Podcast transcript: Handling complaints

Transcript –  CT Brief: Honest Conversations – A three-part mini series – Handling complaints

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Part 1

Zina Smith

Hi, and welcome back to a new miniseries version of the CT Brief Honest Conversations podcast. In this three-part miniseries, Campbell Tickell’s Catherine Little, Sue Harvey and Francesca Stanyer discuss the Housing Ombudsman’s complaints handling code and how it links in with changes to social housing consumer regulation. In part one, they reflect on how boards can seek assurance around complaints handling and tenant satisfaction measures, and are joined by guest Sarah Klueter, Director of Customer experience at Wythenshawe Community Housing Group. Part two, they explore organisational culture, in depth assessments and top tips. And in part three, they discuss what’s new in the updated housing Ombudsman’s code.

Catherine Little

Sue, let’s start with your thoughts around the kind of assurances that board members should be seeking around the complaints handling.

Sue Harvey

So, it’s a question we’re being asked a lot. In general, as with much of these things, it’s what were you looking at before? Maybe that’s absolutely right for your organisation and your structures. However, definitely more focus on this stuff. So, I think the first thing would be to understand where the detail on complaints was being reviewed within your governance structure, and it may not be at board level. So if you have an operating committee or a customer committee or something of that nature may well be where the detail on looking into complaints handling and learning from complaints is being done with appropriate escalations and assurance to the board that, having said, there’s a bunch of things that that committee should be looking at, and probably some committee within the staffing structure should be looking at as well, and possibly in more detail. So I’m thinking of things like an annual assessment against the housing ombudsman’s complaint handling code, which is changing, it’s being updated. So, a sort of typical gap analysis? Yes, we do comply with this element and here’s the evidence, or we don’t yet comply with that element, and here’s the timetable for us complying and the person who’s leading on that.

So, it’s sort of fairly standard self-assessment and gap analysis. I think, then probably one of the biggest influences of the increasing focus from the housing ombudsman in recent years is an increased frequency with which boards or committees are considering complaints. So, I remember the days when it used to be an annual report that came to a very busy board meeting and it was the last item on the agenda. And I think now you’d expect boards to be looking at this, if not quarterly, then six monthly, I think, would be normal. And a rather more detailed and insightful look at what the complaints activity is telling you. So things like the volume of complaints, the trends, any themes, any geographical or demographic hotspots from your internally resolved complaints. I think what the ombudsman has referred to as listening to the silence. So something that tells you where there are sections of your residents who are not complaining, which may well be for good reason, but there’s probably learning in that as well. But it may be people who are reluctant to complain or for whom the complaints process is not that accessible. I think you should think about seeing some kind of triangulation.

So, with what you’re learning from the tenant satisfaction metrics, what you learn from your repairs transaction surveys, post repairs transaction surveys, any themes and geographical hotspots in your repairs activity. For example, I think you should be looking at the volume and trends of complaints going to the ombudsman, what happens to them there, because there are lots of things that he decides are outside of jurisdiction or get resolved before they reach the formal decision stage, and then a summary of any learnings. And I think if you’ve had the misfortune to have a severe maladministration finding, then that full report from the ombudsman, the decision report should probably come to that committee and maybe also should be considered by the board. And then with all of those things, the internally resolved and the ombudsman complaints, I think you should be seeing something about what lessons have been learned. It’s a requirement of the complaint handling code. In fact, what lessons have you learned, what policies and procedures have been updated, what training has been adjusted, any relationship with contractors that has been changed in any way. So, I think in general, someone should be looking at in the government structure, and the board and committee structure should be looking at some of the detail around complaints, possibly more than before.

They should probably be looking at it more frequently before, and it should be more nuanced and more insightful, rather than just we had 34 complaints last year and this year we’ve got 32. That’s a lot, but I hope that a great deal of it people would already be doing.

Catherine Little

Thanks. And I suppose moving on from that then how can board members have confidence their approach to complaints handling is delivering a good experience to customers and is actually supporting wider service improvements.

