You may also contact the independent Housing Ombudsman Service at any time to discuss your issue:
- Visit: Housing Ombudsman Service
- Email: [email protected]
- Call: 0300 111 3000
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Our complaints procedure
If you make a complaint, we will:
- Acknowledge your complaint.
- Ask you at the start what outcome you are hoping for.
- Inform you of what action we will take to bring your complaint to a satisfactory conclusion.
- Resolve your complaint quickly and fairly. You will have the chance to discuss this in person with us and can bring a relative, friend or advisor if you wish.
- Phone you once we have resolved your complaint to ask you how satisfied you are with how we handled it. This call is made by an independent organisation who has not previously been involved in the process, so you can speak freely and honestly.
Read our complaints policy
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How we will respond to you
Feedback
A customer service advisor will log your comments and share your feedback with the relevant service manager as soon as you get in touch.
Feedback with investigation
Our customer services advisors have up to 48 hours to investigate your concerns and will either offer a resolution or pass the matter on to one of our complaint handlers. If after 48 hours you are still dissatisfied with the way that your concerns have been handled, we will then begin our complaint process.
Complaints (stage 1)
If applicable, we will inform you who has taken over your case and give you a courtesy call on day 5 to update you on progress.
Our aim is to reach a satisfactory conclusion within 10 working days of you first raising the issue. However, if you remain dissatisfied after this time, your case will be escalated (stage 2).
Complaint escalation (stage 2)
If you remain dissatisfied with the solutions offered after 10 days, a senior manager will review your case. They will call you to introduce themselves and will have 5 days in which to resolve your case.
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Unresolved issues
You have the right to escalate your complaint to a designated person, such as your local MP or councillor, if you do not feel that we have resolved the issue satisfactorily.
You may also consider taking your complaint to the independent Housing Ombudsman Service
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What we do with your feedback
We value all feedback and use this to help us improve our services.
We publish a quarterly summary of the feedback we have received and some of the improvements to services made as a result:
- Customer feedback July - September 2020
- Customer feedback April-June 2020
- Customer feedback January-March 2020
- Customer feedback October-December 2019
Our Scrutiny Group also regularly review our performance based on the customer feedback we receive:
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The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code
We work closely with the Housing Ombudsman Service, the official body set up by law to look at complaints about housing organisations that are registered with them. Their service is free, independent and impartial for our customers to access.
They published a new Complaint Handling code in July 2020 to set out:
- Good practice that will allow us, and other landlords, to respond to complaints effectively and fairly.
- How we should use learning from complaints to drive service improvements.
Find out more about the Complaint Handling Code at: The Housing Ombudsman Service
Our self-assessment
We carried out a self-assessment against the Code and reported our findings to our Board on 27 November 2020.
Our assessment shows how we comply against the new code’s requirements, along with actions where we need to improve our complaints handling processes. We plan to have actioned these in January.
