As a Cabinet, we welcome this report as an opportunity to share the challenges we have faced and the progress we have made in relation to complaints about our services as a landlord. It demonstrates our commitment to listening to citizens, improving our services, and acting with transparency.
We would like to thank the officers who have contributed to investigating and resolving complaints in the last year, as well as the residents who took the time to share their experiences with us.
We acknowledge that the Housing Ombudsman issued the Council with a Complaint Handling Failure Order during 2023-24, and we are reassured that the changes made since then show that we are determined as a Council to learn and to do better.
We have noted the trends mentioned in the report, both nationally and at a local level, and we look forward to seeing how this information is used to improve our services and plan for the future. Addressing damp and mould is a priority within the housing sector, and we hope to see these complaints used to inform our strategies for this.
We fully support the plan to improve the recording of complaints to ensure that trends and themes can be picked up on easily, and would like to see reports of these themes published on a regular basis throughout the year, along with how we intend to act on this information.
Whilst there is still a lot of work to be done, we feel this report details the positive improvements being made in our handling of complaints and our learning from them. We look forward to greater visibility of our progress moving forward, and the implementation of the plans detailed in the report.
