London Borough of Ealing (202222523)

REPORT

COMPLAINT 202222523

London Borough of Ealing

19 December 2024

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 problems with the cold-water supply.
2. The Ombudsman has also considered the landlord’s complaint handling.

Background

3. The resident is the secure tenant of the property which is owned by the landlord, a local authority. The property is a 2-bedroom flat situated in a large block of flats owned by the landlord. The resident lives there with her children.
4. The landlord delegated responsibility for problems inside the individual flats to a management company (the company) in 2015. Problems occurring outside the flats but within the block remain the direct responsibility of the landlord.
5. On 16 September 2022, the cold-water supply at the property failed and the resident contacted the landlord, which informed the company. The company sent out a contractor who found that the problem was located in the communal water tank and was, therefore, the landlord’s responsibility.
6. On 31 October 2022 the resident contacted the landlord to say she had had no cold water since September 2022. She said she had called a plumber herself and asked to be reimbursed for this cost. The landlord treated this as a complaint and provided its stage 1 response on 2 November 2022. It apologised and said its engineers were at the block that day. It offered £50 compensation as a “standard one-off payment”.

7. In the resident’s stage 2 complaint of 4 November 2022 she reiterated her request to be reimbursed the cost of her plumber. Following intervention by the Ombudsman in March 2023, the landlord issued its stage 2 response on 21 April 2023. It said the resident had called the plumber on 16 September 2022, the same day its own contractor had attended promptly, and it therefore refused to reimburse the associated costs. It said its contractors had attended 3 times in September 2022 and fixed the problem so the complaint was not upheld.
8. The resident asked this Service to investigate as she still wanted the landlord to reimburse her plumber expenses and she was concerned that it had questioned her honesty in its complaint responses.

Assessment and findings

Reports of problems with the cold-water supply

9. The resident’s tenancy agreement confirms that the landlord is responsible for repair and maintenance of the water supply to the property. Therefore, it was necessary for the landlord to respond to the resident’s reports (either directly or via the company) to ensure the water supply was in proper working order.
10. Limited evidence has been provided to this investigation by either party. The resident submits that she raised the issue of a lack of cold water before 16 September 2022, but no documentation has been provided to substantiate this, so the Ombudsman cannot reach any conclusions in that regard. The landlord accepts that the resident made contact on 16 September 2022 and confirms that a contractor visited that day and found that there was a problem with the communal water tank. The contractor contacted the landlord and gave the resident 20 bottles of drinking water, which was an appropriate initial response.
11. The next day, the landlord says both it and the company sent out contractors. The company’s contractor confirmed that the problem was not its responsibility and the landlord’s contractor identified that cold taps were “occasionally producing warm to hot water”. There is no record of any action being taken.
12. The landlord said, in its stage 2 response, that its contractor attended again on an emergency basis on 20 September 2022 and “located a fault in the communal cold-water booster pumps which, unfortunately, affected several residents”. It says that the contractor “returned and a repair was carried out and the fault was rectified”.
13. However, on the evidence, this repair was not long-lasting. In its stage 1 response of 2 November 2022, the landlord said that the resident reported the problem again on 22 September 2022. As a result, it instructed the contractor to return to carry out further works. It is clear from the stage 1 response that it did not complete these works until that day. The response reads, “Our contractors are on site as I write…. It is anticipated that these repairs will now be completed so that you have a regular supply of cold water.”
14. The landlord’s Repairs Handbook says that where there is a total or partial loss of cold water at a property, it will attend within 4 hours. This is its highest emergency response time. In this case, the evidence suggests that this did not happen or, if it did, the landlord did not then take sufficient steps to resolve the issue with the water tank urgently as there were 41 days between the report of 22 September and the repair of 2 November 2022.
15. Although there is some uncertainty as to the response times in this case, it is clear that, according to the landlord’s own handbook, there was an unreasonable delay in its response to the resident’s report. The landlord accepts that an interruption to the cold-water supply is an emergency, but it did not then go on to treat it as such. These failures were sufficiently serious to amount to maladministration.
16. While the landlord did take the opportunity of the complaint process to acknowledge some level of service failure and offer redress in that regard, the Ombudsman does not consider that its offer went far enough. The £50 compensation was not proportionate to the identified failings as it did not adequately recognise the impact the lack of cold water had on the resident and her family. For that reason, this Service makes a finding of maladministration and an order for an increased sum of compensation.
17. The landlord’s guidance on compensation payments in housing claims says that it can make such payments for repairs failures. When considering the level of the payment, it should consider factors such as the role it had in any delay, the length of that delay and the degree of inadequacy of its response. It says the investigating officer can authorise payments up to £100 at stage 1 and £1,000 at stage 2 but higher sums can be authorised by directors.
18. The landlord’s compensation policy says that, where it has failed to provide a service, when calculating a remedy, it should consider how long it took to solve the problem. The policy says it can award discretionary compensation up to £1,000 and “time and trouble” payments of up to £250. The Ombudsman has borne these figures in mind when considering what would be an appropriate remedy in this case.
19. The resident says that she contacted the landlord for it to take action frequently, although neither party has provided records which support this claim. The resident also says that she and her family lived away from the property during October 2022 because of the lack of cold water. While no documentation has been provided to evidence this, it is accepted that remaining in a property with no water and children would have been particularly difficult. This Service therefore acknowledges that time and trouble was caused to the resident by the identified failings and considers that the level of financial redress should reflect this. As a result, the landlord is ordered to pay her £400 compensation (calculated as £50/week for a lack of hot water and £100 for time and trouble). This sum is inclusive of the £50 already offered during the complaints process.
20. With regard to the resident’s request to be reimbursed the cost of her plumber, the landlord says the resident should have allowed its contractors to respond before calling her own plumber and that her plumber did not, in fact, carry out any repairs. Instead, the plumber merely confirmed the company’s contractor’s finding that the fault was located outside the property and was therefore the landlord’s responsibility. On that basis, the landlord refused to reimburse these costs. In the view of this Service, this was an appropriate position for the landlord to take so no further order is made in that regard.

