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Clarion Housing Association Limited (202416025)

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REPORT

COMPLAINT 202416025

Clarion Housing Association Limited

29 August 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

  1. The complaint is about the landlord’s handling of the resident’s reports of:
    1. Damage to the garden steps.
    2. Subsidence in the garden.

Background

  1. The resident is an assured tenant of the landlord and has been living in the property since 2007. The property is a 3-bedroom house with a split-level rear garden. The landlord is a housing association, and acquired the property from another landlord during the resident’s tenancy.
  2. From March 2014 the resident began reporting issues with her garden, which included:
    1. Subsidence from the upper to the lower level.
    2. Damage to the wooden steps which connect the 2 levels.
  3. The resident made a complaint to the landlord on 9 April 2024. She told it that she wanted repairs completed to fix the steps and the subsidence. She said the issues had been going on for a long time and had caused her injury.
  4. The landlord provided its stage 1 complaint response on 16 May 2024. It upheld the complaint and agreed that its communication with the resident had been poor. It offered £100 compensation for delays to the work and confirmed that its Major Reactive Works team would now take ownership of the problems with her garden.
  5. The resident was not happy with this response and asked for her complaint to be escalated on 17 May 2024. She felt that the compensation was not enough. She said she had been waiting many years for the work to be done. She was also unhappy that her complaint was only taken seriously when she said she was thinking about taking legal action.
  6. The landlord issued a stage 2 complaint response on 28 June 2024. It found there had been additional failings in its handling of the repairs and its communication. The landlord raised the compensation offered to £300. £50 was for delays in its complaint response, and the rest for delays in the work and for not keeping the resident informed. It also said works to the garden would start in July or August 2024.
  7. The resident brought her complaint to the Ombudsman on 7 July 2024. She said that the works still had not started and maintained that the compensation offered was not enough.

Events after the end of the complaints process

  1. On 12 November 2024, the landlord offered the resident additional compensation of £100 because the work had not started.
  2. The works to the garden took place in December 2024 and the resident confirmed that she was happy with the results.
  3. In April 2025, after the complaint had been brought to our service, the landlord reviewed the complaint and offered an additional £600 compensation. This was for the delays in fixing the subsidence.

Assessment and findings

The scope of our investigation

  1. The resident has said that she suffered personal injury because of the failure of the landlord to carry out repairs promptly. This service cannot decide who is responsible for any injuries caused or provide compensation for this. This would be best dealt with by the courts or as a personal injury insurance claim, and the resident may wish to take independent legal advice about this matter. However, we can consider how the landlord responded to the resident’s concerns, including whether it treated fairly and in line with its relevant policies and procedures.
  2. The resident has also said that the issues in the garden have been going on since she moved into the property in 2007. This investigation has focused on the events in the 3 years leading up to the resident’s complaint. This is when the landlord was put on notice by the resident about the issues she was experiencing with her garden. It also represents the resident giving the landlord a chance to fix the issues as she believed work was being considered by the landlord. This is because residents are expected to raise complaints with their landlord in a timely manner. This gives the landlord a reasonable opportunity to consider the issues while they are still live, and while the evidence is available to reach an informed conclusion on the events that occurred.

