Platform Housing Group Limited (202121416)

REPORT

COMPLAINT 202121416

Platform Housing Group Limited

27 July 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

The complaint is about:
1. The landlord’s response to the resident’s reports about damp in the resident’s garage
2. The landlord’s response to the resident’s reports about hedge cutting and the associated service charge.
3. The landlord’s handling of the resident’s complaint.

Background

The resident is an assured tenant of the landlord. The property is a four bedroom house with a garage. The tenancy commenced in 2003.
On 21 April 2020, the resident asked the landlord why her hedges were not being cut, as she had noticed that her neighbours’ hedges were being cut by the ground maintenance workers. In October 2021, the landlord investigated the issue and confirmed that its contractor should have been cutting the hedge in front of the resident’s property and apologised to the resident that it had not been maintained previously. The landlord confirmed that the hedges would be maintained from then on.
On 30 June 2020, the resident contacted the landlord to ask whether they could inspect her garage as it was mouldy, damp, and paint was chipping. She contacted the landlord again on 21 August 2020, confirming that the garage door was broken and needed repair, and that this was causing damp in the garage. The landlord attended the property on 5 October 2020 to carry out the repair and noted that other than a damaged hinge, the garage doors were in good condition and a follow up inspection was needed to establish the cause of the damp. The resident contacted the landlord on 11 December 2020, 8 February 2021, and 19 April 2021, to ask the landlord to arrange the inspection.
On 17 December 2021, the resident contacted the Ombudsman and asked it to investigate the landlord’s handling of her reports about the garden maintenance and garage. The Ombudsman contacted the landlord on 17 December 2021, to outline the resident’s complaint and ask it to investigate and respond to her complaint in accordance with its complaint procedure.
On 26 January 2022, the landlord issued a stage one response to the resident’s complaint, acknowledging poor communication in relation to the resident’s enquiries about the garage repair and garden maintenance. The landlord offered £100 compensation in relation to the poor communication and confirmed it would follow up on the garage and hedge maintenance issues. The resident confirmed that she was dissatisfied with the response on 26 January 2022 and 4 February 2022. On 4 April 2022, the Ombudsman asked the landlord to escalate the resident’s complaint, and it provided its stage two response on 11 May 2022. The landlord upheld the resident’s complaint and increased its offer of compensation to £200.
The resident confirmed that she was unhappy with the landlord’s response and asked the Ombudsman to investigate.

Assessment and findings

Scope of investigation

The Ombudsman’s remit in relation to complaints are limited by the Housing Ombudsman Scheme (‘the Scheme’), which sets out the type of complaints which the Ombudsman will and may not investigate.
Paragraph 42(g) of the Scheme sets out that the Ombudsman will not investigate complaints which, in the Ombudsman’s opinion concern matters where the Ombudsman considers it quicker, fairer, more reasonable, or more effective to seek a remedy through the courts, a designated person, other tribunal or procedure’.
It is not within the Ombudsman’s authority or expertise to decide on matters relating to service charges in the same way as the courts, including whether the landlord should provide are fund where the delivery of services is disputed. However, the Ombudsman can assess whether the landlord has followed proper procedure, followed good practice, and behaved reasonably, taking account of all the circumstances of the case.
Although it is noted that the resident asserts that the failure to cut her hedges dates back to the beginning of the tenancy in 2003, this investigation has primarily focussed on the landlord’s handling of the resident’s reports from six months prior to the resident raising her complaint in December 2021. This is because, under paragraph 42(c) of the Scheme, the Ombudsman will not investigate complaints which were not brought to the attention of the member as a formal complaint within a reasonable period, which would normally be within six months of the matter arising. Residents are expected to raise complaints with their landlords in a timely manner, so that the landlord has a reasonable opportunity to consider the issues while the evidence is available to reach an informed conclusion on the events that occurred.

