Tenant experience: what the Housing Ombudsman is really looking for

The Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code, strengthened since Awaab Ishak's death, has raised the bar for every social landlord in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own equivalents, but the direction is the same: quicker acknowledgement, clearer stages, real evidence of learning. Here's what we see separating the landlords that handle this well from the ones still being issued orders.

The Code is a floor, not a ceiling

Acknowledge within 5 working days, stage 1 response within 10, stage 2 within 20, offer escalation, log everything, publish annually. Most landlords can write that policy. Fewer can produce it reliably every time, for every complaint, under pressure.

Three things make the difference:

• A single complaints log — not multiple spreadsheets across housing, repairs and income teams.
• Automatic timeline tracking so SLAs can't quietly slip.
• Named ownership at every stage, visible to the complainant.

Categorise early, categorise correctly

The Ombudsman's “severity maladministration” determinations almost always trace back to a complaint that was logged as an enquiry, treated as a service request, or bounced between teams until the clock ran out. Train front-line staff to default to “this is a complaint unless it obviously isn't”, not the other way around.

Damp, mould and the Awaab test

Any complaint mentioning damp, mould, condensation or respiratory issues should be flagged the moment it lands. Inspection within days. Record temperature, humidity, category. Treat children and elderly residents as priority. Any doubt, escalate. This is now the single most scrutinised category of complaint in the sector.

The self-assessment nobody wants to do

The annual Code self-assessment is a chore. It's also the single best opportunity in your year to actually look at what happened. The questions that expose the most:

• How many complaints did you receive? How does that compare to last year?
• Of the ones upheld, what was the root cause category?
• What changed in your service as a result?
• How many did the Ombudsman determine, and what did they say?

If your answer to the third question is “we discussed it at a team meeting”, you haven't closed the loop. Good landlords can point to a specific change in a policy, a process, or a contractor relationship.

Evidence, not assertion

The Ombudsman doesn't care what you meant to do. They care what you can evidence you did — with dates, timestamps, attendees and attachments. Every contact with a complainant, every inspection, every decision needs to live somewhere that can be produced in 48 hours.

If you're storing complaint correspondence in someone's inbox, you already have the answer to why evidence bundles are painful.

Learning out loud

Publish a lessons-learned section in your annual complaints report and talk about it at your AGM or members' meeting. Tenants can tell when it's boilerplate and when it's real. The landlords building trust with their residents are the ones willing to say “we got this wrong, here's what we changed” in public.

How CHICS helps

Our complaints module is built around the Code: auto-categorisation, stage timers that can't be overridden without a reason, damp-and-mould flag with escalation rules, evidence attached to the case not to an email, and a reporting pack that maps directly onto the self-assessment. It won't write the learning for you — but it will make sure you have every piece of evidence you need to write it honestly.