Our response to the Housing Ombudsman’s special investigation

The Housing Ombudsman Service has now completed its paragraph 49 special investigation into the Hyde Group and has made some recommendations for us to enhance our service for customers.

We recognise that historically we haven’t always met some of our customers' expectations, and we apologise to those customers where we could have done things better. We know the impact this can have and are committed to learning from these experiences to ensure we do better in the future.

While challenges remain for charities like Hyde, this report recognises our ambition to continue evolving and improving our services. We will continue to deliver homes and communities that meet the highest standards.

Improving our service

Providing homes and communities that people are proud of is central to everything we do. We’ve taken significant steps to improve our services and strengthen relationships with our customers to achieve better outcomes.

This includes increasing investment in customers’ homes and adopting a more localised approach. To ensure timely resolutions, we’ve also doubled the number of colleagues handling complaints and brought our repair service in-house. The average number of repairs carried out in each home by our in-house team increased to 4.74 (2023/24: 2.98). Satisfaction with repairs remained high at 85.6% (2023/24: 77.6%).

Customer complaints fall due to new ways of working

The number of complaints we received this financial year fell to 4,325 (2023/24: 4,688), as we saw the positive impact of our neighbourhoods approach and bringing more repairs services in-house. Our new Customer Service Centre and improvements to our online service, MyAccount, has enabled our colleagues to resolve around nine in ten customer enquiries at the first point of contact.

Our complaints handling performance continued to improve. We responded to 89.3% of Stage 1 complaints within the Ombudsman’s timescales (2023/24: 83.4%). We responded to 96% Stage 2 complaints within the timescales (2023/24: 86.6%) by year end.

Key initiatives in 2024/25 included:

• Doubling the number of colleagues handling complaints
• Joining our Complaints team with our Customer Services team - to help us identify root causes, themes and trends, so we can act faster
• Holding lessons learned sessions – and sharing outcomes with the rest of the business
• Updating our complaints and compensation policy – ensuring we’re clear and consistent when dealing with service charge enquiries
• Creating a framework for complex case management - to help cross-departmental working and prevent further escalation.

We’ve engaged with the Housing Ombudsman Service throughout this process, sharing extensive information about the changes we’ve made.

As always, we remain committed to engaging with the thriving communities that we serve.