Sue Harvey

If you are receiving regular information on lessons learned, then you will be receiving regular information on, for example, a policy that’s been updated or should be updated, and then you can go back and look six months later. If the new policy is working well, I think you should be seeking reviews, views from your residents on how they felt. Maybe six months, for example, after you consider a complaint have been resolved. It’s one of the things I think that comes out of the ombudsman’s individual determinations is issue. I think we’ll touch on later, which is disagreement about when a complaint started. But I think there’s also disagreements about when a complaint has been resolved. So that’s worth looking at, I think any opportunity to benchmark. So that would be using the ombudsman data. Other organisations, I think, do bench-marking in this area. Certainly we have developed a bench-marking tool that runs off of some of the Ombudsman data, but uses it in different ways. In time, the regulator will be, through publishing the tenant satisfaction measures, will start to put data sets in the public domain that can be used for bench-marking as well. And I think perhaps as with anything else, occasionally, for example, every three years, have some external assurance that your complaints handling processes, including the learning bit of it, meet best practise and are being followed.

Catherine Little

Thanks, sue.

One of the things you mentioned there was the TSM, the tenant satisfaction measure and that perception measure around complaints and Francesca, that’s made the headlines really, hasn’t it, in terms of what providers are seeing. And certainly when I’m working with both housing associations and local authorities.

There’s a certain element of surprise at how low satisfaction is with complaints handling through that perception measure. What would be your reflection around that area?

Francesca Stanyer

Yeah, so I think it’s important to remember that perception surveys tend to score, regardless of the topic, a lot lower than transaction surveys. And I think there’s perhaps some comfort in knowing that, as we said, a lot of organisations have seen the same trend of being lower in satisfaction for complaints. However, I wouldn’t want that to detract away from that actual message. Just because everyone else is perhaps in the same boat doesn’t necessarily mean that’s not an area that you should be focusing on and trying to improve that relationship. I mean, it’s important to remember that complaints are one of the biggest forms of feedback you get from your main customer base. It lets you know in advance if a service area is not failing or there’s some areas of improvement that are needed without you letting me go out and do that formal consultation. You have that feedback already, I think, as well, there’s something around people being very clear on what a complaint is and what a complaint is and where service failure. I know this is a big topic that comes up from the housing confidence code. However, some people have been raising the issue of difference between the perception results or people say they’ve made a complaint versus people organisations performance measures around complaints made.

I would encourage people not to get too stuck into this. I think definitely understand what that data is telling you and really interrogate it. However, I don’t think this is a question of trying to argue with the data. That is the results that come back from customers and that is somewhere for you to look at, understand and make the improvements that you might need to do. Within that, I think it’s around setting clear expectations for your customers or your residents, your tenant base, so that they know. Actually, when I speak to my landlord, what can I expect if I’m not satisfied with something? Is it going to be that they’re going to resolve that for me there and then, or is it going through the formal complaint process and what can I expect in terms of time sales in terms of that customer offer? I also think there’s something at the moment around the fact we are obviously hearing quite a lot of press around complaints and the impact that will have on people’s own feelings and sentiment towards their landlord. Likewise, I think going wider than that, you see just the general news at the moment, that overall cost of living, just general sentiment within the country is that in terms of customer satisfaction as well.

People in social housing, they’re going to be feeling that crunch and they’re going to be feeling it probably more than a lot of other different groups of society. So it’s important to remember that’s also going to translate. So I think it’s really just around focusing on your customers and improving that relationship, rather than getting too obsessed around what your numbers are saying, comparison to your organisations down the road, I love that.

Catherine Little

So understanding your own context and the emphasis on understanding, not arguing with the data, because that’s a fairly thankless task, I should think. Actually, I spoke earlier to one housing association whose customer committee have been delving into that difference in terms of that understanding, and I think we’re going to hear a bit from them now.

I’m here with Sarah Klueter, who is director of customer experience at Wythenshawe Community Housing Group. And Sarah, I was really interested to talk to you about the experience you’ve had in with insure around TSMs and in particular the complaints tenant satisfaction measure. Can you tell me a bit about what you found when you did your survey?