Damage to the garden steps

  1. The evidence provided by the landlord shows that the garden steps were raised as an issue by the resident on 25 August 2021. It is not clear what work, if any, was completed at the time. This is a record keeping failure and likely means that the resident had to continue using steps that were potentially dangerous.
  2. The resident again advised that the steps were in a dangerous condition and had caused injury when she complained to the landlord on 9 April 2024. There is no evidence that the resident contacted the landlord about the steps between these dates.
  3. The landlord’s repairs policy states that an “emergency” repair is one that “can be classified as one that presents an immediate danger to the resident, the public or the property or would jeopardise the health, safety or security of the resident”.  It says that these repairs will be completed within 24 hours and that the issue will be repaired or made safe at this visit. The injury sustained by the resident shows that the issue posed a risk to her health and safety and should have been considered as an emergency repair.
  4. The landlord has explained that the works to the garden took longer due to the size and nature of the work and difficulties in carrying out work of this size at speed. This is understandable in terms of the subsidence, but as the steps posed a risk to the resident a temporary repair should have been considered by the landlord to reduce any potential risk to the resident.
  5. The landlord’s stage 1 response said that a contractor would attend on 11 June 2024 to make safe the steps. However, there’s no evidence that this visit took place or what work was completed. This is also a record keeping failure.
  6. The landlord’s response was also sympathetic regarding the resident’s injury and gave her the correct information about how she could take forward her personal injury claim. This was appropriate and shows the landlord took this element of the resident’s complaint seriously.
  7. The landlord has explained that there were delays to the overall works, due to extra time needed to complete work at other properties. It has not made clear if this meant it was unable to attend to work on the steps before this date, or if it had planned to complete all works at the same time.
  8. The steps were repaired in December 2024, after the landlord’s complaint process had been completed. This was over 3 years since the issue was first reported and more than 8 months since the resident raised her complaint.
  9. The length of time taken for the repairs to be completed was unreasonable and caused the resident inconvenience as she could not safely use all areas of her garden. We find this amounts to maladministration.
  10. The landlord’s compensation policy does not set out guidelines for how much it will award for failures. It says, “We will consider each case individually and calculate compensation according to what we believe to be fair in the circumstances.” Therefore, compensation amounts will be based on our own remedies guidance.
  11. While the landlord offered compensation to the resident for other elements of her complaint, it is not clear that any of this was offered for the delays in repairing the steps. The steps were a significant issue for the resident and were the direct cause of her complaint as she explained in her complaint that she had suffered injury in using them.
  12. While the delay to the repairs was significant, it is noted there is no evidence to show that the resident repeatedly chased the landlord about the problem. This has been taken into account during our assessment. Nevertheless, the resident said the damage to the steps meant she had not been able to enjoy the garden as it was unsafe to move from the upper to the lower level.
  13. There was some distress and inconvenience to the resident caused by these delays. She has made clear that the use of her garden is important to her and explained that there are many plants with sentimental value to her in her garden. To reflect this distress and inconvenience, we find the landlord should make a payment of £400. This sits within the maladministration range set out in our guidance for circumstances where there was a failure that adversely affected the resident.

Subsidence

  1. The first relevant report of subsidence in the garden was raised by the resident on 9 August 2023. Based on the information provided by both parties, surveys and inspections were completed and the work was referred to the landlord’s planned investment team. This team decided not to progress the work at that time because there were no serious concerns that this would impact the health and safety of the resident or the fabric of the buildings. This was appropriate.
  2. The works needed to rectify the issue with subsidence in the garden were significant and were required to many properties on the estate. It is reasonable that the landlord wanted to take a broader approach to this work and that this could take longer than the 28 days allowed for a ‘non-emergency’ repair under its policy.
  3. However, the resident was not kept informed about the status of these works and was not told that they would not be progressed. The landlord has accepted that there were service failures here and has offered compensation to reflect this.
  4. The resident again raised concerns over the subsidence in the garden when she raised her complaint on 9 April 2024. Following this complaint, the landlord explained that the work would be passed to its Major Reactive Works team. In its stage 2 response it was confirmed that the work was expected to begin in July or August. In fact, the work later began in November 2024 and was completed by 23 December 2024.
  5. The resident was not always kept up to date with the progress of the work and this added to her distress. She has explained that there are many plants with sentimental value in the garden and that she was concerned that delays to the work made it more likely that these plants would be damaged as a result. The landlord has accepted that it did not keep her informed during this time.
  6. The landlord has offered payments totalling £950 to the resident in respect of its handling of the subsidence. This was both during and after the completion of their complaints process. It is not clear if these amounts have been paid to the resident.
  7. In considering the impact that this is likely to have had on the resident, we find the offer of £950 was fair. The Scheme allows us to make a finding of reasonable redress when actions taken by the landlord before the involvement of the Ombudsman are sufficient to put things right. However, it is not in the spirit of our dispute resolution principles or the Complaint Handling Code (‘the Code’) for a landlord to make an offer of redress at the end of a long process with the anticipated effect that the Ombudsman will not consider the matter further. As the compensation offer was only substantially increased 10 months after the resident’s complaint completed the landlord’s complaints process, and 4 months after the works were concluded, a finding of maladministration has been made.
  8. Had we assessed the landlord’s complaint handling separately, we would have made a finding of reasonable redress on the basis of the £50 offered. The decision has therefore been made to address this aspect as part of the substantive issue.

Determination

  1. In accordance with paragraph 52 of the Scheme, there was:
    1. Maladministration in the landlord’s handling of reports of damage to the garden steps.
    2. Maladministration in the landlord’s handling of reports of subsidence in the garden.

Orders and recommendations

Orders

  1. The landlord is ordered to do the following within 4 weeks of the date of this report:
    1. Provide a written apology to the resident for the failings identified in this report.
    2. Pay the resident £1,350 compensation. This must be paid directly to her and is broken down as:
      1. £400 for its handling of her reports of damage to the steps.
      2. £950 as offered in its complaint responses and post complaints communication for its handling of her reports of subsidence and delays in its complaint response if it has not done so already.

Recommendations

  1. It is recommended that the landlord pays the resident the £50 it offered for its complaint handling failures, if it has not already done so. This is in addition to the compensation ordered above.