Resident Panel meeting March 2024

The Complaint Handling Code became statutory on 1 April 2024, meaning landlords are now obliged by law to follow its requirements. The statutory Code also places a legal duty on the Ombudsman to monitor a landlord’s compliance with the Code. The Code aims to achieve best practice in complaint handling and ultimately provide a better service to residents.  

The sessions’ focus was to gain the panel’s insight on how we can raise awareness of our new statutory powers and a landlord’s obligations amongst residents. 

In 2023 we invited the panel to have their say on the changes to the Complaint Handling Code. We received 361 responses to the consultation. To find out more about the Code and read the responses to the consultation please go to the dedicated Code webpage. 

The main changes to the Code are: 

• all provisions of the Code are now ‘must’ – we will no longer accept ‘comply or explain’  
• residents must be offered a complaint if they are dissatisfied with the landlord’s service to promote choice  
• we have clarified some of the timescales for responses to be provided to make the complaint process easier to navigate 
• we have tightened the requirements for when landlords can extend the timescale in which it provides a response to ensure residents know they can contact the Ombudsman  
• landlords will now be required to produce an annual service improvement report to promote accountability and transparency 
• we will now have a duty to independently review and challenge a landlord’s compliance with the Code where we 

In the first of 2 breakout discussions, we asked the panel how we can raise awareness of these new statutory duties and landlord’s legal obligations to comply with the Code. We received some excellent feedback and will be using this to offer more guidance to residents on how the Code can support a resident when making a complaint to their landlord.  

We have already made some change to the information on our resident web pages using the feedback from this meeting and provided additional information ‘about us’ on the website. One of the common themes that came out of discussions is that residents are still not clear on when an issue becomes a complaint. We have included this on our helpful webpages. The Code sets out this definition of a complaint:  

‘An expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by the landlord, its own staff, or those acting on its behalf, affecting a resident or group of residents.’

It was also clear from the discussions that there is still a feeling of discomfort from residents to make a complaint to their landlord. This came up in multiple discussions, along with the feeling of stigma or fear of reprisal for saying if something has gone wrong.  

As learning from this feedback, we want to emphasise that residents are completely within their rights to let their landlord know if something has gone wrong or they are unhappy with the way their landlord has handled an issue that has been reported to it.  

We encourage residents to follow the correct process to report an issue in their home and work with their landlord to try to put things right, however, we do understand that sometimes things go wrong, and complaints should be viewed by the landlord as an opportunity for learning and to avoid the same thing happening again.  

We received some positive feedback from panel members about the new statutory Code: 

We also asked residents what resources they would like to see. The panel had some excellent ideas which we will be working on to develop resident guidance and continue to improve the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and the information that is available on our website.

In the second breakout space we asked the experts (our current panel) on how they think we can improve the next round of Resident Panel.

We were given lots of ideas which we are excited to apply to the next round of recruitment, to which we have received a huge amount of interest. We were given some great feedback on how we can make the sessions more interactive and share more learning. It is encouraging that over 20% of the current panel have so far reapplied to join the next round!

Some of the feedback from panel members: 

We look forward to meeting our next recruit of panel members soon!

If you have applied to join, we will contact you after applications close on 30 April 2024. 

Apply to join our next Resident Panel