Sarah Klueter

Yes, so we first did a trial survey back in October 2022 and at that point we went out to 1000 customers and we just wanted to get a feel for how the new tenant satisfaction measures were going to land and if there was anything in there that we weren’t already aware of. And we brought those findings then back to our customer experience committee. And broadly, we were pleased and we felt that they were positive. However, there was one measure that stuck out a mile and that was the satisfaction with complaint handling, which was at 30%. And that came as a real shock to us. I think I remember when we took it to the customer experience committee, which is a committee of our board who deal with everything to do with the consumer standards and all kind of customer facing service performance. There was a committee member who was particularly shocked by this. She’d been involved as a tenant, been involved in the scrutiny of our stage two complaints, and she’d seen many times the satisfaction levels for our complaints and she’d seen that they were 70, 80%. And see, suddenly this at 30% was quite a shock.

And I think she was really, really keen to make sure that we fully understood why that was. So we went away and the committee had asked us to make a plan, not just on complaints, actually on three of our lowest scoring areas. And we looked into it and what was interesting to me was that our initial gut instinct as to the reason for that low satisfaction was completely wrong. It wasn’t right and wasn’t borne out by the. So I think initially we’d sort of said, oh, maybe it’s people who have either not complained to us and we haven’t heard it and they maybe just were frustrated with something. And so when somebody phoned them up to ask an interview, they said, oh, yes, I had to complain. Or maybe it was a service request where their neighbor’s garden was messy and they phoned up to complain about it. But we saw that as a service request. And yes, both of those things came up. But when we actually went in and we did the phone calls back to people, we started digging into the data. We really did the proper investigation around it. We found that the key cause people were telling us, but that we weren’t properly recording those expressions of dissatisfaction.

So just to give an example, we had someone complain about our roofing contractors and say that they’d not met the target time sales that have been set out for them. And so we’d get on the phone and we’d apologise and we’d raise it with the contractor and we’d make sure that went through our process and then we’d feel like heroes because, yeah, we’ve sorted this for the customer, but we wouldn’t record it as an expression of dissatisfaction, which meant that it then probably wasn’t followed up and that we weren’t able to pull out any patterns that were across numerous areas of dissatisfaction. Another thing we realised was that some of our colleagues didn’t realise that customers complain about policies. So if they disagreed with the policy, we would say, oh, I’m sorry, that’s our policy and this is where it is if you need to go and look at it. But sorry, we don’t do that. And then thank you very much. Goodbye. Can I help you with anything else? And we weren’t logging when customers weren’t happy with the policy. So, yeah, we felt that that was really helpful research for us to go away and do. And we really did find out something new.

Catherine Little

And in terms of doing that research, Sarah, just to understand that that was literally picking up the phone to people who’d taken part in the tenant satisfaction measure survey, then saying, can we just understand a bit more what you’re telling us?

Sarah Klueter

Yes. So, we went out to a range of customers, but we started with those who were either disappointed, satisfied with the complaints and said that we could contact them back through the tenant satisfaction measures. But we also went back to people who had raised what we were calling sort of expressions of dissatisfaction at that time. So we went, how easy was it to raise? And we started talking to people. We then went out to our frontline colleagues as well and said, do you have any issues? Do you hear any dissatisfaction? What do you do when you hear that? We listened into telephone calls from our contact centre and we tried to create a picture of, okay, what had actually happened in these cases.

Catherine Little

That’s quite a comprehensive piece of research that’s given you that insight and what have you done about it? So you know what a couple of the issues are. What did you do?

Sarah Klueter

So, we took it back to our scrutiny group, first of all, and said, this is what we found. And we proposed to them what we thought would be helpful. So initially we thought, because we thought it was customers not telling us, we thought, we have to go to customers and do a big campaign to customers about telling us about their dissatisfaction. But actually, the start was internal. So, we used the government’s make it right campaign and we used a lot of materials from that and we went internally to first our call centre and our frontline colleagues and just did training and awareness raising about, we really want to hear this dissatisfaction. It really helps us to work out what the problem is. It actually will make your life easier because if we can see a pattern in dissatisfaction, then it’s more likely we’re able to do something about it early and it stops people having to complain to you and you having to hear that. So, although it was extra work for our frontline colleagues, we tried to bring people on board to say, we really want to hear this, and recorded. We set up a new form internally.

It was just an MS form, nothing exciting, but that allowed people to log that dissatisfaction whenever they heard it. We made posters, we went around to team meetings. We just generally did all the usual things internally to try and raise that awareness. And we were thinking, oh, it will just increase a little bit and then we’ll have to go external. But whoa, it really increased. So we realised that that’s what happened. We hadn’t been properly recording things.

