Complaints about the Housing Ombudsman Service
The Housing Ombudsman Service is committed to providing an effective, high-quality and consistent service to all those that use it - including residents, landlords, and other stakeholders or the representatives of those users.
We see service complaints as an opportunity to improve. It is important for us to hear from our service users if they are unhappy. We recognise that we do not always get it right and embrace complaints as an opportunity to recognise what went wrong and how we can put things right and learn to improve the service we provide and avoid the same failings happening again.
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What will you consider as a complaint?
The Housing Ombudsman Service define a complaint as an expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, action, or lack of action by the Housing Ombudsman, its own staff, or those acting on its behalf, affecting service users.
If you are not happy with the service we have provided to you, let us know so we can try to put things right and share lessons from the complaint with our teams.
What we can consider
A complaint about our service may relate to:
- the quality or standard of service you have received from the Housing Ombudsman
- failure to provide a service or follow our published processes
- how long we took to respond to you
- the behaviour, conduct or attitude of a Housing Ombudsman employee
What we cannot consider
We will not consider a complaint about your landlord or the following issues under the service complaint process:
- requests to re-open a previously concluded service complaint
- service complaints that relate to an issue that occurred more than 12 months ago
- where we have decided it is not within the Ombudsman’s remit to consider a complaint brought to us, or the issues are for another Ombudsman or Regulator
- decisions or determinations we have made about a complaint made against a landlord, including challenging how evidence has been considered during an investigation - these will be considered under the Reviews policy
- issues that are going through a legal process or already have been heard by a court or tribunal
- the processing of data or the information provided as part of a response under the Data Protection Act – find out more about how we look after your data
In exceptional circumstances, we may decide to exclude the service complaint due to a service user’s behaviour. Any such decision will be made in line with our Unacceptable User Actions policy.
What information do I need to provide?
You need to tell us why you are unhappy with the service you received from the Housing Ombudsman, and what you think we should do to put things right.
If you make a complaint, please provide us with:
- full name
- email address
- address
- Housing Ombudsman case reference number
- preferred way for us to contact you
If you are making a complaint on behalf of a resident, we will need to see signed consent from the resident.
How will you respond to my complaint?
Once we receive your complaint, we will tell you within 5 working days if we are considering it. We will send you acknowledgment of the complaint, which will set out the issues we are considering and when we will respond. If we are not clear on why you are making a complaint, we will ask you to provide more information.
If your complaint is not something we can consider under our service complaint process, we will let you know. In some cases where casework queries are raised, we will pass this to the relevant team to respond and let you know this is the action we have taken.
Your service complaint will be investigated by a member of our Customer Insight team in line with our 2-stage complaint procedure.
Stage 1
We will investigate the issues you have raised. To do this we will:
- consider whether we have followed our own policies and procedure
- talk to staff members that have been involved in your case
- review evidence or request further information from you
We will provide a response in writing within 10 working days. Our response will clearly set out:
- the decision we have made on your complaint about the service
- what we are going to do to put things right
- the next step and actions needed, if any
- how you can let us know if you are unhappy with our response
If we need more time to be able to investigate your complaint, we will let you know and agree a date with you that a response will be provided.
Stage 2
If you are not satisfied with the response to your service complaint at stage 1, you can request to escalate the complaint to stage 2.
Please let us know as soon as possible, ideally no later than 4 weeks from the date of the stage 1 response.
You will need to tell us why you are still dissatisfied with our stage 1 response, for example tell us if you:
- do not think we responded to the issues you raised to us in your complaint
- do not agree with our decision at stage 1 of your service complaint and the reasons for this
- have new or relevant information that may change the decision we made in our stage 1 response to you
We will write to you within 5 working days to let you know if we will investigate your complaint at stage 2 of our complaint process.
A senior member of the team with no involvement at stage 1 will investigate the issues you have raised and provide a response within 20 working days from the date of our acknowledgement to you.
Our final response to you will be in writing and will be the end of the service complaint process.
If we are not considering the complaint at stage 2, we will write to you to explain our reasons for this. If this decision is reached there is no further course of redress available from the Service.
How will you put things right?
We aim to put you back in the position you would have been in had we done things correctly. This could mean that we:
- apologise
- supply an explanation if something has gone wrong
- liaise with the casework operational team to deliver an action – for example, review a reasonable adjustment or contact a resident
- carry out a review of our internal processes, procedures, or systems
- pay compensation if we find service failure that has caused detriment to a service user
- recommend improvements to our internal procedures and systems
How do I make a complaint about the Housing Ombudsman Service?
To make a new complaint about the service you have received from the Housing Ombudsman, you can email the Customer Insight Team directly via complaintsaboutus@housing-ombudsman.org.uk
Please note the Customer Insight Team will not be able to provide an update on a landlord complaint or case you have with the service for investigation and these requests will be sent directly to the relevant casework team.
Telephone
You can call us on 0300 111 3000.
If we need more information from you, a member of the Customer Insight team will return your call within 5 working days.
Our phone lines are open on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 9am to 5pm and on Thursday between 9am and 3.30pm.
Lines are closed for staff training every Thursday from 3.30pm to 5pm.
Post
You can send a letter to:
Customer Insight team
Housing Ombudsman Service
PO Box 1484
Unit D
Preston
PR2 0ET
Please note complaints sent by post may take us slightly longer due to postage and processing times.
Privacy notice
Our privacy notice explains what type of personal data we might collect, from where, and what we do with it.
Our commitment to you
Our commitment to you
The Housing Ombudsman’s aim is to improve residents’ lives and landlords’ services through housing complaints.
We provide an independent and impartial service to social housing residents and landlords and offer dispute resolution for complaints that are not resolved after finishing a landlord’s complaint procedure.