The Housing Ombudsman - Spotlight on repairs report launched
Wednesday 1st of May 2019
The Housing Ombudsman have recently launched their first in a series of reports 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 that the Housing Ombudsman Service deal with, accounting for over one third of all complaints each year.
Called Room for improvement: Spotlight on repairs, the report identifies the main causes of complaints about repairs and illustrates them with case studies.
The good practice section is based on their dispute resolution principles of Be fair, Put things right and Learn from outcomes.
The report is intended to be a useful resource for landlords to refer to in delivering their repairs service and handling related complaints effectively.
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 we will build on over the next few years. It adds to the increasing range of tools and activities that we provide to support landlords and residents including e-learning and workshops.
We have saved the report in our resouce hub for members to access easily
Tpas are running a series of events in conjunction with the Housing Ombudsman, visit our events page for more information.