Catherine Little

So when you say the volume increased, are you happy to kind of quantify that? Sarah?

Sarah Klueter

Yeah. So we learned two things, I guess, from that tenant satisfaction measure. One was that people were only 30% satisfied with the outcome of how we’d handled the complaint. And the other was that lots more people were complaining than we thought. So our target was to get closer to that percentage of people who are complaining, which I think was about 24%. So we wanted to hear that and that would mean we’d have to triple the number of expressions of dissatisfaction that we were hearing. And we managed to get to that within probably two months of the campaign running.

Catherine Little
Yeah, there’s definitely links, Liz. So Homes for Cassie is a coalition of housing organisations and really it started off with the housing associations from the 60s, from the Kathy come Home era, the Ken Loach film, and recognising that years later, unfortunately not much had changed and kind of reaffirming, I suppose, the commitment to the reason those housing associations were established and that was important, I think, for a few reasons. One is quite often you go to a housing conference and it’s all housing providers, you go to a homelessness conference and it’s all homelessness organisations, and sometimes you kind of think, well, never the twain shall meet, and how silly, when they should be working in partnership. So, I think that’s been really powerful through homes for Cathy. The other thing is what they did was produce nine commitments and asked housing associations to sign up to them. And the reason that’s really important is the regulation of housing associations is such that allocations have to be fair, they have to make best use of available stock, and they do have to support local authorities in discharging their homelessness duties. But this is not a very active requirement if housing is the solution for homelessness, with whatever level of support, and housing first being one of those, I think that the case that the Homes for Cathy campaign has made is really, it ought to be considered within the regulatory framework and housing providers should be held to account around evictions, around tenancy sustainment and also around access to housing, because, as you mentioned, in terms of housing first, there needs to be something alongside perhaps the core purpose and mission of a housing association that encourages a bit of risk in terms of letting homes and that’s not consistent, I would say.

Catherine Little

Wow. So a lot of internal campaigning, training, bringing staff on site. Have there been any difficulties in that? Sarah, anything you think that kind of lessons learned?

Sarah Klueter

Well, yes, certainly difficulties. I’m not sure whether I’ve learnt the lessons yet, but anyone who wants to talk to me about this, I’m really interested in it. So the issue that we had was then you’ve obviously got the huge volume coming through, but you still got the same resources to deal with that volume. So we had things initially, things like the call handling time going up. So we needed to make sure that we had enough temporary staff being able to come in to help us to keep our targets on the call handling. But then probably a bigger issue was around then in the middle, we’ve got our call, our complaint handlers who had to make sure that all of this was logged. And for them it was a bit of a morale thing because they had previously been absolutely on it. They’d loved every customer, been in contact with every customer, made sure that they were satisfied, really gone through this very high quality process. And suddenly when you triple the number of expressions of dissatisfaction coming in, they’re thinking, I haven’t followed that one up and I’m not sure about that one. So there was a lot of work with them about how do we actually deal with this increase in volume?

And then probably the biggest impact was on our managers. So we have a model whereby our complaint handlers will oversee the process and make sure the admin is done on the complaint process, but it’s the managers who actually go out and see the customer and find the resolution and write the response. So for them, they saw an increase in complaints coming through, and I think that’s the bit we still haven’t tackled. So with the complaint handling code coming out next month, that’s really going to give us that opportunity to review our resources and see what model we need for complaint handling.

Catherine Little

And in terms of that initial figure that prompted all this work, Sarah, the TSM. It’s probably a bit early to say, but have you seen any indications that this work has improved satisfaction?

Sarah Klueter

Yes, we ran the TSM survey again for real for the first time in summer 2023. And just in that short period between sort of October and August, we saw a 9% increase, or nine percentage point increase, from 30% to 39% in the satisfaction on complaints. Obviously, that comes with a massive caveat of that’s only our first time of doing the survey, and we’d need to see a number of months, weeks, years of that before we can be sure that’s a full trend. But, yeah, the initial feedback looks good.

