New Ombudsman partnership to help social landlords 'get it right' with tenants

Social landlords are to get more help in putting their services right, thanks to a new partnership agreement between three of the leading organisations in dealing with tenants’ complaints.

The Local Government Ombudsman has signed up to a project run by the Housing Ombudsman Service and HouseMark to help housing providers perform better when their tenants complain.

The ‘Ombudsman Says’ service, which launched earlier this year, has already made a wide range of housing association case digests available online to show landlords what to do - and what not to do - when things go wrong.

Now, under the new agreement, landlords will also have fast and easy access to cases involving council services.

The Local Government Ombudsman will also join the other partners in the project in responding online to HouseMark member queries.

The organisations are also planning to explore other ways of working together to help all social landlords manage complaints more effectively and improve their relationship with their tenants.

Reacting properly when a tenant complains is crucial, particularly given the increased focus on tenants at the heart of the regulatory regime.

HouseMark Deputy Chief Executive Samantha McGrady said: "We are delighted that the Local Government Ombudsman has agreed to join us in providing this
important service to landlords. With more information to hand, landlords can manage complaints more quickly and effectively and improve the landlord/tenant relationship.

"At a time when regulation is rightly becoming more customer-focused, landlords need to make sure they are ahead of the game when it comes to dealing with their tenants’ complaints."

Local Government Ombudsman Tony Redmond said: "Housing represents the biggest category of complaint that we receive about council services, covering issues from housing repairs and allocations to homelessness.

"Using the ‘Ombudsman says’ website to publish the outcome of individual housing cases will help to maximise the value of our investigations. It will disseminate good practice more widely and assist councils in making improvements to their services."

The Housing Ombudsman Mike Biles said: "I am pleased that in addition to the summaries of cases from my Service the new website will include those of the Local Government Ombudsman. That, and the supplementary practice information from HouseMark connected with them, will increase the ability of social landlords across the sector to learn from their own experiences.

"Housing practitioners should use these examples better to handle complaints and improve performance in an important area of interaction with tenants."

The website can be searched by keyword, topic and tenure and is regularly updated with new cases and information.

The website is available at www.ombudsmansays.info HouseMark subscribers can also access ‘Ombudsman Says’ from the HouseMark website. The extended service is launched today.

Later in the year, HouseMark will be launching a new complaints benchmarking service which will be free to subscribers. Complementing the ‘Ombudsman Says’ service, complaints benchmarking will enable landlords to compare their performance on a range of performance indicators to better understand their strengths and weaknesses and take targeted improvement action.