Clarion Housing Association Limited (202427653)

Decision
Case ID	202427653
Decision type	Investigation
Landlord	Clarion Housing Association Limited
Landlord type	Housing Association
Occupancy	Assured Tenancy
Date	28 November 2025

Background

The resident has lived at the property for several years. He soon raised concerns about asbestos at the property which he believed was unsafe. He believes the landlord has failed to deal with this appropriately. In March 2023 the landlord received several reports of antisocial behaviour (ASB) about him. After a further report in November 2023, the landlord issued a tenancy warning to him. The resident complained about the landlord’s response to his concerns about asbestos and about the ASB warning in March 2024.

What the complaint is about

The complaint is about the landlord’s handling of:
1. Allegations of ASB involving the resident.
2. The resident’s concerns about the presence of asbestos at the property.
3. The resident’s reports of required repairs to sockets in the kitchen.
4. The complaint.

Our decisions (determinations)

There was no maladministration in the landlord’s handling of:
1. Allegations of ASB involving the resident.
2. The resident’s concerns about the presence of asbestos at the property.
There was service failure in the landlord’s handling of the resident’s:
1. Reports of required repairs to sockets in the kitchen.
2. Complaint.

We have made orders for the landlord to put things right.

Summary of reasons

Allegations of ASB involving the resident

The landlord investigated allegations involving the resident appropriately and had sufficient evidence to justify a decision on the balance of probabilities that he had written an offensive letter to his neighbour.

The resident’s concerns about the presence of asbestos at the property

During the period under investigation, the landlord responded to the resident’s reports that he was concerned about asbestos at the property appropriately.

The resident’s reports of required repairs to sockets in the kitchen

The landlord failed to respond to the resident’s initial report of a concern about the off- switch for the cooker at the property due to a cyberattack.

The complaint

The landlord failed to meet its policy timeframe commitments both at stage 1 and stage 2 by several days but this caused little distress or inconvenience to the resident.

Putting things right

Where we find service failure, maladministration or severe maladministration we can make orders for the landlord to put things right. We have the discretion to make recommendations in all other cases within our jurisdiction.

Orders

Landlords must comply with our orders in the manner and timescales we specify. The landlord must provide documentary evidence of compliance with our orders by the due date set.

Order	What the landlord must do	Due date
1	Apology order The landlord must apologise in writing to the resident for the failures identified in this report. The landlord must ensure: The apology is specific to the failures identified in this decision, meaningful and empathetic. It has due regard to our apologies guidance.	No later than 09 January 2026
2	Compensation order The landlord must pay the resident £ 50 to recognise the distress and inconvenience caused by its complaint handling failure.	No later than 09 January 2026

Order

What the landlord must do

Due date

Apology order

The landlord must apologise in writing to the resident for the failures identified in this report. The landlord must ensure:

The apology is specific to the failures identified in this decision, meaningful and empathetic.
It has due regard to our apologies guidance.

No later than

09 January 2026

Compensation order

The landlord must pay the resident £ 50 to recognise the distress and inconvenience caused by its complaint handling failure.

No later than

09 January 2026

Our investigation

The complaint procedure

Date	What happened
30 April 2021	The landlord commissioned an asbestos report for the property. It stated that there was “low risk” asbestos which did not require removal.
8 March 2023	The resident’s neighbour (the neighbour) began to make allegations against the resident. These included playing loud music, and aggressive speech and behaviour in the street. The neighbour also claimed that the resident had sent him a note. The landlord investigated the reports.
September 2023	There were further allegations of ASB against the resident.
19 November 2023	The landlord issued a warning (the warning) to the resident. It said it had received allegations of verbal abuse and threatening behaviour and an offensive note put through a neighbour’s door. It said, “you are advised that any further incidents of ASB may result in us taking action against you for breach of your tenancy agreement”.
14 February 2024	The resident reported a problem with the oven at the property. He said the on/off switch was not on the wall but behind the oven which could be dangerous in the event of a fire.
22 March 2024	The resident raised a stage 1 complaint to the landlord about: The decision to send him a warning letter. He also said that he had not sent the neighbour a note but said that, if he had, the landlord should return his property to him. Being refused a copy of the letter the landlord had accused him of sending to the neighbour. The landlord’s failure to repair an oven socket.
11 April 2024	The landlord provided a stage 1 complaint response. It said: The landlord had issued the warning after “an allegation that you had been verbally abusive to another resident and put a note through their door.” The landlord said that it considered that, “on the balance of probability” he had put the note through the door though it acknowledged that he denied it. It apologised for a delay in responding to his request to see the letter. It would not provide a copy of the letter as it did not have it though it noted that the resident denied having written it.
11 April 2024	The resident responded to the stage 1 response saying it was “not an acceptable response” and asking the landlord to escalate his complaint to stage 2 of its complaints process. He: Questioned what it meant by “the balance of probability”. Asked why it had not called the police if the letter was abusive. Said it had also failed to acknowledge asbestos at the property or to remove it. He said he removed it at his own expense. Said it had made up allegations about him.
26 April 2024	The landlord acknowledged the resident’s request to escalate.
16 May 2025	The landlord provided a stage 2 response. It said: It could not give the resident a copy of the letter as it did not have the letter to copy. The works in the kitchen to repair the oven socket had been completed on 14 November 2023. There was no high-risk asbestos at the property.
Referral to the Ombudsman	The resident asked us to investigate. He said: The landlord had taken over 2 years to acknowledge the presence of asbestos tiles at the property and that he had had to remove them at his own expense. It had failed to offer reimbursement. The landlord’s communication had been “dismissive”. He said he wanted us to order the landlord to compensate him for the cost of removing the asbestos tiles at the property.

