The Housing Ombudsman has launched the first in a new series of reports which shares the learning from complaints and provides good practice points to help landlords improve their services and complaint handling.
Room for improvement: Spotlight on repairs is the first report as repairs is consistently the biggest category of complaint the Ombudsman deals with, accounting for over one third of all complaints dealt with each year.
The report identifies the main causes of complaints about repairs and illustrates them with case studies. The good practice section is based on the 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.”
Room for improvement is the first in a new series of ‘spotlight on’ reports that the Ombudsman will build on over the next few years. It adds to the increasing range of tools and activities that the Ombudsman provides to support landlords and residents including e-learning and workshops. Information on the tools for landlords is available on the website https://www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/landlords/
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