The landlord’s response to the resident’s reports about damp in the resident’s garage

The tenancy agreement confirms that the premises includes a garage. The agreement also confirms that the landlord is obliged to maintain and repair the structure of the premises.
The landlord provided a repairs policy effective from August 2021. The policy outlines that the responsive repairs service exists to undertake work that cannot wait for cyclical or planned programmes of work and categorises repairs according to their urgency.
Appointed Repairs are defined as all non-emergency and non-specialist repairs that need to be carried out to remedy building defects or component failure and that cannot reasonably wait for cyclical or planned/programmed works. Such repairs will be completed in a single visit where possible and customers should be offered a mutually convenient appointment at first point of contact where possible.
The landlord’s case management records show that the resident first reported damp in the garage on 30 June 2020. She contacted the landlord again on 14 July 2020, suggesting it could be due to damage to the garage door. She contacted the landlord again on 21 August 2020, confirming that the garage door was broken and needed repair, and that this was causing damp in the garage. On 5 October 2020, the landlord attended the property and noted that the doors were in generally good condition apart from a damaged hinge, and that this was unlikely to be the cause of the damp in the garage. The landlord’s employee recommended that a follow up inspection be arranged to determine the cause of the damp.
The resident contacted the landlord to request the follow up inspection on 11 December 2020, 8 February 2021, and 19 April 2021, but no follow up inspection took place until 19 May 2022. On 19 May 2022, the landlord identified that a possible solution would be to install aco drains. According to the records provided to the Ombudsman, as at 4 November 2022, no further works had been arranged or carried out to address the damp in the garage.
In the stage one response to the resident’s complaint, the landlord appropriately acknowledged and apologised for its delay in addressing the repair issue. An offer of £50 (half of the total £100 offered at stage one) was made in respect of poor communication by the landlord in relation to the garage repair. This offer was increased to £100 in the landlord’s stage two complaint response.
In light of the lengthy delay in addressing the issue, and the fact that the damp remains unresolved, three years after it was first reported to the landlord, the Ombudsman considers that there was maladministration by the landlord in its handling of the resident’s reports of damp in the garage.
In consideration of the above, the landlord’s final offer of compensation of £100 (half of the £200 offered in the stage two response) was disproportionately low.
Under the Ombudsman’s remedies guidance, awards of between £100 – £600 are suggested for cases where the landlord has failed to acknowledge its failings and/or has made no attempt to put things right.
An order increasing the compensation in respect of this issue to £600 is set out below, along with an order requiring the landlord to investigate and carry out any necessary repairs to the garage. This is calculated at £200 compensation for each year the matter has been outstanding.

The landlord’s response to the resident’s reports about hedge cutting and the associated service charge.

Under the terms of the tenancy agreement, the resident pays a fixed service charge for maintaining the front garden hedges, so when concern was raised about the delivery of these services, the landlord had a responsibility to review the concerns. The first record of the resident raising concerns about the hedge cutting was on 21 April 2020. The landlord inspected the hedges on 2 June 2020 and noted that the hedges had been cut and therefore no further action was taken. The resident maintained that, prior to investigation of the issue by the landlord, she had cut the hedge with help from her neighbours, rather than the landlord’s contractor.
When the resident raised her concerns for the second time in August 2021, the landlord contacted its ground maintenance contractor and reviewed the work schedules and plans, which demonstrates it accepted this responsibility. Having reviewed services, it concluded that the hedges had not been cut when they should have, and apologised for this oversight. The landlord confirmed that it would ensure that the hedges would be cut in future, and it offered the resident compensation of £50 at stage one (half of the total award of £100 offered for both complaint issues) and then increased this offer to £100 at stage two of the complaints process.
The Ombudsman notes that the landlord acknowledged and apologised for failing to cut the hedges. The landlord also took appropriate steps to arrange to rectify this acknowledged shortfall in service, by ensuring hedges were cut in future. However, within the complaint responses, the landlord failed to address the resident’s assertion that the hedge had not been maintained by the landlord since her tenancy began. This assertion seemed plausible, particularly in light of the fact that the landlord needed to make enquiries to determine whether it was obliged to cut the hedge when it was investigating the resident’s complaint. However, due to the historic nature of this allegation, the Ombudsman is not in a position to investigate the alleged failure to cut the hedges from the commencement of the tenancy.
The landlord also failed to review and respond to the resident’s associated request for a refund of the service charge at each stage of its complaints procedure, and did not provide the resident with a detailed explanation of its position.
In light of the failings outlined above, the Ombudsman considers that there was maladministration by the landlord in its response to the resident’s reports of failure to cut the hedges at her property and her request for a refund of the associated service charge.
Under the Ombudsman’s remedies guidance, awards of between £100 – £600 are suggested for cases where the landlord has acknowledged failings and made some attempt to put things right, but the offer was not proportionate to the failings identified by the Ombudsman’s investigation.
In consideration of the continued failure to address the resident’s request for a refund of the service charge and failure to set out its position on the issue, the landlord’s final offer of compensation of £100 (half of the £200 offered in the stage two response) was disproportionately low.
An order increasing the compensation in respect of this issue to £250 is set out below, along with an order requiring the landlord to comply with its obligations to review and explain its position regarding the requested service charge refund.
If the resident remains dissatisfied after receiving the landlord’s response to her request for a refund for the service charge, only a legal process can offer a definitive and legally binding decision as to whether a service charge refund is due, as explained above.

