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Southwark Council (202204385)

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REPORT

COMPLAINT 202204385

Southwark Council

8 April 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:
    1. The landlord’s handling of repairs to the resident’s walls.
    2. The landlord’s response to the resident’s reports of damp and mould.
    3. The landlord’s handling of the associated complaint.

Background

  1. The resident is a tenant of the landlord. On 11 August 2021, she first reported experiencing damp and mould in the property. After three unsuccessful attempts to gain access to complete a mould wash of the property, the landlord cancelled the work.
  2. The resident raised a stage one complaint with the landlord on 4 March 2022 about the condition of the walls in the property. She was also unhappy that damp and mould repeatedly developed in the property. The resident highlighted that the effect of the damp and mould had led to her taking her child to hospital several times and she wanted to be rehoused because of her health concerns.
  3. The landlord carried out an inspection on 22 March 2022 and provided its stage one complaint response to the resident. This relayed that its inspection had found the damp and mould was not caused by water penetration. The landlord outlined the work it would do to clean the mould and repair some of the walls. The resident escalated her complaint, on 20 April 2022, and the landlord’s final response on 14 July 2022 partially upheld the complaint. It confirmed that work had been completed on 27 April 2022, six days overdue, to plaster two of the walls and wash the mould from the property. The landlord repeated that its inspection had not found evidence of “water ingress” into the property.
  4. The resident informed this Service, on 10 September 2022, that she continued to be dissatisfied as she considered the landlord’s repairs to be incomplete, and she wanted to be rehoused because of her concerns over the impact of the damp and mould on her child’s health.

Assessment and findings

The landlord’s handling of repairs to the resident’s walls

  1. The landlord’s tenancy agreement with the resident confirms that it is responsible for the repair and maintenance of the structure of the property; this includes the walls. Its repairs rights and responsibilities web page clarifies that minor repairs such as “small cracks in plaster” are the resident’s responsibility to repair. The landlord’s repairs guide states that non-urgent repairs – those which do not present an immediate hazard or nuisance – will be completed within 20 working days. This guide states that an exception to this is when there are planned works which include a non-urgent repair; in this instance there may be a “reasonable” delay.
  2. The landlord’s inspection of the property on 22 March 2022 found that not all areas highlighted by the resident needed repair. The inspection notes recorded that “even though areas are uneven… purely cosmetic”. It is reasonable for a landlord to rely on the opinions of its appropriately qualified staff; therefore, it was also reasonable for it to only carry out re-plastering of those walls where the damage was found to be more than superficial. This was in accordance with its repair responsibilities web page above which confirms that minor repairs are part of the resident’s repairing responsibility.
  3. The landlord informed this Service that it received the report of the repair on 14 March 2022, inspected the property on 22 March 2022 and raised works with a completion date of 21 April 2022. As the works were completed six days overdue on 27 April 2022, it did not consider that compensation was due as the delay was less than a week.
  4. However, the first record of the damage being reported was in the resident’s stage one complaint on 4 March 2022; this was therefore a period of 37 working days for the completion of the repair; 17 working days in excess of the timeframe specified in the repairs guide above for a non-urgent repair. The repairs guide does not stipulate that repairs should be inspected within 20 working days, and then subsequently completed within a further 20 working days; it is simply stated that non-urgent repairs will be completed within 20 working days. There was also no evidence that the repairs formed part of larger planned works. Therefore, the timeframe specified should be inclusive of any time taken to inspect the repair, to minimise any distress and inconvenience experienced by the resident in the meantime.
  5. Therefore, it was unreasonable that the landlord did not pay compensation to the resident for, or acknowledge, the delay in completing the wall repairs. Compensation of £100 should be paid to the resident to recognise that there was a delay to the wall repairs which would have caused her inconvenience while she was awaiting their completion. This is in accordance with the Ombudsman’s remedies guidance, available to view online, which provides for awards of compensation between £50 and £100 where there has been a failure by the landlord which was of short duration but which led to detriment for the resident.

