We always aim to deliver the best possible services for residents but know that sometimes things go wrong or communication can break down. In these situations we really appreciate it when residents take the time to tell us. It means we can put things right for individual residents and review and improve the services we provide for everyone.

We actively promote our complaints process to make it easy for residents to tell us when there’s an issue. Part of the complaints process is to look at lessons learned from individual complaints or from the themes that arise through complaints. This helps us improve services and prevent recurring complaints about the same sort of issues.

While ideally we want to prevent complaints from happening in the first place or resolve them as quickly as possible, sometimes unfortunately this doesn’t happen, and complaints escalate to the independent Housing Ombudsman.

We’ll always signpost complainants to the ombudsman, throughout our complaints process as well as advising complainants who’ve been through the two stages of the process that they have the right to escalate to the Ombudsman, if they remain unhappy with our response. The Ombudsman service is happy to give advice at any stage but won’t usually review a complaint until a complainant has exhausted our process.

We value the Ombudsman’s feedback when they get involved, it’s always good to hear an independent perspective. One recent example is with a review of a complaint linked to ASB handling, specifically around support provided to residents who report safeguarding issues.

We have reviewed our processes and are implementing some changes in line with the Ombudsman’s suggestion. Staff training will be updated to include the recommendations and we will be writing four new procedures by the end of  October to ensure that those changes are adopted across different services.