Peabody Trust (202323311)

REPORT

COMPLAINT 202323311

Peabody Trust

30 September 2025

Our approach

The Housing Ombudsman’s approach to investigating and determining complaints is to decide what is fair in all the circumstances of the case. This is set out in the Housing Act 1996 and the Housing Ombudsman Scheme (the Scheme). The Ombudsman considers the evidence and looks to see if there has been any ‘maladministration’, for example whether the landlord has failed to keep to the law, followed proper procedure, followed good practice or behaved in a reasonable and competent manner.

Both the resident and the landlord have submitted information to the Ombudsman and this has been carefully considered. Their accounts of what has happened are summarised below. This report is not an exhaustive description of all the events that have occurred in relation to this case, but an outline of the key issues as a background to the investigation’s findings.

The complaint

The complaint is about the landlord’s handling of:
1. repairs to the intercom system.
2. the associated complaint.

Background

The resident is an assured tenant of the landlord of a third-floor flat. The resident reported to the landlord that she has health issues, including joint pain, a panic disorder and agoraphobia, meaning that she is mostly housebound. Some of the flats in the building are privately owned and managed by a managing agent.
The landlord initially raised a repair for a broken communal door entry intercom system on 1 November 2022. The landlord’s contractor attended on 7 November 2022 and identified that it was unable to programme the system as the programming was managed by the privately owned side of the development. The contractor recommended that the landlord’s intercom system should be replaced so it was independent of the private side of the development.
The resident raised a complaint on 30 August 2023, in which she said:
1. the intercom had been broken since last year.
2. the communal gate was locked which prevented access in and out of the building.
3. the gate needed to be left open until the intercom was fixed.
The landlord issued its stage 1 complaint response on 5 January 2024, in which it said:
1. on some occasions, its contractor had attended to the incorrect intercom system which had caused confusion and delays to repairs.
2. it received a quote from its contractors in November 2022 to upgrade the system, but the quote was not reviewed due to staff changes, restructure of departments and the merger that had taken place.
3. its contractor would submit a new quotation for it to review, and once agreed, it could take 8 weeks for the materials to be delivered and a further one or 2 weeks for the system to be installed.
4. It offered £300 compensation, made up as:
  1. £100 for the delayed stage 1 response.
  2. £100 for poor complaints handling.
  3. £100 for time, trouble and inconvenience.
The resident escalated her complaint on 7 January 2024. She said:
1. the service charge for the use of the intercom was approximately £5 per week, which amounted to around £360 for the 18 months the service had not been received. She said that this amount should be refunded.
2. she was unable to receive deliveries which had caused stress and inconvenience.
3. she is disabled and mostly housebound and so relied on deliveries.
4. she had spent many hours on the phone to the landlord over the previous 18 months about the issue.
The landlord issued its stage 2 complaint response on 17 June 2024, in which it said:
1. the intercom system had been fixed.
2. there was a service failure due to the delay in fixing the intercom system.
3. it offered additional £200 compensation, made up as:
  1. £100 for time, trouble and inconvenience caused.
  2. £100 for the delay in providing the stage 2 response.
The resident referred her complaint to the Ombudsman on 2 August 2024. She said:
1. the landlord’s stage 2 response was incorrect as the intercom had not been repaired.
2. she was mostly housebound and had to rely on others to collect deliveries for her, which had caused stress and inconvenience.
On 11 September 2025, the resident told us that:
1. the landlord repaired the intercom in August 2025.
2. on 14 July 2025, the landlord had upheld a separate complaint about charging her for the intercom service, and told her that it would refund her £705.05 and pay an additional £50 compensation.
3. she had received the £50 compensation, but the landlord had not applied the refund to her rent account.
4. the lack of intercom for 3 years had placed her in vulnerable and stressful situations and had resulted in missed deliveries, theft of delivered items and needing to pay extra money for emergency food deliveries to ensure her daughter was not without meals.
5. In order to resolve her complaint, the landlord should:
  1. issue a corrected stage 2 response addressing its inaccuracies and failings.
  2. pay the £705.05 refund regarding her upheld service charge complaint.
  3. pay appropriate compensation for the 3 years without a working intercom and the resulting safeguarding risks, missed deliveries including groceries and medication, the financial costs incurred and the distress caused due to the lack of support.
On 23 September 2025, the resident informed us that the landlord had made a final offer of £1,000 compensation which she said was made up as:
1. £700 for distress and inconvenience
2. £300 for extensive failure.
The resident said she was dissatisfied with the compensation offered as the amount did not take into account the length of time the intercom system was broken, or the distress and inconvenience caused due to the landlord’s handling of the issue.

Assessment and findings

The landlord’s handling of repairs to the intercom system.

