Introduction

The annual completion of our self-assessment against the Housing Ombudsman’s complaint handling code has been carried out by our Housing Enabling and Development Manager and our Housing Compliance Officer. The opportunity has also been taken to update our Housing Complaints Policy. On 8 April 2025 the Council’s Executive approved the self-assessment for the financial year 2024/25 and the previous year (2023/24). 

The process is to comply with the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 which now places a duty on the Housing Ombudsman to monitor compliance with the statutory complaint handling code. This means that the Housing Ombudsman is required to ensure that all landlords meet the standards set out in the code for complaint handling.

With some minor revisions made to our Complaints Policy we can continue to demonstrate compliance with the requirements of the code.

We are required to submit our self-assessment of the code to the Housing Ombudsman, in addition it is also necessary to publish on our website.

The Housing Ombudsman code of practice also requires us to appoint an elected Member responsible for Housing complaints and further guidance produced by

The Housing Ombudsman states that this person should be the Councillor with oversight on the Executive for Housing. It is therefore considered appropriate for this to be the Executive Portfolio Holder for Housing.

Background

We received correspondence from the Housing Ombudsman on 12 March 2025 requesting that we publish the following documentation.

• The landlord’s published 2023/24 self-assessment
• The landlord’s published annual complaints performance and service improvement report for 2023-24
• The landlord’s published governing body’s response (or equivalent) to the report
• The landlord’s published complaints policy

We have therefore taken the opportunity to conduct the process for the 2024-2025 documentation at the same time.

The documentation required is set out in a prescribed format as follows -

Appendix A - The landlord’s published 2023/24 self-assessment
Appendix B - The landlord’s published 2024/25 self-assessment
Appendix C – Complaints performance report for 2023/2024
Appendix D – Complaints performance report for 2024/2025
Appendix E – Revised Complaints Policy having regard to the self-assessment

The original Complaints Policy was approved by the Executive in October 2024. The revisions added clarification rather than make changes to the previously approved policy. The additions in the 2024/2025 self-assessment reflect the analysis of the document and these form the basis of the clarification to the Complaints Policy.

Tenant Satisfaction Measures

In April 2023 the Regulator of Social Housing introduced the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standards which requires all Registered Providers to generate and report on tenant satisfaction measures (TSM’s)

For the first time in financial year (2024/2025) landlords of less than 1,000 homes are required to conduct Tenant Perception Surveys to generate a set of Tenant Satisfaction Measures which have to be published.

Because larger Registered Providers had to conduct this prescribed survey in financial year 2023/2024 year the results have been published and therefore provide us with a benchmark, against which we can assess our performance as a landlord.

For larger landlords a sample of tenants are selected with roughly a 10% of all tenants being required to be considered as a representative sample.

We surveyed all our tenants and received a 27.08% response rate. The survey was conducted online (with a hard copy option) and was anonymous. The results exceeded the national average in 11 of the 12 national indicators. Whilst this is an anonymous survey Officers have assumed that the lower than average score for Question 12 relates to incidences of fly tipping surrounding some of our properties. This will be further investigated and acted upon.