Housing complaints annual report 2024/2025

An annual report is produced by the Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS) for each landlord and will be received later in the year for 2024/25. This will set out our performance in relation to complaints accepted by the HOS and will compare us against other social landlords.

The HOS made 21 determinations to the council in 2024/25. In those determinations, there were 45 findings. These findings are broken down as follows:

In all cases where either severe maladministration, maladministration or service failure was found, the HOS ordered the council to pay compensation to the resident.

The total compensation ordered was £19,727, an average of £986 per case across the 21 determinations.

Across the 21 determinations there are similar themes recurring throughout. They can be briefly summarized as:

• complaint handling - failure to comply with the council's complaint policy and HOS Complaint Handling Code
• handling of repairs - compliance with our own policies and timescales
• handling of damp and mould - an unreasonable amount of time taken to act when a customer makes a report of damp and mould
• customer communication - Lack of updates to customers when there are delays to repairs or complaint responses
• record keeping - inability to provide evidence to the HOS of the council's actions and recording of customer profile data

To better understand the specific detail from these themes identified by the HOS, an analysis of each determination report was carried out. This was subject to a separate report which was shared with the Housing Leadership Team and the member responsible for complaints. Further details are included in Appendix 2.