What we found and why

The circumstances of this complaint are well known by the parties involved, so it is not necessary to detail everything that’s happened or comment on all the information we’ve reviewed. We’ve only included the key information that forms the basis of our decision of whether the landlord is responsible for maladministration.

Complaint	Allegations of ASB against the resident.
Finding	No maladministration

The landlord’s ASB policy says that it will respond to reports of ASB. It does not require proof before it begins an investigation. However, it does need to find evidence to support an allegation before it issues a warning to one of its tenants.
The resident was distressed to receive a warning about ASB from the landlord in November 2023. The warning letter stated, “we have received reports of verbal abuse and threatening behaviour as well as an offensive note put through a neighbour’s door”.
The resident never formally denied posting this letter but questioned the landlord’s reasons for assuming that he had written it. He said, in an email of 22 March 2024 that it had accused him of having written it, “without any evidence whatsoever”.
The landlord stated in the warning that it was satisfied “on the balance of probabilities” that the resident had written the letter. This means it believed that it was more likely than not that he had done so. The resident questioned what the landlord had meant and asked it to define the rule of probability it had used.
The landlord had sufficient reason to believe it more likely than not that the resident had written the letter. The letter used unusual greetings that the resident frequently uses and it was delivered during a dispute between the resident and the neighbour. Indeed, on 29 April 2024, the resident wrote in an email to the landlord that, “I already have a copy of the letter I posted to my neighbour”. He said he had photographed it before delivering it. This shows that he accepts that he wrote it. Therefore, further analysis of the landlord’s reasons for believing he wrote it are unnecessary.
The resident has asked why the landlord did not report him to the police if the letter was threatening and abusive. However, the warning did not state that the letter was abusive or threatening. It referred to the letter only as “offensive”. It was the resident’s behaviour towards the neighbour that was referred to as threatening and his speech was referred to as abusive. In any event, even if the letter had been threatening, the landlord did not have to report the matter to the police if it did not think this appropriate.
The landlord’s ASB policy says that the landlord will sometimes issue tenants with warnings to discourage ASB. In this case, it had received several reports that the resident was responsible for ASB. It did not rely heavily on the letter in reaching the decision to issue the warning but it had sufficient evidence to allow it to do so. For that reason, we do not consider that the landlord was responsible for any maladministration.
The resident also said that the landlord should return the letter to him if he had written it as it would be his property if so. However, on the evidence we have seen, the letter had been posted to the neighbour and was, therefore, the neighbour’s property. The landlord did not have possession of the letter.

Complaint	The resident’s reports of required repairs to sockets in the kitchen.
Finding	Service failure

The resident said in his complaint email on 22 March 2023, that he was complaining about, “the repair of an oven socket”. He said that he had reported it over 2 years earlier and had had only one visit. He said it had “still not been fixed or even opened to be fixed even after I’ve sent you pictures.” The landlord was responsible, under the tenancy agreement for ensuring the safety of the cooker and kitchen fixtures and fittings.
The records provided by the landlord show that he contacted the landlord on 14 February 2023 saying, “I need an electrician ASAP as wiring in the kitchen isn’t right. I don’t have the proper fitting for the oven and the off switch is behind the oven. Obviously, this makes it impossible to turn the oven off if it catches fire.” We have assumed that this is the report he is talking about.
Next to this entry, the landlord has stated that it had recently suffered a cyberattack at this time and it had no details on its system. The records show that the resident raised the issue again in November 2023. It says that it attended and dealt with the issue at that time. The resident says that the problem has not been resolved.
We are unable to say, given the conflict of evidence, whether the repairs have been completed or not. We have not seen any evidence that the resident has reported the problem again, other than through his complaint, since November 2023. The resident can raise this issue as a required repair with the landlord if necessary.
Overall, we find that the landlord was responsible for a service failure in failing to address this problem in early 2023. We have ordered the landlord to apologise to the resident for this failure. It does not seem that this failure caused the resident significant distress as he did not raise it again for some time and his cooker was functional. For that reason, according to our guidance on remedies, an apology is sufficient to remedy this failure.