Catherine Little

That’s really positive to hear. So that feels like a very positive narrative, albeit with its challenges around really listening and hearing complaints and recording them and using them to learn. But also in terms of the influence of your customer experience committee, which I know is majority customers, plus a number of board members, some of whom are also customers. Can you just tell us a tiny bit about that, the model of your customer experience committee, please?

Sarah Klueter

Yeah. So we set up our customer experience committee in January 2022, and we have, as you say, a number of board members. We’ve got three board members and the rest are our customers. So we have a mixture, majority tenants, but we also have a shared owner and a leaseholder on that group. And they have been really good, actually, over the last couple of years in being able to focus. They do a lot of work for our board and making sure that that pre work, maybe on some of those bigger decisions around customers is done, but they’ve been really good for us as officers. In terms of challenging. How do you know that? What customer voice are you listening to? What about this customers. What can you tell me about when we’re talking about allocations, what can you tell me about the experience of customers experiencing domestic abuse? When we’re talking about a range of different topics, it’s really right back to that customer experience on everything. And how can we evidence that? So we found that massively helpful and they’ve got extra time that maybe board members don’t have to go through things with us.

So on the complaints, for example, we were able to take things to our scrutiny group of tenants and then bring it back to the customer experience committee. And I think the board might have not had time on their agenda, maybe to look at it every couple of months, but the customer experience committee did. And sometimes it’s those power questions they just ask, isn’t it? We just think, I hadn’t thought of.

Catherine Little

That one really makes you think in.

Sarah Klueter

A different direction on that. So, yeah, they’ve been super helpful with that. And I think with the campaign, they were the ones who were saying to us, okay, so are you sure customers aren’t. You’re not hearing know they were the first ones to say that to us.

Catherine Little

I was going to ask. Quite a few organisations are saying that complaints are increasing. Perhaps the satisfaction isn’t great. If you could give them one piece of advice based on your experience, Sarah, what would it be?

Sarah Klueter

I would say stay curious, stay open. The way that the committee has supported us has been brilliant in terms of putting in place those reviews. So now we’ve got more dissatisfaction coming through and we’re logging it. We then have reviews with managers every quarter which are saying, okay, this is the dissatisfaction that’s come through for your area. It’s great that you’ve managed to solve these complaints, but what are your underlying issues? What are your things that you think you need to think more broadly about? And that has been really empowering for managers. It’s been quite a positive experience because they’ve been able to come to those meetings and say, right, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this, we’ve already done this. This seems to be working. I think maybe before we were a little bit too involved, because when you put all your passion and energy into delivering a service, you want it to be brilliant. And it’s upsetting when it’s not brilliant for some reason, but being able to say, actually, the professional quality here is in you being able to listen and is in you being able to take that feedback and put yourself in those customer shoes and see if there’s a different way to do it.

That’s the quality that we’re valuing in you as a manager, and I think that’s just freed managers up a little bit to release their creative side, think maybe a little bit differently, and to stay curious.

Catherine Little

Brilliant. Sarah, thanks so much for your time today.

Zina Smith

Thank you for listening. In part two, we discuss complaints handling culture, in depth assessments and top tips.

Part 2

Zina Smith

Welcome back to the second in our CT brief honest conversations miniseries on complaints handling. In part two, our speakers discuss what trends there are around complaints handling and organisational culture, how complaints handling approach and outcomes may support in depth assessments and top tips for housing providers and local authorities on complaints handling.

Catherine Little

Francesca, it strikes me that the some really interesting messages coming through around complaints and organisational culture, and I know that’s an area you’ve been doing a lot of work around. What are some of the main trends you’re seeing?

Francesca Stanyer

Yes, so we’ve recently been developing a complaints culture scan, which we want to be piloting with some organisations to be able to see how colleagues, I guess, perceive the complaints culture within an organisation as we know how important getting that right is translated into the success of complaints. We’re being able to see from the early data that there’s sometimes a difference between how the board and the exec teams view complaints culture in comparison to those on the ground. I think there’s often sometimes a narrative around the idea that they’re told, do the right thing. There’s a clear message we are prioritising, making sure complaints are resolved. However, when it comes to actually getting to the position of trying to resolve it, there are barriers in the way that prevents people from being able to do that. I think there’s definitely a big thing within this positive complaints culture around data and being able to log data and use data and giving people the time to really interrogate what are the overall trends that are coming from it, but actually being able to use it on an individual, case by case basis, so they’re able to see that customer’s journey right from when they let you know something’s gone wrong to closing the complaint and it’s resolved and being able to put that to your ownership in place,

Catherine Little

That’s really interesting. Thanks. And I think data just comes up so much in so many parts of our work. So interesting to hear you reflect on that in terms of the individual as well as the broader messages data might be giving you. Sue, did you want to come in on.

