Ombudsman Corner

By Richard Blakeway, the Housing Ombudsman

At the heart of our role is the ability to strengthen resident and landlord relationships. Whatever the outcome of our work or an investigation, it’s likely the resident will remain living in the same home with the same landlord. That’s why we want to promote a positive complaint handling culture. It’s also why I’m so interested in exploring mediation as a route to resolution, where it’s appropriate.

Last month the Housing Ombudsman published its framework for investigating systemic and thematic issues. The framework addresses three areas: the scope of our power; when and how we will use it; and possible outcomes. Under our revised scheme, the Housing Ombudsman is able to look for the first time beyond individual disputes into the wider and deeper issues responsible for generating complaints, so that we can, in turn, seek to address those issues using a range of outcomes to improve residents’ lives and landlords’ services.

In doing so, it’s important we distinguish between three issues: failures in complaint handling, where further work could support earlier resolution of disputes; service failures, where further investigation into underpinning policies, procedures or approach could prevent service failure reoccurrence; and reoccurring issues across several landlords where further investigation could promote greater understanding and sharing of best practice.

To my mind, these are distinct issues which should result in different outcomes, although they can and will overlap during the course of an investigation.

Over the past few months, we’ve developed our systems to identify, within the thousands of complaints we handle each year, issues and trends within an individual landlord, across a group of landlords or sector-wide.

This picture is becoming richer as our new powers come into effect – for example, the publication of our landlord performance reports and issuance of Complaint Handling Failure Orders.

We may also consider relevant information produced by others and issue calls for evidence, as we’ve done with our thematic report into damp and mould. An initial review of our casebook suggests a higher than average maladministration rate where the complaint concerns damp and often significant levels of compensation. This investigation will be an opportunity to consider learning and best practice to develop the sector’s response to this issue.

The possible outcomes from our systemic and thematic work are wide ranging, depending on whether we are examining complaint handling or service failure, an individual or group of landlords. But we will always be fair and proportionate. The focus instead should be on engagement, identifying learning and making recommendations for landlords to take action – and so it’s important for landlords to engage positively.

Finally, our service is publishing increasing amounts of information about our work, and we will take the same approach to our systemic work, too – raising awareness of issues, sharing good practice, and building on that aim of strengthening resident and landlord relationships and establishing a positive complaint handling culture across the sector.