Complaint	The resident’s concerns about the presence of asbestos at the property.
Finding	No maladministration

What we have not investigated

The resident said, in an email to the landlord on 23 February 2024, that he first raised the issue of asbestos at the property in 2021. The resident says that an operative attended and confirmed the presence of asbestos-containing floor tiles which were damaged and dangerous. The resident says the operative said that the tiles needed to be removed and that they would inform the landlord of this. He says that, as a result of this, he paid to have the tiles removed himself and said he wanted the landlord to pay him back.
However, the resident has confirmed that this took place in 2021. The landlord confirmed in the stage 2 response that he had raised this matter in 2 previous complaints to which he did not ask us to investigate. Due to the passage of time, it is not practical for us to investigate these historical concerns, and we have not done so. We have included relevant facts from 2021 as background information.

What we have investigated

The landlord commissioned an asbestos report in 2021. This report said that there was no “high risk” or “medium risk” asbestos in the property. However, it said there was a fair amount of “low risk” asbestos containing material which did not require removal. The landlord relied on this survey in deciding how to respond to the resident’s reports of concerns about asbestos. It was entitled to rely on this expert evidence.
However, given that this report was written over 4 years ago, the landlord had to be aware that this low-risk material might become damaged and require removal. Its repairs log shows that the resident reported in February 2023 that some “floor tiles have cracked and are becoming loose”. The log states that it should send out someone to inspect them. It is not clear from the records exactly when this visit took place, but the Stage 2 complaint response of 11 May 2024 makes it clear that this visit took place before then.
The landlord stated in the stage 2 response that, “the asbestos you are concerned about poses no danger to you, if the tiles have not been damaged.” It said that it had inspected and found that they were not damaged and did not require replacement. It said that, if it carried out works that might damage the tiles, it would inspect them again. This was an appropriate response to the resident’s reports.
The resident alleges that the landlord has lied multiple times about asbestos in the property. He has cast doubt on the qualifications of the operative who found the asbestos to be safe. He says the landlord told him at one point that there was no asbestos report for the property before later providing him with a copy of a report.
We have seen no evidence to support these claims. We make our decisions on the available evidence. On that evidence, while we recognise the resident’s strength of feeling about this issue, we have not found maladministration in the landlord’s handling of the resident’s reports of asbestos at the property during the relevant period.

Complaint	The handling of the complaint
Finding	Service failure

The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code (the Code) sets out when and how a landlord should respond to complaints. The landlord’s published complaints policy complies with the terms of the Code in respect of timescales which says that landlords should acknowledge a complaint within 5 working days and provide a stage 1 complaint response within 10 working days of a complaint. It must acknowledge escalation requests within 5 working days and provide a stage 2 response within working 20 days of a request. It can ask for a maximum of 20 extra working days to deal with complex complaints which require further investigation.
The resident complained on 22 March 2024. We have seen no evidence that the landlord acknowledged the complaint. It sent a stage 1 response on 11 April 2024. This was 13 days after the complaint and therefore outside the policy timeframe. This delay was slight and caused the resident little if any inconvenience or distress. Nonetheless, the failure to acknowledge the complaint was an important failure. A complaint acknowledgement is an opportunity for a landlord to set out its understanding of a complaint to ensure that it has fully grasped the relevant issues.
The resident asked to escalate his complaint as soon as he received the stage 1 response on 11 April 2024. The landlord acknowledged the escalation request on 26 April 2024, 11 working days later. It apologised for this delay as was appropriate. It provided a stage 2 response on 16 May 2024, 23 working days after the escalation request. This was, again, 3 working days outside the landlord’s policy commitment.
This was, again, a service failure. The landlord has already apologised and so we will not require it to apologise again. However, we have ordered it to pay the resident £50 in recognition of its complaint handling failures overall.

Learning

Knowledge information management (record keeping)

The landlord’s repairs logs are sometimes incomplete. The landlord should consider the recommendations in the Ombudsman’s spotlight report on Knowledge and Information Management for accurate record keeping.

Communication

The landlord’s communications with the resident were appropriate. The resident complains that they were not, but this is more because he disagrees with the landlord’s position than because of a failure to communicate appropriately on its part.