal with disrepair claims that are subject to legal intervention.

“While it’s always disappointing when we are not able to resolve individual cases without the involvement of a third party, we remain proud of our high customer satisfaction rate, which reflects our good level of service and robust complaints procedure.”

Zaiba Qureshi, chief executive of Housing for Women, said the association accepts that its complaint and communication process “fell short”.

She added: “We have conducted a review and identified opportunities of learning at each juncture where this case, unfortunately, went wrong. We are awaiting further details from the ombudsman and are committed to continuously improving our processes to support best practice in our complaint-handling.”

Sarah Allen, director of optimisation and business improvement at Abri said: “Abri welcomes the Housing Ombudsman’s new complaint-handling code and fully aligned its policy and processes to the new code from January 2021.

“Regrettably, on two occasions, due to human error, we did not follow our own procedures and provide information to the Housing Ombudsman in a timely manner. We apologise to the customers concerned and the Ombudsman.

“An internal investigation is underway to understand why this happened and to prevent any future occurrence. In the meantime, we are working closely with the Housing Ombudsman to review our working practices.”