The Housing Ombudsman has launched the first in a new series of
reports to share the learning from complaints and provide good
practice points to help landlords improve their services and
complaint handling.
This first report is focused on repairs as this is consistently
the biggest category of complaint the Housing Ombudsman deals with,
accounting for over one third of all complaints each year.
The report, Room for improvement: Spotlight on repairs,
identifies the main causes of complaints about repairs and
illustrates them with case studies. The good practice section is
based on the Housing Ombudsman's dispute resolution principles
of "Be fair, Put things right and Learn from
outcomes".
Interim Housing Ombudsman Andrea Keenoy said:
"In most cases, landlords carry out repairs well, or resolve
problems before or during their formal complaints procedure without
our involvement. But when something does go wrong it can have a
significant impact on tenants. Unresolved complaints can have a
damaging effect on the landlord tenant relationship so resolving
them early and locally is the best approach.
"We want to share the learning from the complaints we consider
to make a difference to the delivery of housing services and
complaint resolution. We encourage landlords to have a positive
view of complaints, seeing them as feedback that helps them to
improve."
Housing repairs are likely to feature heavily in any proposals
for Strengthening Consumer Redress for social housing
residents expected to be introduced as an outcome from
the Social Housing Green Paper and this report will be a useful
resource for landlords to refer to in delivering their repairs
service and handling related complaints effectively.