Hyde special investigation report

Hyde report summary

This special report follows an investigation carried out under paragraph 49 of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, which allows the Ombudsman to conduct further investigation into whether there is a systemic failure. The investigation was announced and began in November 2023.

During this investigation, the Housing Ombudsman found repeated failings in repairs, complaint handling and how the landlord responded to residents’ enquiries about service charges. This has, on occasion, caused distress and inconvenience to residents with unreasonable delays to repairs, barriers to complaints and poor communication.

The landlord engaged extensively as part of this investigation and has taken action to make improvements in these key areas, which has been welcomed by the Ombudsman.

The investigation was prompted by the landlord’s 10 severe maladministration findings and a high overall maladministration rate, including in areas such as repairs (94%) and damp and mould (100%). Between April 2023 and June 2024, the Ombudsman made 137 determinations, with 353 findings. These included 23 findings of severe maladministration (10 relating to property condition, and 9 relating to complaint handling). There was an overall maladministration rate of 82%. The Ombudsman put forward 548 orders to put things right for residents in these cases.

Key themes

The report sets out 3 key areas for the landlord to improve in and a series of recommendations to help it achieve that.

Complaint handling

Barriers to the complaints process still existed in policy and practice, and the report found that the intention of the Code had been skewed in the landlord’s policy towards its choice and control, not resident choice. There was a failure to escalate complaints with the Ombudsman intervening in 25 out of 44 cases to ask the landlord to accept or progress the complaint. The evidence suggested that many of the issues resulted from historical under resourcing of its complaints team and complaints being held whilst delayed repairs were taking place. Poor systems and knowledge and information management also contributed. Where there was service failure, at times the landlord provided inadequate redress, including poorly handled apologies. It is encouraging that the landlord has invested in knowledge systems, training and has recruited a complaint quality and improvement officer. However, the report recommended the landlord ensures its complaints policy is in line with the Code and it takes learning from the Ombudsman’s determinations seriously to identify the root cause of complaints.

Repairs

There were a significant amount of repair cases with unreasonable delays, mainly caused by poor knowledge exchange with repairs contractors, missed or otherwise ineffective appointments, and failure to effectively manage or oversee contractors’ work on individual repair jobs. This was further exacerbated during the coronavirus pandemic when the landlord struggled to keep up as delivering compliant repair became harder. There were also issues with the landlord’s response to reports of leaks, damp and mould, with repairs not being completed. Other issues in this theme included poor communication, a failure to mitigate impact, and failure to assist the resident with an insurance claim. The landlord identified its need to reduce repairs times and has worked on this. The report recommends that the landlord reviews the causes of its wasted appointments and create an action plan seeking to minimise these, as well as update its damp and mould policies and procedures.

Service charges

The landlord experiences peaks in service charge enquiries twice per year, in response to it sending out information at set times. It appeared enquiries were placed in a queue for response and answered in turn without any triage for common queries or process or criteria for prioritising responses. This had historically resulted in residents typically waiting 5 or 6 months for a response but sometimes up to a year. When residents did receive a response, these were not specific enough or did not cover all the points they needed to. The landlord has undertaken a number of improvements in this area. The report has recommended it makes its policies clear and consistent about when a service charge enquiry becomes a complaint, including appropriate signposting to the complaints procedure, as well as making sure its systems and processes are effective so that residents receive timely and sufficiently detailed answers to their enquiries.

There are also a range of cross-cutting themes identified as part of this investigation, including knowledge and information management, policy and procedure management, communication and taking vulnerabilities into account.