How we're improving

You can read here how we’re listening to your feedback and performing when responding to complaints we receive.

We report to the Housing Solutions Board twice a year on our complaints performance and each year to the Housing Ombudsman as part of our Annual Complaints Performance and Service Improvement Report. Our last report to the Board was in March 2024 covering the period from April 2023 – we’ve set out a summary of the report below looking at how we’re learning from the complaints we receive.

 What type of complaints do we receive?

Over 2023/24, the key reasons why residents complained to Housing Solutions were :

  • Communication: not getting back to people when we said we would, not keeping our promises and being inconsistent in our communication
  • Repairs: not completing repairs or resolving an issue first time around
  • Delays: taking longer than residents wanted to complete  repairs,  respond to queries or concerns being raised about an aspect of the home, building or local spaces
  • Contractors : contractors missing or delaying appointments, delivering poor quality work & communication.
  • Neighbourhood issues: not addressing problems with neighbours or the local area in the way residents wanted or had asked us for – including anti-social behaviour and parking issues. 

 How are we resolving complaints ?

We take every complaint made to us seriously and want to ensure we’re resolving the issue in the way residents need. Our aim is to provide high quality services so people don’t feel as though they need to complain but, when people do, the next best thing we can do is put the issue right.

We ask every resident who has complained to us to fill out a short survey about how we dealt with their complaint and how happy they are with the outcome. In 2023/24 we had an 80% approval rating from residents who engaged with our complaints service including our new complaints team. We’re constantly looking for ways we can improve, so want to build on this for next year.

Complaints Satisfaction

 

Complaint Handling

Complaint Outcome

2021/22

60%

44%

2022/23

66%

42%

2023/24

80%

80%

How are we learning from complaints?

A key focus of the Housing Ombudsman Complaint-Handling Code is for landlords to look beyond the circumstances of individual complaints and consider broader service improvements that need to be made as a result of the complaint or complaints in general. We take every complaint seriously. Our focus in responding to complaints is equally on resolving the complaint itself and learning from it to ensure the same mistake doesn’t happen again – and that our services improve for all residents.

We report to our senior management team every quarter on all aspects of our complaints service including the learning and improvements we’ve identified from complaints. We report to the Housing Solutions Board twice a year on this too.

Our learning from complaints made to us over 2023/24 identified that we need to take action in the areas below:

  • Communication – improving our contact recording processes, better staff training and tracking of actions to make sure we respond to residents when we say we will. Being clearer on our service standards and policies. We’ve strengthened our mandatory complaints training for managers, looking at why complaints are being made in the first place.
  • Repairs & delays - improve training for our Contact Centre when booking repairs to help make sure we fix the issue first time and that we’re allocating enough time to jobs. We have also introduced a new 3-day urgent repair callout to complete jobs faster.
  • Contractors : tighter management of our contractors with improvement plans and account monitoring. We have also moved away from poorer performing contractors and will be doing more work, including specialist repairs and maintenance, through our own trades teams.
  • Neighbourhood issues: not addressing problems with neighbours or the local area in the way residents wanted or had asked us for – including anti-social behaviour, parking issues.
  • Other improvements : we’ve also introduced monthly quality audits of our tenancy and housing management services to highlight where we haven’t followed our processes or there are areas we could improve.

All actions and steps identified as improvements are monitored through our complaints team, tracked and reported to our senior management team each quarter to make sure we carry out every improvement we’ve identified.