Housing Ombudsman criticises ‘very striking’ complacency around missed repairs appointments

He said: “That shows there’s an underlying decline because issues are appearing in service areas, they may be resolved by the complaints team, which shows the complaint-handling code and work to embed a positive complaint-handling culture has started to embed.

“So, the landlord is recovering. But nonetheless, the stuff is going wrong and that 20 per cent decline, I think, illustrates that.

“On the severe maladministration, sometimes I’ve heard the grumbling, ‘it’s just been a bit unfair to move the goalposts’; [that] is nonsense on the basis that we are simply looking at what the landlord needs to deal with the Landlord and Tenant Act and other legislation, and what the landlord has committed to do in its own policy. And trying to excuse why you can’t meet your own commitments, I think, is overly defensive at times.”

Mr Blakeway said there has been no change in how the ombudsman approaches cases and it is transparent with its decisions and reports published, enabling people to make their own mind up on how reasonable providers were in their responses.

He said that some of the rise in maladministration is down to the fact that some cases would not have been seen previously.

Mr Blakeway said: “I know when we published the first complaint-handling code, one landlord said that they’d adopted the definition of a formal complaint and they’d seen a 150 per cent increase in complaints that they were treating formally. I am now seeing with that landlord some quite serious cases and quite serious failure.

“So, I think some of it will [underline] the fact that we are now seeing cases that we simply wouldn’t have seen; they just either were not being handled effectively by the landlord or they were not being effectively signposted to the ombudsman.”

Mr Blakeway said that in the growth of casework, the ombudsman has seen a rise in more serious cases coming forward, with repairs taking a “lion’s share” of the cases it is handling.

While there is a challenging operating environment now, he questioned whether anyone really believes repairs services were that good before the current economic conditions.

Mr Blakeway said: “[The] complacency perhaps that exists around missed appointments is very striking.” And he criticised the excuses of landlords not being allowed access or the current economic environment.

He said: “I’ve used the analogy of sectors and with British Gas. British Gas missed 12,000 appointments that affected 12,000 customers [in 2017]. They very nearly had regulatory action against them, but they pre-empted it through an engagement with the regulator. If you transpose that, that would equate to one per cent of appointments being missed in social housing, but the average is 20 per cent.

“And then I hear ‘oh, well, we’re not allowed access’. Those issues will certainly exist, but so often we see when we look at the case, actually, the landlord can’t evidence it was no access. It turns out it was a missed appointment or it turns out the resident was deaf and didn’t hear that the operative turned up. I just think it’s too easy to say ‘it’s the current economic climate’ rather than addressing fundamental issues.”

Mr Blakeway said that if the whole sector seems to be having issues with the same contractors, there is room for more collaboration, but sometimes, there is “inadequate performance management and inadequate information on actually what is happening”.

He said that the highlighted issues of knowledge and information are “really fundamental” but that landlords should communicate “more effectively” with residents about any problems.

“So, if there’s a problem with the repair, with the materials, if there’s a problem with the right operative being available, if there’s a problem with getting to the property – communicate with the resident, manage the resident’s expectations, and that should be owned by the landlord,” Mr Blakeway said.