The landlord’s responsive repairs policy states that ‘next available’ repairs are non-urgent repairs that are required to rectify a fault and should be completed within 28 calendar days. The policy states that ‘ programmed’ repairs are those that require additional time due to manufacture, complexity or specialist trade and should be completed within 60 calendar days.
The landlord raised a works order on 1 November 2022 for the intercom system to be repaired. The landlord’s repairs notes state that the issue was outstanding from July 2022. This indicates that it took approximately 3 months for the landlord to take action, which was an unreasonable delay. The landlord’s contractor inspected and provided a quote for upgrading the intercom system on 7 November 2022.
In its stage 1 response, the landlord identified that it had failed to consider the quotation due to organisational changes happening at the time. There is no evidence to indicate that the landlord took any further action until the repairs issue was reported again in June 2023. This represents a lengthy delay and was a failing by the landlord to act in accordance with the timeframes in its repairs policy.
The landlord’s contractor attended in June and July 2023 to inspect the entrance gate and intercom. On 31 July 2023, the contractor informed the resident that new parts were required to fix the issue and that the repair would be completed on 2 August 2023. From the evidence provided, it is unclear whether a repairs appointment took place on this date. However, the evidence suggests that the landlord raised a further repair with its contractors on 16 August 2023, indicating that no repairs went ahead prior to this.
On 11 September 2023, the landlord noted that a new works order was raised for the managing agency’s subcontractor to attend regarding the intercom. However, it is unclear whether it attended. The evidence indicates that during November and December 2023, enquiries were undertaken regarding which contractor had responsibility for repairing the intercom system. In January 2024, it noted that it was likely that the managing agent’s subcontractor controlled the intercom software for the landlord’s side of the development, meaning that the landlord’s contractor was unable to programme the system.
In its stage 1 response, the landlord said its contractor would submit a new quotation for the works, and that it could take up to 10 weeks for the system to be repaired. The landlord has not evidenced that it took any further action in the weeks following the stage 1 response and it is unclear whether the contractor provided an updated quote. While it is clear that there was uncertainty on how to repair the issue, there were unreasonable delays by the landlord in taking meaningful action to progress the repairs.
The landlord’s emails dated March 2024 state that replacing the system may not have been the best course of action and it was still trying to establish who was responsible for the repairs. There is no evidence that the landlord took any further action until August 2024, when it contacted the managing agent’s subcontractor to request it looked into the issue. The subcontractor advised that the intercom systems were linked and that the landlord needed to set it up as an approved contractor so it could respond to a works order to fix the intercom system.
On 11 September 2024, the landlord informed the resident that its contractor was liaising with the subcontractor about the repairs. On 13 November 2024, the landlord’s contractor said that the managing agent’s subcontractor had refused to have a site meeting, as they were not prepared to carry out works on the intercom system without a direct order from the landlord.
The landlord emails from February 2025 state that the managing agent’s subcontractor was not on its approved contractor framework, and so it could not make a direct order to it for the repairs. The landlord informed the resident about this issue in July 2025. While this has reasonably caused delays, the evidence indicates that it took several months for the landlord to identify a solution to this issue before the repairs were completed in August 2025.
The Ombudsman understands that some of the repairs delays were caused due to uncertaintyabout which contractor was responsible for repairing the intercom system, anddifficulties engaging with the managing agent’s subcontractor to complete the repairs. However, these issues do not account for the overall lengthy delays in conducting repairs to the system.
The delays were significantly outside of the 60 calendar day timeframe stipulated in its repairs policy. The evidence reflects gaps in the landlord taking action to progress the repairs. It did not regularly update the resident and she was required to chase it on multiple occasions. It also did not respond to the resident’s reports that her health issues meant that she relied on deliveries, and that deliveries had been missed or stolen and she had needed to rely on others’ to assist her.
The resident experienced distress and inconvenience over a 3 year period due to the delays in repairing the intercom system. Although the landlord apologised for the inconvenience caused within its complaint responses, it did not properly acknowledge the impact of the issue. Given the resident’s vulnerabilities, the landlord should have considered completing a risk assessment, and considered how it might have escalated its service delivery to resolve the issue quickly. The landlord did not offer any suggestions to mitigate the impact of the issue. Further, it appears there were delays in the landlord ensuring the entry gate was left unlocked which led to further disruption to the resident in receiving deliveries. The resident also incurred significant time and trouble in contacting the landlord about the repairs.
The failings amount to maladministration by the landlord. Where there are failings by a landlord, the Ombudsman’s role is to consider suitable remedies in line with the Ombudsman’s Dispute Resolution Principles: be fair, put things right, and learn from outcomes.
In its stage 1 and 2 complaint responses, the landlord offered the resident £200 compensation for the time, trouble and inconvenience caused for the intercom issue. This amount was insufficient to remedy the distress and inconvenience caused.
This investigation is focussed on the complaints process that ended in June 24 and our assessment of the landlord’s attempts to put things right up to that point. However, we have commented on the landlord’s actions following its final complaint response. The resident raised a new complaint in 2025 and she informed us that the landlord offered an additional £50 compensation for distress and inconvenience in its July 2025 complaint response. She stated that the landlord had also accepted that reimbursement of the service charge was appropriate. While we are not considering this complaint as part of our investigation, the offer of a refund appeared to be a fair and sensible approach. The resident provided a further update on 23 September 2025 that the landlord had offered her £1,000 compensation.
We have not viewed the landlord’s July 2025 complaint response or its September 2025 offer of compensation. It is unclear whether the £1,000 offered was in addition to the £250 already offered by the landlord within its complaint responses, or whether this sum included the refund for the service charges. The resident’s interpretation of the offer suggests however that the amount was compensation for distress, inconvenience and ‘extensive failure’ and therefore any service charge reimbursement would be additional to this sum. In the absence of clarity on this issue and given that our role is to assess the complaint under investigation, we have restricted our assessment to the £200 offered during the complaints process that concluded in June 2024. The resident is entitled to bring the new complaint to this service for consideration, once it has fully completed the landlord’s complaints process.
In all the circumstances of the case, given the extent of the detriment that the resident has reported, the £200 offered during the complaints process is not considered sufficient redress. In our view, a fair and reasonable amount of compensation for the failures of the landlord in fixing the intercom would be £300 up to the point of the landlord’s final response on 17 June 2024. In addition, given the resident’s reported difficulties in this time, including missed deliveries which she relied on due to her vulnerabilities, we consider a furtheramount of £250 is reasonable for distress and inconvenience throughout this same period. A total of £550 compensation (inclusive of the amount offered by the landlord during the complaints process) is therefore an appropriate amount to remedy the impact of the failings for the period up to June 2024.
We have not awarded any compensation for the period following the landlord’s final response as we are aware that the new complaint considers this period. We have also not factored any service charge reimbursement into this sum. An order has been included however in relation to this reimbursement. We expect the landlord to follow through on an appropriate service charge reimbursement to account for the period during which the resident was without the service. It has already agreed that this is appropriate to put things right, though it is not clear which period it has acknowledged it should do this for. We have made a further order for the landlord to clarify its position on reimbursing the resident for the intercom system service charge for the period up to June 2024.

