By Richard Blakeway, the Housing Ombudsman
When a potential merger is announced between landlords, there’s often intense interest. My tip for anyone involved: watch the complaints. The challenges of mergers are often reflected in complaints. It’s not unusual for performance on handling complaints to decline and the issues driving complaints to come into sharp focus. It’s crucial for landlords to prioritise the insights to make these changes successful.
This month we published a report on a landlord that, at the investigation, was a subsidiary of another prior to full integration. The lessons for that landlord are worth sharing. The report is rich with learning. It’s based on more than 30 findings by the Ombudsman across a six-month period, where nine out of 10 were upheld. In one case, a resident and her premature baby were left in cold living conditions, despite severe health complications with the baby. The landlord passed the case from department to department and did not investigate the issue until four months after it was first reported.
The report identified seven key themes and set out a series of recommendations, in areas such as compensation, aftercare and quality assurance. Let’s focus on three.
The first lesson which I think touches on an area of challenge for several landlords is the boundary between a service response and a formal complaint. This has been addressed in later versions of our Complaint Handling Code, and the consistent message has been to avoid handling complaints informally: the risk of issues falling through the gaps, not being handled consistently, and recordings of what action has been taken (or not) is very present. In this investigation, we found around twice as many complaints were handled informally as formally. This created issues. By frequently handling complaints in an informal fashion, the landlord created confusion over the status of residents’ complaints and sometimes undermined natural justice. This is something the landlord has addressed through merger. Understanding approach and culture towards complaint handling are key.
Secondly, repair records. Getting the basics right is a challenge for many landlords. The problems with records during a period of significant organisational change and system integration are obvious. In this investigation, the quality of repair logs were often problematic. This resulted in delays to issues being addressed, as well as confusion, uncertainty and frustration for the resident. In response, the landlord developed a centralised CRM database. However, we were concerned there are still issues in this area with consistency, and therefore recommended a review into the merged landlords record keeping process and a training needs analysis to be undertaken for all staff.
Lastly, communication. Again, this is a frequent flyer in lessons from complaints, in itself a cause for concern. Our investigation found that communication underpinned and linked all of the issues we identified, particularly internal. The repairs, complaints and aftercare teams didn’t always share information appropriately or in a timely way. There was also concern around the landlord’s communication tone which didn’t always demonstrate empathy to residents.
A final thought. A successful merger is where shared values and culture come together. Complaints are an indicator of culture and behaviours. If you want to know your staff, as well as your residents, interrogate your complaints.
