My experience of the Housing Ombudsman
Housing in the UK is broken. It’s either too expensive to buy, too expensive to privately rent, or, if affordable, in a bad state of disrepair. My flat falls into the latter category.
My situation
I live in social housing, in a small housing cooperative managed by a large housing cooperative. I have written before about how important and transformational having a home has been for me, but it has not come without struggle. Struggle to obtain it (a different story), and struggle with the landlord over disrepair for the entire time I have lived here.
I obtained the keys in February 2021 and immediately reported signs of water ingress in the hallway. I followed this up the next day with photos of how the paint I applied had literally rolled off the walls due to water saturation and damp. The landlord’s managing agent acknowledged the report and said they had passed it onto repairs.
Over the course of the last 3 years and 9 months, I have repeatedly chased this repair, and when that failed, raised complaints about disrepair with the landlord’s agent. In that period, as is to be expected, the damp in the hallway has grown in size, turned to saturation, and subsequently to black mould. Next, the same issue occurred in the other side of the flat in the eaves in my bedroom. Again, damp turned to white and black mould, turned to at least 2 defined leaks and a rotten hole in what appears to be a structural beam. I have not been able to sleep in my bedroom since July 2024.
The atrocious behaviour of my landlord and their agent is (also) another story. However, just because it’s the kind of thing people wonder: I have never, not once, not ever been late with my rent payments. Despite the fact that I can only occupy 50% of the liveable space of my flat (which is already tiny), I am still required to pay the full rent and I do so every week without fail.
The Housing Ombudsman’s litany of failures
In January 2023, I submitted my complaint about disrepair to the Housing Ombudsman via their webform. In February 2023, I sent several emails and a letter to the Ombudsman as I had not received an acknowledgement of my complaint. After eventually receiving some Kafkaesque replies which seemed to confuse my chasing of the complaint for the complaint, I sent them a copy of the webform printout of my initial complaint. Again, no response.
I chased in April and May 2023 and received no reply, so I put in a Subject Access Request to try to see what data they had, and then raised a formal complaint about their service. This seemed to get things moving and the Ombudsman contacted my landlord’s agent to prompt a formal response to my disrepair complaint. (A consistent tactic of the landlord’s agent is to not respond formally to complaints with Stage 1 and 2 replies. I believe this is a deliberate tactic to prevent and/or delay tenants going to the Ombudsman, and also to lower the amount of formal complaints logged on any internal reporting system.) As well as prompting the landlord’s agent, the Ombudsman also sent me a lengthy, measured, and apologetic reply to my complaint about their service.
By the end of August 2023, I had exhausted my landlord’s formal complaints process and went back to the Ombudsman. My landlord’s formal responses were stupendously bad and littered with factual inaccuracies, despite being authored by the landlord agent’s Head of Governance. In my opinion, her failure to bother to get her facts right for the formal, mandated responses demonstrates how little seriousness she invests in the Ombudsman and the complaint’s processes. In early September 2023, the Ombudsman confirmed that my complaint had now been progressed for formal assessment and that I would get a response in 15 working days.
In mid-November 2023, I chased the Ombudsman for an update. I received a reply in December simply stating that my complaint had been accepted for investigation. I chased twice in the first half of 2024 to no avail. So, in June 2024, in complete despair, I put in another complaint about the Ombudsman’s service. It was, at that point, a year and a half since I had submitted my initial complaint about disrepair, yet no investigation (or repair) had been undertaken. Shortly thereafter, in late June 2024, I received another lengthy, measured, and apologetic reply to my complaint about their service.
Eventually, an adjudicator was assigned to my case, and he issued his orders at the end of July. I felt the report was, in the main, fair although there were some inaccuracies and omissions. My main disappointment with the order was that my landlord was not given any timeframe within which works had to be started. Only a timeframe to start giving me weekly updates and to provide me with a single point of contact. Nevertheless, the report’s inaccuracies were corrected and my landlord had 4 weeks to comply.
The 4 weeks passed at the end of August 2024 and, predictably, my landlord had not complied. When the adjudicator chased them for compliance, my landlord told him that they had not been able to open the file. Astonishingly, the adjudicator actually accepted this as a legitimate reason and afforded them another 4 weeks to comply. I pointed out that if it were a legitimate reason, my landlord would have contacted the Ombudsman ASAP after receipt of the inaccessible file to notify them. No one who takes the Ombudsman seriously would fail to notify them of a genuinely inaccessible file.