Sue Harvey

Yeah, I was just reflecting on what Francesca just said, which is, I’m often in boards where anything you can measure and write down and put in a paper gets attention and gets discussed. And culture is something that everybody says, of course, yes, absolutely. Or even repeat regularly. It’s a no blame culture, but because we rarely have any way of sort of measuring it, it never gets put in a paper, it never gets challenged. And so I think the work that Francesca has been doing on this culture scan survey aligns with other work we’re doing on different kinds of culture scanning, and it can give boards something to look at and consider and challenge around the frontline culture, which is quite difficult for them to get a handle on, barring the sort of usual kind of wandering around approach. So I think it’s fascinating the stuff that you’re coming up with as you.

Catherine Little

Develop that tool and a slightly different angle. Now, sue, back to you again. If I’m a housing association or a council and I come to you and put a question to you, how might our complaints handling approach and outcomes support our next IDA? What would you say?

Sue Harvey

Well, I think we’re working with clients today who have had the complaints element really highlighted and focused on in their IDAs that are occurring today. So the regulator is continuing to pilot its approach to integrating the new consumer standards from April of next year into the in depth assessment methodology. And we are already seeing a lot more focus on the complaints data. And I think in part, two aspects here, really. One is the data that they will already have before they come to the document request. So they will have the housing ombudsman data and the ability to highlight, identify outliers in the housing ombudsman statistics, and then they will have the tenant satisfaction measures and again, they’ll be able to identify outliers in those statistics. And just as they’ve always done with the value for money metrics, for example, is they use those as can openers, as reasons to ask people questions. So the question is not why are you 39.7 and the organisation down the road is 35.4? That’s not the question.

The question is you appear to be in the worst performing quartile of the distribution. And is there any. What reasons are you aware of as to why that might be the case? So I think you should expect questions from the tenant satisfaction metrics and the housing ombudsman data, and you should have an awareness, before you even get close to an IDA of your benchmarking in those areas, so that you’re not surprised if you’re found to be in an outlier in those distributions. Or similarly, you know that you’re about the middle of the table or you’re equivalent to your peers, what you consider peers. So that’s external data and you shouldn’t be surprised that they turn up with that data and ask questions about it. And then internally, I think you should expect it to be in the document request. So all of the things we spoke about earlier, when you said what should boards be looking at, or the customer committee or the ops committee, what should they be looking at? A lot of that stuff will now be in a document request and we’re seeing that in the IDAs where the regulator is ending its piloting activity.

That how you report on complaints and to whom is part of the document request. So you should expect that. And then a bit sort of broader than complaints. We do know that they will be observing customer committees or similar, not just on complaints, but on the issues of tenant engagement, involvement, transparency, all of those issues that appear in the new standard. So you should expect that as well. So I think if you’re taking complaints seriously and learning from them and can articulate how you learn from your complaints, both your internally resolved ones and the housing ombudsman resolved ones, you should be in a really good place for this bit of an IDA. It’s a chance to shine, actually, for some people where the bit that you really love and put a lot of passion into perhaps hasn’t featured in what might be considered a sort of dry finance and governance. Ida is now really going to be a focus and I think that can only be a good thing.

Catherine Little

That makes sense. Thanks, Sue.

Francesca Stanyer

I was going to say with that, Sue, I think that’s a really good point. What you’re saying then. I think a lot of the messaging that we’re hearing from it is from these IDAs, it’s assurance around what you’re doing with it. So perhaps you are scoring lower, performing lower. But if you’ve got a good action plan on how you’re going to get yourself out of there, that’s obviously going to go a long way with reassuring regulator.