Complaint handling

The landlord was first made aware of the resident’s complaint by the Ombudsman on 17 December 2021. An acknowledgement was sent to the resident on 20 December 2021, confirming that the target date for providing the stage one response was 12 January 2022.A stage one response was provided by the landlord on 26 January 2022, 24 working days after the landlord became aware of the complaint.
Under the Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code, landlords must respond to a complaint within 10 working days of the complaint being logged. Exceptionally, landlords may provide an explanation to the resident containing a clear timeframe for when the response will be received. This should not exceed a further 10 days without good reason. If an extension beyond 20 working days is required to enable the landlord to respond to the complaint fully, this should be agreed by both parties.
The landlord therefore failed to comply with the code by exceeding the recommended timescale of 10 working days for providing a stage one response, failing to provide an alternative timescale when this deadline was exceeded, and failing to seek the resident’s agreement for an extension beyond 20 working days.
On receipt of the stage one response, the resident immediately made clear that she was unhappy and wanted to take things further, when she replied to the stage one response on 26 January 2022. She reiterated her dissatisfaction, and confirmed that she was seeking a service charge refund and thought that the compensation was inadequate, on 4 February 2022.
In spite of the resident’s clear dissatisfaction with the stage one response, the landlord did not escalate the resident’s complaint until it was asked to do so by the Ombudsman on 4 April 2022.
Under the Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code, a stage 2 complaint response should be provided within 20 working days of the complaint being escalated, and an extension of this deadline beyond 10 working days should be agreed by both parties. In this case, the resident made clear that she wanted to escalate her complaint by 4 February 2022, but a response was not issued until 11 May 2022, 3 months later. The landlord failed to acknowledge or apologise for this delay in its response on 11 May 2022.
Overall, the impact of the landlord’s complaint handling on the substantive issues was limited, however it is evident that additional effort was required from the resident to escalate the complaint. This will have caused the resident frustration, resulted in unnecessary time and trouble and distress and inconvenience, and undermined her trust in the landlord. The landlord did not demonstrate that it acknowledged or remedied this, which was not appropriate. As a result, the Ombudsman finds there was service failure in the landlord’s handling of the resident’s complaint, and compensation of £100 is reasonable to address this failure.

Determination

In accordance with paragraph 52 of the Scheme, there was maladministration in the landlord’s response to:
1. the resident’s reports about damp in the resident’s garage.
2. the resident’s reports about hedge cutting and the associated service charge.
In accordance with paragraph 52 of the Scheme, there was service failure in the landlord’s handling of the resident’s complaint.

Orders and recommendations

Within four weeks of the date of this report, the landlord is ordered to pay the resident a total of £950 in compensation, this is inclusive of the landlord’s previous offers of compensation. The compensation comprises:
1. £600 for the distress and inconvenience caused by the landlord’s response to the resident’s reports of damp in her garage.
2. £250 for the distress and inconvenience caused by the landlord’s response to the resident’s reports about hedge cutting and the associated service charge.
3. £100 for the distress and inconvenience caused by the landlord’s handling of the resident’s complaint.
The landlord is ordered to, within six weeks of the date of this report, investigate the damp issues in the garage reported by the resident and arrange to carry out any necessary repairs.
The landlord is ordered to, within four weeks of the date of this report, provide its response to the resident’s request for a refund for the service charge paid for hedge cutting.
The landlord is ordered to, within six weeks of the date of this report, review its complaint handling and its staff training needs to ensure that it responds to and escalates complaints in a timely manner and in accordance with its complaint policy and the Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code.
The landlord should provide evidence of compliance with the above within the timeframes stated.