The failure to apply any penalties to my landlord and their agent for non-compliance has meant they have not taken the Ombudsman’s order with any seriousness. Their weekly updates arrived, but they were mealy mouthed, inaccurate, often nonsensical, and they generally always failed to answer my clarification questions. For instance, one week they claimed that they were “awaiting confirmation of deposit payment, as per your request”. Clearly, they had just copied and pasted some internal document and didn’t care enough to rephrase it in a way which would be meaningful for me.
At the end of the second 4-week compliance period (end of September 2024), the adjudicator telephoned me to find out whether my landlord had complied with his orders. He was very angry as they had not provided him with a compliance report by the deadline, despite him chasing them earlier in the week. He told me he was so livid with them that it was causing him to break impartiality. After I explained how unhappy I was with what I had been provided by my landlord’s agent, the adjudicator assured me that he would be reporting them for non-compliance and that the matter would be escalated.
The adjudicator’s U-turn
However, a few days later, I received an email from the adjudicator saying that he was satisfied with the landlord’s response and that he was effectively washing his hands of the matter. He stated that I would have to raise another complaint should I remain dissatisfied. Given that it had taken 3 years and 8 months to get to this stalemate, I found the suggestion to raise a new disrepair complaint profoundly offensive.
Can you guess what I did? Yep, I raised another complaint about the Ombudsman’s service. Given that I had received two good outcomes from my earlier complaints, I felt it was worth trying to understand what caused the adjudicator to do a U-turn in his decision.
The response to my complaint was, fundamentally, an admission of incompetence. Apparently, the landlord had filed their final report, but the Ombudsman had failed in their processing of the report, so it looked like no report had been filed. As such, the adjudicator did write them up for non-compliance, but had to retract it once the report had been located. It is unfortunate that the adjudicator did not explain this to me to help me understand why he had drily changed his mind, as I would not have had to raise the third and final complaint.
Given the Ombudsman’s repeated administrative failures in respect of my complaint—losing it and then taking a year and eight months to investigate—it is easy to believe that yet more incompetence was behind the U-turn. However, that hardly inspires confidence in their service. Rather unfairly, the complaints team saw fit to blame the adjudicator rather than the person in charge of assigning reports to case files. I regret that.
The real failure in the Housing Ombudsman’s impartiality
At the same time as raising the third service complaint, I also put in an FOI to the Ombudsman as I was keen to understand how their Advisory Board was recruited, given that it appears to have zero tenant representation. It seems to me that an organisation claiming impartiality needs to have representation from all sides: landlord and tenant. Surprise surprise, there have been no social housing tenants on their advisory board during the last ten years (the timeframe I asked for). In addition, the recruitment strategy they supplied does not include any defined strategy to change or mitigate that. Simply put, they don’t have any plans to be genuinely impartial or inclusive and involve tenants in the operation of their service. When you add this to the fact that the Housing Ombudsman is funded by landlord subscription fees, it is no wonder it is a fundamentally toothless organisation biased against tenants.
Just get a solicitor
To conclude, on the basis of my experience and the innumerate bad reviews on Trustpilot, I would say that if you have an open and shut case about disrepair, just go straight to a solicitor. You will be wasting your time with the Housing Ombudsman, especially given the length of time they take to investigate complaints. In the end, despite the Ombudsman obviously finding in my favour and awarding compensation, I had to find a solicitor as it was clear that my landlord did not take the order seriously. They didn’t even bother to continue complying with it once the Ombudsman had signed them off, which shows how little respect they have for the whole process.
It is currently November 2024 and my roof still has not been fixed, although works have finally started albeit mired with problems. To remind you, it is now 3 years and 9 months after I first reported the issue and, because it has taken so long, it will now take much more to fix. Meanwhile, my whole house stinks of mould even though I clean it off religiously and run an air purifier 24/7. I have leaks in even more places, and I’ve got multiple hospital referrals for the effects of living with black mould for so long.
Housing in the UK is broken.