Learning from complaints

It is important that, if you are not happy with an area of the housing service you know that you can contact us (or call 023 8083 3006 and choose option seven) and ask for the issue to be put right, safe in the knowledge that we will listen and respond accordingly.

If you’re not satisfied with our initial response you can make a formal complaint to hold us to account if needed.

In order to ensure that we respond to complaints about the housing service fairly we have a Tenant Panel. If you are unhappy with our response to your complaint, you can ask for a review by the Panel. The tenant volunteers who sit on the Panel will then investigate whether the reply was fair and recommend if it needs to be amended. The Panel also holds us to account to ensure we constantly learn from these experiences and implement changes and improvements so that mistakes aren’t repeated.

A separate Complaints Review Panel has also been established to make use of the valuable insight that complaints present into your experiences of dealing with the Housing Department. This Panel has already been instrumental in helping to bring about a number of important changes to the housing service including creating an appeals process for the Management Transfer procedure, identifying the need to update the website with more relevant information on supporting residents, and clarifying the complaints process to make this easier for customers to understand.  

We are working hard to listen to and learn from your concerns and we will be increasing staff training to help us better understand how to deal with, handle, and learn from complaints. We are also looking into recruiting a dedicated housing complaints officer.

Our formal complaints procedure (complemented by the work of the Tenant Panel and Complaints Review Panel) adheres to the national guidelines laid down by the Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code. This was established by the Government to ensure social housing tenants’ complaints are responded to effectively and fairly. We have a legal duty to follow these guidelines and report on our complaints handling performance. You can read more about this online, check our performance, and find out about our complaints reports and self assessment. You can also read our complaints policy.