Learning from complaints Winter 2023

1. Seasonal repairs
Whether it’s fallen fences in Autumn or heating and hot water in Winter, each year comes with seasonal repairs. We want to ensure we handle these issues as best as we can. Back in May, a group of colleagues met to discuss how to handle our biggest repairs complaints and we agreed to:
- Improve our reporting schedule so we can keep track of issues as they arise
- Shorten our time scales for urgent repairs such as boiler replacements
- Provide more support to customers who are struggling to pay their bills
- Tackle supply chain issues by pre-ordering essential supplies to reduce waiting times

2. Bringing a community together
Everybody has the right to live in a safe space. We recently learned that one of our communities came together to create a community trigger against anti-social behaviour. This allows the victim of persistent anti-social behaviour to request a multi-agency review of their case when a threshold is met. If you’re a Home Group customer experiencing anti-social behaviour, please let us know.

3. In it together We always ask colleagues if the service we provide would be good enough in our own homes. With this in mind, Home Group colleagues have come together to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes. We have introduced extra steps to make sure health and safety cases are resolved in the best way possible.

4. Hearing from our diversity groups
A group of colleagues and customers took the time to help us review discrimination cases. Although our discrimination complaints are very rare, we take them seriously. As a result, we agreed to take the following actions:
- Capture and review customer cases and experiences to improve our services
- Make sure customers feel able to complain about discrimination

5. Damp and mould
Damp and mould are our absolute priority. We reviewed what we do and Housing Ombudsman’s recommendations to tackle damp and mould the best way we can. If you are suffering with it in your home you can report damp and mould online.

6. Grounds maintenance
We know this really matters to you; not only is it a service you pay for, but it also makes a difference to how you feel about where you live.

It’s a challenging area; recruiting grounds maintenance colleagues is hard, and the cost of providing this service is increasing.

To make sure we provide the service you expect, we remind housing officers how to escalate any work that could have been done better.

7. Communal doors
Some customers have found it frustratingly slow to get communal doors fixed. To remove this frustration, we are working on a faster way to resolve issues around communal doors, entry systems and security.