Leeds City Council (202118443)

REPORT

COMPLAINT 202118443

Leeds City Council

1 February 2023

Our approach

The Housing Ombudsman’s approach to investigating and determining complaints is to decide what is fair in all the circumstances of the case. This is set out in the Housing Act 1996 and the Housing Ombudsman Scheme (the Scheme). The Ombudsman considers the evidence and looks to see if there has been any ‘maladministration’, for example whether the landlord has failed to keep to the law, followed proper procedure, followed good practice or behaved in a reasonable and competent manner.

Both the resident and the landlord have submitted information to the Ombudsman and this has been carefully considered. Their accounts of what has happened are summarised below. This report is not an exhaustive description of all the events that have occurred in relation to this case, but an outline of the key issues as a background to the investigation’s findings.

The complaint

1. The complaint is about the landlord’s response to the resident’s request for a repair to broken glazing above her front door.

Background

2. The resident is a secure tenant of a two-bedroom house owned and managed by the landlord.
3. The resident first reported that vandals had broken the window on 29 April 2019. The landlord attended as an emergency the same day to board the panel. Subsequently, there were a number of times when the landlord visited where there was no access due to the resident not being home. The landlord has recorded these as: 9 May 2019, 31 May 2019, 8 July 2019 and 3 February 2020. However, the resident was at home for a visit on 5 December 2019.
4. The resident complained in March 2020 that the repair had been outstanding for almost a year. The landlord’s stage one response apologised for the delay and lack of communication but said that no non-urgent works were being carried out due to the pandemic. It said it would contact the resident to re-arrange once lockdown measures were lifted.
5. In February 2021 the resident made a stage two complaint. She said she had found out that the repairs team had been back to business as usual for some months and yet she had not been contacted. The  landlord’s stage two response  noted that a joiner had attended on 9 March 2021 and had concluded that a new UPVC unit was needed to match the existing door and that an order had been raised. The resident understood from this visit that the new unit would take 3-4 months to manufacture.
6. Following the visit on 9 March 2021, there are no further records of any activity in relation to the repair until January 2022. On 25 January 2022 the landlord’s contractor surveyed the damage and concluded that a whole new door was required. This was ordered and had a provisional installation date of 16 February 2022. The new door was finally fitted on 3 March 2022.
7. The resident would like compensation for stress and inconvenience and for increased heating bills, as well as a refund of rent.

Assessment and findings

8. The landlord has been unable to provide certain records of events relating to the complaint, such as internal communications about the repair. In addition, it also has not provided any evidence of contacting the resident in advance of arranging visits. In the absence of adequate records from the landlord, the Ombudsman has considered it reasonable to rely on the submissions of the resident in terms of appointments she did and did not know about.
9. As such, the Ombudsman accepts that the resident was not informed of the majority of planned visits in advance. There is some evidence that the resident asked to be called in advance of appointments. However, it came to light later that the landlord and contractor appeared to have the wrong phone number for her and her husband. For one visit the resident says a morning visit was agreed as she had an appointment in the afternoon. However, she left at 1pm and returned to find a ‘no access’ card had been left for her during the afternoon. She has also said that she waited in for other appointments that were not honoured.
10. If things had happened as they should, it is likely that a survey would have been carried out in May 2019 and then, with a manufacture time of about four months, the new door would have been fitted around September 2019, not 3 March 2022 as transpired. This represents a delay of two years and six months, an excessive amount of time. It is recognised that not all of that delay was the fault of the landlord. The Covid lockdown halted all non-urgent repairs from March 2020, and although the landlord’s repairs team did resume wider work in July 2020, there would have been a large backlog of jobs at that point. As the landlord was able to arrange a visit for early March 2021, the repairs service was clearly back on track by that point in terms of completing non-urgent repairs. On that basis, the available evidence suggests that there were avoidable delays in this case, at the very least between September 2019 and March 2020, and between March 2021 and March 2022.
11. The landlord’s aim should be to get repairs right first time, which clearly did not happen in this case. The opening of multiple works orders is a concern, as is the closure of works orders without any process in place to place to ensure that matters had been progressed. Also, the lack of available records, both about whether the landlord did attempt to contact the resident in advance of visits and about the visits themselves, is not satisfactory. As there were problems with missed visits, the landlord should have made enquiries about the resident’s correct contact details on the occasions when it was in touch with her or made efforts to contact her in different ways.
12. The landlord has not demonstrated that it has taken any learning from the complaint. Being as the complaint was about a protracted time period to complete the repair, things did not improve once the complaint began being investigated.  Missed visits were a big cause of the delay and yet the landlord made no attempt to get to the bottom of why that was happening. The landlord failed to meet its stage one promise to recontact the resident after lockdown restrictions were lifted. There was a lack of commitment to following up the complaint outcomes, meaning that the repair remained outstanding for a further year after the stage two response had been issued. Furthermore, that finalisation of the repair appears to have been prompted by receiving contact from this Service in January 2022.
13. Whilst the landlord has accepted that there was a lack of communication and unacceptable delay and apologised for it, it has not offered the resident any compensation. The landlord does not have a separate compensation policy but it has said that, as part of its complaints procedure, it can offer compensation on a case by case basis if it finds fault during an investigation.
14. Despite finding that the landlord could have handled this matter better, the Ombudsman considers that a rent rebate, as the resident has requested, would not be appropriate in this case and would be disproportionate to the evidenced impact caused by the broken window. The Ombudsman has, however, made an order below for the landlord to offer compensation, to adequately reflect the resident’s experience as a whole, including potentially increased heating bills during the winter months when the window was missing.

Determination

15. In accordance with paragraph 52 of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, there was maladministration with respect to the landlord’s response to the resident’s request for a repair to broken glazing above her front door.

Orders

16. The Ombudsman orders the landlord to pay the resident the total sum of £400 in in compensation within four weeks of the date of this report for distress and inconvenience experienced.
17. The landlord should provide evidence to this Service of compliance with the above orders within four weeks of this decision.
18. The landlord to review the handling of the repairs in this case to identify what learning it can take from it. This review could involve quality assessing a sample of current repairs to review current recordkeeping; reviewing the appointment notification process to ensure customers are given adequate notice for repairs; and reviewing whether, in cases of multiple missed appointments, more communication should be attempted.
19. The landlord should provide evidence to this Service of compliance with the above orders within six weeks of this decision.

Recommendations

20. The landlord to liaise with the resident to ensure that the contact details on the system for her and her husband are up to date.
21. The landlord to:
    1. ensure it has processes in place to consider compensation for issues such as missed appointments.
    2. review the compensation policies of other social landlords and consider putting in place its own compensation policy.
22. The landlord to, if the resident supplies this:
    1. consider evidence from the resident, such as her heating bills since 2017, for her claim that she had significantly more energy usage in the period the repair was outstanding,
    2. consider if any additional compensation would be reasonable for this.
    3. write to the resident to inform her of the outcome.
23. The landlord should confirm its intentions in respect to the above recommendations to this Service within four weeks of this decision