Sue Harvey

And that’s a good point, because the other point is the regulator’s approach to this is the same as their approach to everything else, which is how is the board assured that. So for a board member, it’s, how do you know that your complaints handling is effective and is leading to service improvement? So if you can answer that question, then you’ll be able to show it to the regulator. So, Catherine, I wanted to turn the tables and ask you a question. We know you’ve been working with a number of housing providers around complaints in recent months, and from that work that you’ve done, I wondered if you could just kind of articulate a couple of top tips that you would give providers to improve their approach.

Catherine Little

Absolutely. I suppose it can feel like there’s a lot being thrown around with regards complaints at the moment, and particularly when organisations feel that stuff coming through the housing ombudsman. That was things you were doing two years ago, and perhaps you feel processes have moved on. So I suppose my first tip, my overriding tip, is, keep your head in this. Don’t get lost in becoming responsible. Don’t panic. Yes, in big, friendly letters, Sigu talked a lot about the importance of good governance, about the oversight and learning from complaints. And linked to that, I’d very much say it’s important to have an element of the business. It’s about stepping back, looking at the patterns, looking at improvements in terms of complaints handling, but also the substantive issues. And, as with any improvement plan, having milestones, having evidence improvements, and ideally, sharing that with your board, but also with your staff and your residents. I think the second tip is it sounds so self evident, but focus on the issues themselves. It can get really easy to get so tied up with complaints numbers increasing or decreasing, or war stage ones or war stage twos, that it can almost lose the issues themselves. And I think it’s just a reminder that behind every number there’s a complaint and there’s someone’s home, someone’s services that needs to be looked at, improved someone’s life absolutely.

So focus on the issues themselves. And in terms of learning, I would say the more upstream you can get, of course, you’re going to focus on the housing ombudsman and the maladministrations, on the big things that have gone wrong, and that’s absolutely right and proper. But the more you can get upstream of complaints and look proactively at what’s coming with a cold winter or a weather event or the kind of traffic you’re getting through in email requests or phone calls from customers, the more you can respond and kind of preempt complaints, which, frankly, is better all round. The third tip I’d give is actually about remembering that whilst the ombudsman is very important and rightly is in people’s minds, actually, you’re not doing this for the housing ombudsman. I think there’s something around co-production and really working with residents to get a complaints process that’s absolutely compliant with the complaints handling code, which actually is a bit of a gift in terms of looking at good ways of doing things. But work with your residents to understand what they need, what they want, to make sure the process is accessible. And whilst, as I say, the ombudsman is important, remember who we’re actually doing this for and make sure they are a key part of the conversation.

Sue Harvey

Really important, it’s very easy to get a little bit taken over by the worrying about the ombudsman and the regulator?

Catherine Little

I think so.

Sue Harvey

And there’s a sort of fundamentals, isn’t there, that somebody who’s living in a house that’s really unsuitable and we should be really upset about that and that it may have arisen and worry how we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. How you improve your complaints handling and your complaints resolution is probably best worked out with your residents.

Francesca Stanyer

Yeah, I would concur, and I think, again, with your colleagues as well, and those that have to actually handle those complaints, making sure they’re involved in that. Your people that work in your customer service centres, your contact centres, they’re going to know more than anyone what’s on your residents mind. They’re just being to them every single day. So it’s making sure you’ve got the right people in the room to help improve, whether it’s services or the complaint process itself.

Zina Smith

Thanks for listening and join us for part three, which looks at what’s new in the Housing Ombudsman’s code, which was updated on the 8 February 2024.

Part 3

Zina Smith

Welcome back to the third instalment of our CT brief, honest conversations miniseries on complaints handling. Here, Catherine and Sue discuss key changes in the complaints handling code, emphasising a shift from should to must and the code’s new statutory status.

Sue Harvey

The housing ombudsman issued the new complaints handling code, which was launched after quite extensive consultation and with landlords and others. And so I just wanted to ask you, Catherine, what do you think are the main changes that this represents, the new code?