The landlord’s response to the resident’s reports of damp and mould

  1. When a landlord receives a report of damp and mould in a property, its first action should be to carry out an inspection to identify the cause. As confirmed in the tenancy agreement above, the landlord was responsible for carrying out repairs to the structure of the property if this was allowing water to enter and cause damp.
  2. The resident initially raised concerns with the landlord, on 4 March 2022, that damp and mould repeatedly developed in the property. The landlord acted reasonably in carrying out an inspection on 22 March 2022, 12 working days later, to ascertain if there was any water penetration into the property that was causing the reported damp and mould. When it found no evidence of this, it acted reasonably in arranging for a mould wash to be carried out to remove the mould reported by the resident, which the landlord confirmed was completed on 27 April 2022, a further 25 working days later. Again, 37 working days had passed between the resident raising her concerns and the landlord completing the mould wash, 17 working days outside the 20 working days timescale given in the landlord’s repairs guide.
  3. While it was reasonable for the landlord to rule out water penetration as the cause of the reported damp and mould, it should have done more to determine why this issue was occurring. A landlord would be expected to take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to dealing with damp and mould. While there may not have been any water penetration into the property; nevertheless, dampness and mould were present and there was no evidence of the landlord explaining to the resident why this occurred. It would have been reasonable for the landlord to provide an explanation of why the damp and mould formed and what steps could be taken by itself or the resident to prevent further reoccurrences. This was an unreasonable omission by the landlord.
  4. Given that the resident highlighted that the damp and mould was persistent and was having a detrimental effect on her son’s health, it was particularly unreasonable that the landlord did not do more to investigate the cause. A landlord is obliged, in accordance with the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, introduced in the Housing Act 2004, to identify and mitigate any potential hazards to a resident’s health which may be present in a property. Damp and mould are one such potential hazard and, despite the resident relaying that she had needed to take her child to hospital several times for health issues linked to the damp and mould, the landlord failed to address this.
  5. Therefore, while the landlord did carry out some reasonable initial actions to address the resident’s report of damp and mould, it was unreasonable that it did not do more, in spite of the resident’s evident distress at remaining in the property. The landlord should therefore pay compensation of £200 to her for the distress caused by its incomplete response to her reports. This is made up of £100 for the delay in completing the repair and a further £100 for the landlord’s additional failures in this case. This is in accordance with the Ombudsman’s remedies guidance, which provides for awards of £100 to £600 where there has been a failure by the landlord which it did not fully resolve for the resident, leading to distress and inconvenience, but which may not have had a permanent impact on her. The landlord has also be ordered to take steps to determine the cause of the damp and mould, through an inspection if necessary, and provide a solution for mitigating this.

The landlord’s handling of the associated complaint

  1. The landlord’s complaints policy provides for a two-stage internal complaints procedure, where a stage one response should be provided to the resident within 15 working days of receipt of the complaint. At the final stage, it should provide a full response within 25 working days.
  2. The Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code (the Code), which member landlords are required to adhere to, specifies that a landlord should respond to all points raised in a complaint, and consider all information and evidence carefully. The landlord’s responses at both stages did not address the resident’s concerns about the impact of the damp and mould on her and her child’s health. Its responses focused on the repair works it would carry out but did not acknowledge her request to be rehoused. This was a failure by the landlord to respond to all the concerns raised by the resident.
  3. The lack of acknowledgement by the landlord of the resident’s concerns would have led to distress for her as her health concerns had not been considered, and incurred further inconvenience for her to pursue rehousing. It would have been reasonable for the landlord to provide a response which was empathetic to her concerns and provide her with information on the rehousing options appropriate to her current circumstances.
  4. Furthermore, the landlord’s complaint responses were provided to the resident outside of the timescales specified in its complaints policy which would have led to inconvenience for her. It provided the stage one complaint response one day late and its final response was provided to her 58 working days after it received her request to escalate the complaint.
  5. In accordance with the Code, a landlord should not wait until proposed works are complete before issuing a complaint response. It should endeavour to provide a complaint response within the timeframes specified in its policy that specifies the proposed resolutions to the complaint. Any delay by the landlord in issuing a complaint response contributes to the overall delay in resolving a complaint, and prolongs the time required before a resident may seek alternative resolution of the complaint, such as escalating it to the Ombudsman.
  6. Therefore, the landlord exhibited a failure to consider all the aspects of the complaint raised by the resident and a failure to adhere to its timeframes for handling the complaint. To recognise the distress and inconvenience caused to the resident, it should pay compensation to her of £100, in accordance with the Ombudsman’s remedies guidance above.

Determination

  1. In accordance with paragraph 52 of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, there was service failure by the landlord in:
    1. Its handling of repairs to the resident’s walls.
    2. Its response to the resident’s reports of damp and mould.
    3. Its handling of the associated complaint.

Orders

  1. Within four weeks, the landlord should:
    1. Pay the resident £400 compensation, comprised of:
      1. £100 for its handling of repairs to the resident’s walls.
      2. £200 for its response to the resident’s reports of damp and mould.
      3. £100 for its handling of the associated complaint.
    2. Write to the resident to confirm the reasons for the formation of damp and mould in the property and provide a solution for tackling this. If appropriate, it should carry out another inspection to investigate this.
    3. Write to the resident to confirm what options are available to her for rehousing.
  2. The landlord should provide evidence to the Ombudsman, within four weeks, that it has complied with the above orders.

Recommendations

  1. The landlord should:
    1. Review its strategy for tackling damp and mould, and self-assess its approach against the ten tests highlighted by the Ombudsman’s spotlight report on damp and mould, available online.
    2. Review its complaint handling procedures and identify what steps it will take to ensure that it responds to complaints empathetically, comprehensively, and in consideration of a resident’s circumstances.