Hyde bosses ordered to review tenant compensation policies

The ombudsman said that Hyde “appeared to make its offer of compensation for delays conditional on the resident accepting that the complaint was resolved”. 

As part of the ombudsman’s intervention it also ordered Hyde to pay the resident £450 in compensation. 

The ombudsman also found maladministration for how Hyde communicated with the resident throughout the case, with lengthy gaps where she had to chase for updates. On several occasions Hyde also failed to respond to questions and queries, the agency said. 

Richard Blakeway, the housing ombudsman, said: “While the landlord’s handling of the noise nuisance itself was broadly reasonable, the landlord’s handling of the complaint responses was very poor.”

He added: “The landlord failed to learn from its errors in stage one which were repeated at stage two, causing additional inconvenience to the resident.”

In a statement submitted to the Housing Ombudsman, Hyde said: “We’re sorry that our complaints-handling process was not good enough in this case and for the impact this had on our customer. 

“As part of our continuous improvement approach, in the three years since this case was raised, we’ve made changes to the way we manage complaints, to help us to be more consistent and transparent in our communications, and to avoid situations like this happening again.”

Among the changes it has introduced have been new processes to speed up response times to customers, the group said.

“Colleagues now receive clear notifications when tasks are assigned to them, the actions they must take and when to update customers. Our compensation approach has also been overhauled, allowing us to pay customers faster. We’ve also changed the wording of our responses around compensation to avoid misinterpretation, something that was highlighted in this case.”

The landlord concluded: “To be clear, it was never our policy that paying compensation was dependent on a customer agreeing a complaint was resolved.

“It’s important that we act on customer feedback. We thank the Housing Ombudsman for the chance to explain how we’ve changed our approach since 2020. We continue to work hard to improve our services to better support, and work with, customers.”