We always try to resolve your dissatisfaction when you first tell us about it. And if we can’t then we promise to monitor your complaint and keep in touch while we're looking into it. We have a detailed complaint policy, and we learn from your feedback to improve our services.
We welcome feedback and we’ll try to resolve your dissatisfaction when you first tell us about it. Quickly and simply. We monitor all feedback so we can understand where we may need to improve our services. Our customer resolution team handle most of our complaints, but you may be contacted by another specialist within the organisation.
We define a complaint as ‘an expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by us or our staff, or those acting on our behalf, affecting an individual resident or group of residents.
Stage 1 Investigation
If we’re unable to resolve things straight away, or you request a formal investigation, we will investigate this as a Stage 1 Complaint. This is managed by an appropriate complaint investigator and is part of our complaint process.
A complaint investigator will contact you to acknowledge your complaint within 5 working days. This helps them fully understand your complaint and what you’d like us to do to put things right before carrying out their investigation.
Their investigation will take up to 10 working days, when they’ll provide a full response. If this isn’t possible, they’ll keep you informed and advise when you should expect a full response. We'll always provide this in writing.
Stage 2 Review
If you are not satisfied with the outcome of your Stage 1 complaint, you’ll need to let us know within 15 working days from the date on your Stage 1 written response.
We’ll need to know:
It needs to be about the same issue you reported in your Stage 1 . If you have a new issue , you should request a new stage 1 investigation.
We’ll let you know within 5 working days if we have accepted your request to escalate to Stage 2.
Where a request for a Stage 2 review is accepted, a senior investigator will look into things and provide their outcome within 20 working days. If this isn’t possible, we’ll keep you informed of progress and advise when you should expect a full response. Stage 2 is the final stage of our complaints process.
You can find out more about our complaints process and what you can expect from us in our Complaints Policy. You can find it on our policies and strategies page.
Housing Ombudsman
We're proud to work with the Housing Ombudsman Service to continually review and improve our services. You can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service for advice at any time:
Write to: Housing Ombudsman Service, PO Box 1484, Unit D, Preston, PR2 0ET
Phone: 0300 111 3000
Email: info@housing-ombudsman.org.uk
You can find out more information about how they work with customers and landlords by visiting www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk.
We're sorry you’re not happy with our service to you. If we’re aware of the situation, but haven’t been able to resolve things for you, please check out how we'll manage this by reading the guidance above. We have a variety of ways you can contact us to find an answer to your query or contact us to ask for the matter to be reviewed.
You can find a how-to video to help you raise a complaint through our Virtual Assistant here
You can find out more about our chat function here.
We review our complaint processes each year to ensure we meet the requirements of the Housing Ombudsman’s Scheme and accompanying code. The code sets out good practice that allows us and other landlords to respond to complaints effectively and fairly. This includes how we use learning from complaints to drive service improvements. We’ve carried out a self-assessment against the Code which you can view here. This shows how we comply against the requirements.
A new requirement of the code is to produce an Annual Complaint Handling and Service Improvement Report, where you can find out how we’ve performed and what we’ve done to improve. You can see this and our governing body’s response here.
The Housing Ombudsman produce an annual summary of our performance for escalated complaint cases, showing how we compare to other landlords. You can find it here (PDF 410kb).
If you’re not happy with the way we’ve handled your complaint, you can contact the Housing Ombudsman and they’ll decide if it’s a case they can investigate further.
The Housing Ombudsman publish decisions on the cases they’ve investigated on their website - you can find link to the decisions here.