Catherine Little

I think the first thing, sue, is a bit of a shift in tone, and I know you’ve done a bit of quick analysis looking at the change from should to must. That, to me, sums up the main changes, actually, and of course, that reflects the statutory status of the complaints handling code. Now, there are a lot of clarifications. One of the most interesting ones I saw was a kind of clarification around this issue of is it a service request or is it a complaint? And there’s been this ongoing conversation, I think, with some landlords around, well, it’s a service request, they just want it sorted versus we need to investigate. It’s a complaint. I think that’s a bit of a false distinction, and the ombudsman has really clarified that in this version of the code. So a service request is not necessarily a complaint. However, should someone make a service request and then not be happy with the outcome? That absolutely is a complaint, whether or not the tenant specifically asked to lodge a formal complaint. So I think I take that to mean someone rings up and says, you didn’t turn up to fix my window this morning.

Okay, put it right. Service request, they ring up again and say, and the guy was really rude to me, or the girl was really rude to me when they turned up. That’s a complaint. And that’s very clear now in the complaints handling code. It was already in there. And what’s interesting is the fact the ombudsman’s felt the need to clarify it further. There’s a lot more clarity around the expectations of people being able to access the process and being, no doubt really clear expectations around putting into action any reasonable adjustments. It’s not enough to have a policy, it’s around how you use that in practise, to make sure that access to the complaint service is fair and also people are getting equitable service outcomes, which, of course, is a theme in the new consumer standards we’re expecting to see. I think there’s more around unacceptable behaviours, and I stress the word behaviours because the ombudsman is really clear. The behaviour of a complainant may be unreasonable. It’s not about labelling the person, it’s about labelling the behaviours and saying, this is unacceptable, and this is how we’re going to deal with it. So there’s more clarity around that and some absolute, crystal clear clarity in what’s now 6.9, which basically sets out your stage one investigation letter for you.

It says, here are the headings. This is what to include. It’s very clear there are changes in terms of complaints exclusions. You can no longer exclude complaints due to time, unless they’re over twelve months old instead of six. There’s confirmation that you need to investigate and reply to a complaint within ten days of acknowledgment, not receipt of the complaint, which will, I imagine, give a bit of a sigh of relief to landlords dealing with quite a volume of complaints. The third stage of the process is already gone. It’s now completely unacceptable under any circumstances. And in terms of remedies, there’s much more clarity that the ombudsman wants landlords to look at, the housing ombudsman’s own guidance to get some consistency, I suppose, across the sector. But the biggest change, so far as I can see, is the duty of the ombudsman to monitor compliance with the code, which is now on a statutory footing, and as such, they are requiring all landlords registered to make an annual return of their self-assessment with the code that includes smaller providers, albeit with a slightly different timescale. And I suppose when I saw that, I thought, gosh, the housing ombudsman must have had regard to what that means for individual landlords in terms of where the retention’s going, but also the resource that the ombudsman. You got any thoughts about that, Sue?

Sue Harvey

I guess I felt that as often with compliance things, there’s a discipline of self-assessment which is really helpful, I think, for landlords to go through a process and say, well, we think we comply with this code, but let’s just go through and check every single stage and make sure that we do so. That, I think, is a really useful and process that adds value. The actual resulting self-assessment itself could be extremely dull. I mean, I don’t know, I’m not sure. So, for me, it’s more the discipline and the process than the actual list, which says, yes, I think it’s the discipline and the assurance that comes with that. And I also think the real richness will come from understanding the ombudsman’s data compliance with this code and then the tenant satisfaction metrics, which are coming in on a very similar timetable. So, I think the real richness will come from how those two sets of data interact. So, I’m really looking forward to being able to cross reference those in publicly available information. So that’s going to be fascinating, really.

Catherine Little

And we’re doing quite a lot of work with housing associations and local authorities as they grapple with the self-assessments around the complaints code and also really get to grips with consumer standards. I feel the two are really closely related, so I think it can feel like quite challenging times for registered providers at the moment, but doubtless we’re looking at an approach that’s going to result in better outcomes for tenants.

Zina Smith

Thank you for listening to our miniseries. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and found it insightful. There is an upcoming online masterclass on navigating the updated consumer standards on the 14 March at 10:00 a.m. To find out more, visit campbelltickell.com/events. If you can’t attend, a recording will be made available on our website and YouTube channel. To discuss any issues raised in the podcast, please feel free to email comms@campbelltickell.com

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To discuss the issues raised, contact Catherine Little on catherine.little@campbelltickell.com 0r Sue Harvey on sue.harvey@campbelltickell.com.