Our complaint management process
We use a two-stage formal complaint process. Our aim is to provide not only a shorter process, but an improved experience overall.
Stage 1 formal complaint investigation
Responses to formal complaints are managed by our Complaints team, unless you have raised a staff complaint. (In this instance it will be managed by the Manager for that individual via our complaint case management system.)
Within five working days, your case will be logged, reviewed, and acknowledged by a Complaint Officer, who will contact you to discuss your complaint. They will provide a written acknowledgement which sets out a summary of your complaint and what you would like us to do about it.
Your Complaint Officer will work with our teams to deliver our decision about your complaint. Our aim is to provide this to you within ten working days from acknowledgement. In some cases, we may need more time to complete our investigation. If we do, we’ll let you know why and provide you with a date for when we’ll provide our response. This will not be longer than a further ten working days, unless there are exceptional circumstances.
Our formal complaint response will include our review of what’s happened, our decision about the complaint and details of next steps, including what we’ll do to put things right.
In many cases, the next steps will include commitments to actions which will happen in the period ahead. This could include follow-on repairs booked in, the creation of an action plan for longer term plans which may require a reasonable amount of time to organise. We’ll tell you about proposed actions, timescales, and responsible people, in our complaint response letter.
These commitments, which fall outside our formal complaints response times, will be managed separately to the complaint process by the owner of the commitment. If we fail to deliver against these commitments or you remain unhappy with our response, we’ll reopen and escalate your case to Stage 2.
Stage 2 formal complaint
If you’re not satisfied with our response at Stage 1, you can ask for your complaint to be escalated to Stage 2 of our process. In most cases, we’ll agree to look again at our decision and to consider any additional information provided. In certain cases, we may not be able to do this and, if so, we will explain why.
The Stage 2 formal complaint review is not a repeat of the full investigation. The actions and decisions taken at Stage 1 will be examined to check if they were thorough, reasonable and fair. We aim to give you our decision on the outcome of the review of your complaint within 20 working days. If we need more time, we’ll let you know why and provide you with a date for a response to be provided. This will not be longer than a further 20 working days.
The outcome of the Stage 2 formal complaint review represents the end of our internal complaint process. We hope we’ll have been able to resolve your complaint. If this is not the case, you can ask the Housing Ombudsman Service to review our responses to you.
We’ll always explain the options to you at the end of our internal complaint process.
Please remember you can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service at any stage for guidance about making a complaint about your landlord.