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. Over the past two years, 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. We’re also supporting customers online to help them manage their homes more conveniently, alongside the launch of our new Customer Service Centre and digital offering, which is enabling our colleagues to resolve around nine in ten customer enquiries at the first point of contact.

To ensure timely resolutions, we’ve also doubled the number of colleagues handling complaints and brought our repair service in-house. As a result, most customers now receive their repairs in around three days and customer satisfaction with our repairs teams is sector leading at over 95%.

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

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