Agenda item

Members are invited to consider a report concerning the various strategies employed by the Housing Services to deal with tenants’ complaints.

The Housing Needs and Strategy Manager provided Members with an update of the number and outcome of complaints and Member Enquiries for housing services over the recent twelve month period.  Since the return of the ALMO (Homes in Havering) to the Council there had been a phased integration of all housing services.  In respect of the logging of complaints and Member Enquiries full integration onto a single system had yet to be completed. 

The report integrated information (where possible) though in some cases the information was not comparable.  He added that where the information was separate, data for the former ALMO was identified as “H&H” and for the former Retained Housing as “RH”.

The Committee was informed that during the past twelve months 1296 complaints had been received by H&H which was a marginal increase on the previous twelve months (1273).  Complaints had peaked twice during the year.  The first was during the start of the autumn when complaints about damp and heating started to increase.  The second was at the end of the financial year (March/April) and may have been due to programmes coming to an end or delayed starts. 

During that period H&H had 35 complaints escalating to Stage Two which accounted for less than 3% of all complaints received.  In the same period the former Retained Housing (RH) service also received a significant number of complaints.  During that time, 310 complaints were received at Stage One.  Of these 13 escalated to Stage Two which equated to 4% of complaints received.

Very few complaints escalated to Stage Two of the process which demonstrated that the procedure for H&H and RH was robust for resolving issues.  Across the Council a total of 1571 Informal/Stage One complaints were received between October 2012 and September 2013.  Members were informed that H&H had – and continued to have – difficulty in returning answers to complaints at Stage Two within the corporate time-scale of 10 working days – 77% for RH and only 43% achieved by H&H which was significantly short of the corporate target of 85%.  This shortfall was attributed to the added complexity of Stage Two responses, both in the amount of additional research and ensuring that a thorough response was provided to the complainant by a senior officer.  On average, Stage Two responses took 13.5 days for H&H.

On the positive side, Members were reminded that a only a small minority of complaints which were addressed at Stage Two proceeded to Stage Three and of those, most were rejected by the Initial Assessment Panel and only a couple of complaints had been considered by Members at a formal hearing.

The Committee was informed that of twelve enquiries received from the Housing and Local Government Ombudsmen during the six months from 1 April, most were either dealt with through the Corporate Complaints system or were outside the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction.  This reflected very positively on the professionalism and consistency of the service as a whole.

Members were reminded that the complaints process also allowed for compliments to be recorded and over the past twelve months, the service had received 176 by H&H.  Since May, the RH side of the service had recorded ten.

Finally, Members were informed that over the past twelve months there had been 436 Member enquiries received by H&H and 602 by RH.  The corporate response target (10 working days) was 95% and whilst H&H ‘s response rate was 98%, RH could only manage 76%.  This disparity could, in some part be explained by the resources deployed at H&H (the Quality Assurance team) and at RH (a complaints officer).

The Committee was asked to note that since the move of Housing to the Children, Adults and Housing Directorate under Joy Hollister, the future of complaints handling was going to change and that the Quality Assurance team would be expanded but become a directorate resource, not simply one concentrating on housing issues and would be under the management of the new Business and Performance Service.  Restructuring was likely to take place in January 2014.

The Committee noted the report and asked for a further report to be provided at a future meeting once the full integration of the housing services had been completed.