Complaints performance and improvement

The council’s strategic leadership team, as its governing body, has reviewed and discussed the contents of the annual complaints performance and service improvement report 2024 to 2025. These are their comments. 

Timeliness

We are disappointed that, over the course of 2024 to 2025, we have not yet embedded the planned improvements to ensure that our housing complaints service addresses resident complaints in a timely way. We are clear that this is inadequate. A significant restructure of our housing service has taken place during spring 2025, which has increased the size of the team and the expertise within it to effectively resolve complaints. We have started to see these improvements in timeliness during the first part of 2025 to 2026 and are monitoring this monthly to ensure it is sustained and built upon.

Accessibility

We note that, whilst we have seen a significant increase in stage 2 complaints, our stage 1 complaints have not increased in volume year on year. This is different to the experience of many other London local authorities. Whilst this may be partly attributable to service improvements that have been made, our concern is that this could point towards our complaints service not being equally accessible to all our residents.

This is something we are determined to resolve. We have already improved the way we publicise the service and are emphasising to residents the many channels available to them to make a complaint. We have analysed, by protected characteristics, which resident demographics make proportionately fewer complaints, and are planning actions to investigate and address this. We have also been updating our records of individual resident circumstances and vulnerabilities, and this will ensure that we are always able to tailor complaints investigations and responses to the individual needs of our residents.

Complaints management

As an organisation, we are doing all we can to support complaints improvement. This includes commissioning an external review of our customer relationship management system to make sure it works effectively for managing complaints, as well as developing automated dashboards to ensure that managers can effectively manage complaints. We will take action on any improvement recommendations we receive.

Ombudsman engagement, oversight, and governance

We have been engaging with the Housing Ombudsman over these past few months, to demonstrate the changes we are making and to assure them that we have robust plans to improve our complaints performance. These plans include addressing the root causes of complaints within our services, and for housing, we are carefully managing and monitoring these to ensure they are successful. Performance is reported at directorate and at organisational level, including to our monthly Housing Executive Board. The responsible lead member receives regular updates as does our member-led Business Board. We report performance through our resident engagement infrastructure, including at our quarterly Independent Housing Board.