The landlord’s handling of the associated complaint.

The landlord’s complaints policy states it will log complaints within 5 working days and provide stage 1 responses within 10 working days. It will provide stage 2 responses within 20 working days of an escalation request being received. The policy states that if it needs more time at either stage of the complaint, it will provide an explanation to the resident containing a clear timeframe for when the response will be received. This should not exceed a further 10 days without good reason. If an extension beyond 10 working days is required, this should be agreed by both parties.
The resident complained on 30 August 2023. The landlord formally acknowledged the complaint on 16 November 2023 and issued the stage 1 response on 5 January 2024. There was therefore a delay of 75 days in excess of the 15-working day timeframe set out in its policy for logging and responding at stage 1. This was a failing by the landlord.
The resident escalated her complaint on 7 January 2024. She chased the landlord regarding the escalation on 18 March 2024 and it advised that there was a backlog and the complaint would be acknowledged ‘shortly’. The landlord formally acknowledged the escalation to stage 2 on 29 April 2024. On 21 May 2024, the landlord informed the resident that it needed to extend the response time however, it did not provide an updated timeframe. The landlord issued its stage 2 response on 17 June 2024, which was 92 working days more than the 20-working day timeframe for stage 2 complaints. This was a further failing by the landlord as it did not act in accordance with its complaints policy.
The landlord also did not properly address the resident’s complaint in its responses. At stage 2, the landlord incorrectly stated that the intercom system repairs had been completed. Further, it did not respond to the resident’s specific request to be refunded the service charge for the intercom service. Landlords should use the complaint process to address residents’ concerns and properly resolve complaints.
It is likely that the resident experienced distress and inconvenience due to the landlord’s handling of the complaint. In both complaint responses, the landlord acknowledged the delays and apologised to the resident. It offered a total of £300 compensation in recognition of the delays. The overall amount exceeds the landlord’s compensation policy, which states it will offer up to £250 for extensive failures to follow the complaints policy. We have therefore made a finding that the landlord offered redress that was reasonable to remedy the distress and inconvenience caused due to this failing.

Determination

In accordance with paragraph 52 of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, there was maladministration by the landlord regarding its handling of repairs to the intercom system.
In accordance with paragraph 53(b) of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, the landlord offered redress that was reasonable to remedy its complaint handling failing.

Orders and recommendations

Orders

Within 4 weeks, the landlord must:
1. pay the resident £550 compensation, made up as follows:
  1. £200 offered by the landlord in its complaint responses in relation to the intercom issue, if this has not already been paid.
  2. £350 additional compensation identified in this report for the landlord’s handling of the intercom repairs up until June 2024.
2. clarify its position on reimbursing the resident for the intercom service charges and confirm how much it will reimburse, or has already been reimbursed, for the timeframe covered by this investigation (up to June 2024).
The landlord must provide evidence of compliance with the orders to the Ombudsman within the timeframe specified.

Recommendations

It is recommended that the landlord pays the resident the £300 compensation already offered for its handling of the complaint, if it has not already done so. The finding of reasonable redress is made on the basis that this amount is paid to the resident.