The associated formal complaint

21. The resident raised her complaint on 31 October 2022 and the landlord responded on 2 November 2022, in line with the timeframes set out in both its policy and the Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code (the Code). Once the resident escalated her complaint to stage 2, the Code says landlords should generally provide a stage 2 response within 20 working days. A landlord can extend this period by up to 20 days if it first contacts the resident to explain why it requires an extension.
22. The resident asked to escalate her complaint on 4 November 2022 and, in the absence of a response from the landlord, sought this Service’s assistance in December 2022. The Ombudsman intervened in March 2023 and the landlord ultimately issued its stage 2 response on 21 April 2023, 116 working days after the original request and 28 working days after contact from this Service. During the entirety of this, period, there is no evidence of any contact with the resident about the complaint or to manage her expectations around response timeframes. This was understandably frustrating for the resident and it should not require the Ombudsman’s involvement for a landlord to take the matter seriously and take steps to respond.
23. Fortunately, by the time of the escalation request the landlord had resolved the substantive issue so there was minimal impact on the resident caused by the delay. Nonetheless, this was frustrating for her as she believed herself to be out of pocket as a result of the landlord’s failures and the landlord failed to address her concerns in a timely way.
24. Given the length of the delay, which was severe, this Service has made a finding of maladministration and ordered the landlord to pay a sum in recognition of its failure. The landlord’s complaints protocol in repairs and maintenance says it will generally give awards of £10 for a failure to keep target times when dealing with a complaint. This sum is, in this Service’s view, too low in the circumstances of this case. It also fails to recognise that a delay of 116 days in providing a complaint response clearly requires greater compensation than a delay of a week.
25. The Ombudsman’s Guidance on Remedies contains a section on calculating financial redress. It says that findings of maladministration are usually best remedied, where a financial remedy is appropriate, with an award between £100 and £600 where there is no permanent impact on the resident. We bear in mind whether the landlord has recognised the impact of any delay and, as a result, awards for complaint handling will generally be lower than awards for the substantive issue.
26. There was a substantial delay in supplying the stage 2 response and, when it came, the landlord provided no apology or offer of compensation in recognition of that delay. For those reasons, this Service has ordered the landlord to pay the resident £200 in recognition of its complaint handling failures.

Determination

27. In accordance with paragraph 52 of the Scheme, there was maladministration by the landlord in its handling of the resident’s:
    1. Reports of problems with the cold-water supply.
    2. Associated formal complaint.

Orders and recommendations

Order

28. Within 6 weeks of the date of this decision, the landlord must:
    1. Issue a letter of apology to the resident for the failings identified in this report.
    2. Pay the resident £600 compensation (inclusive of the £50 already offered) as follows:
       1. £400 in recognition of its handling of the resident’s reports of problems with the cold-water supply.
       2. £200 for its handling of the associated formal complaint.

Recommendations

29. The landlord is recommended to:
    1. In light of its acknowledgement that other properties in the block were similarly affected by water-supply issues, conduct a review of its records relating to those properties to ascertain whether any proactive contact is needed to advertise its complaints process or offer financial redress.
    2. Revisit its Complaints Protocol in Repairs and Maintenance document and consider making amendments to recommend greater and more flexible awards of compensation for complaint handling failures.