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Housing Complaints, Compliments and Comments

We always want to provide you with the best service we can, but sometimes things can go wrong. If you have a complaint about your home or the services we or our contractors provide, please let us know so that we can put things right.

If we have done something well, please let us know too, it’s important we know when we get things right too. You can also suggest new ways of doing things and we’ll use your feedback to learn and to improve our services which will help you and others.

How to make a complaint, compliment or comment

The complaints and information governance team handles all complaints, compliments and comments across the Council. You can find out details about how they deal with complaints about other areas of the Council on their dedicated webpages [internal link].

The Complaints and Information Governance team support our dedicated Housing Complaints Officer who will independently investigate your complaint and provide you with a response.  We have tried to make it as easy as possible for you to tell us what you think. You can do this in many ways including using our online contact form.

You can log a complaint with us by:

We always want to try and resolve an issue as soon as we’re aware of it.  Where possible, please talk to the relevant member of staff first, as they may be able to resolve the issue without going through the complaints process.

What's the process when I make a complaint?

When we receive a complaint, we’ll reply with an acknowledgement letter within 5 working days and respond to the complaint fully within 10 working days. If more time is needed to resolve the issue, the deadline can be extended but we’ll discuss this with you.

Our complaints, compliments and comments procedure [pdf document] ) sets out our approach to managing complaints,  our Complaints Service Standard [pdf document] sets out what service you can expect from us.

Complaints process stages

  • Stage one
    • A thorough investigation of your complaint is carried out by the Housing Complaints Officer.
    • If you’re not happy with the outcome of this investigation, you can request a review of your complaint through the stage 2 process.
  • Stage two
    • A thorough investigation of your complaint and the stage 1 investigation is carried out by the Complaints and Information Governance team, or an independent complaint investigator.
    • If you’re not happy with the outcome of this investigation, you can request a review of this through the Housing Ombudsman. You should do this within 12 months of getting to the end of the complaint’s procedure. We’ll include details of how to contact the Ombudsman in your complaint response letter or you can visit their website for further information.
  • Further help - depending on the nature of your complaint you can also contact:

What don't we investigate under the complaints procedure?

There may be times when we don’t accept a complaint, for example:

  • The issue(s) being complained about took place over 12 months ago
  • It’s a request for service rather than a complaint (for example the first time you ring to report a fault or request a repair)
  • Insurance claims against the Council
  • The issue is part of legal proceedings or where the same issue is part of a case that has been referred to court
  • The issue is about the level of rent or service charge, or the amount of the rent or service charge increase
  • We’ve acted according to regulatory, policy or legislative restrictions

For full details please see the Housing Complaints, Compliments and Comments Procedure [pdf document].

Where this applies, we’ll contact you and explain why we’re refusing a complaint.

Complaint handling and performance

We comply with the Housing Ombudsman's complaint handling code.

Each year we carry out a self-assessment to evaluate how we are performing when it comes to resolving complaints, the results of which are published here in our self-assessment form [pdf document].

Our Complaints and Information Governance team also produce a performance report each year which is reported to Scrutiny Committee and Cabinet. You can view our complaints, compliments and comments annual report here [internal link].

Compensation

We may make a compensation payment to you, where we have not met our service standards [pdf document].  For more information, please read our Housing Management Policy [pdf document].

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