What is a complaint?
The Housing Ombudsman’s definition of a complaint is:
‘An expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by us, our staff, or those acting on our behalf, affecting an individual resident or group of residents’.
If you have a complaint about a neighbour or any antisocial behaviour, please visit our antisocial behaviour page.
Making a complaint
We’re dedicated to consistently providing an excellent customer service. However, we know there are times when our service fails to meet the high standards we’ve set.
If we fail to meet your expectations, please tell us as soon as you can, as if your issue is about something that happened more than six months ago, we might not be able to investigate the matter through our complaints procedure. When making a complaint, please provide as much information as possible,
Including:
- What the issue is
- What happened or did not happen
- When it took place
- How you’d like the matter to be put right.
You can read our Complaints Policy here. If you have an outstanding complaint and would like us to transfer this onto the new policy, please get in touch.
Our Customer Feedback service standard lays out the full details of what you can expect when you make a request or complaint with us but we handle all complaints in line with the Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code.
We review our compliance with the Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code annually with our Customer Services Committee. View our latest Self-assessment against the Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code.
We're committed to providing an excellent service to all our customers. However, we recognise that there are times when our service fails to meet the high standards we have set. At times this may involve paying compensation, for further information, please read our compensation policy.
How to make a complaint, or give a compliment or feedback
To make a complaint or send us a compliment, you can:
- Complete our online form below
- Call Your Response on 0345 345 0272
- Write to: Complaints Team, Youggle House, 130 Birchwood Boulevard, Birchwood, Warrington WA3 7QH.
If, after Stage 2, you’re still unhappy with our response, you can escalate the matter to the Housing Ombudsman Service. The Housing Ombudsman is set up by law to look at complaints about housing organisations registered with them. Their service is free, independent and impartial.
Anyone who’s affected by our services can make a complaint. If you ask someone to make a complaint on your behalf, we’ll ask you to formally authorise it for the security of your personal information.
When we say a complaint has been resolved it doesn’t mean we’ve closed it. It means we’ve spoken to you to understand your complaint fully, and told you how we’re going to resolve it.
If any work is required, or follow up discussions are needed, these will be scheduled in and we’ll agreed a date with you to review again before your case is closed.
All of this will be confirmed to you, either by email or letter, which will act as our contract with you. It means we’re keeping you informed about what we’re doing and when.
Our aim is to deal with comments, suggestions, complaints or general contacts in an open, fair and impartial way. Staff will respond professionally and sympathetically, and will work positively with you to resolve issues and explain the reason for their outcome.
There’ll be occasions when there’s nothing further that can reasonably be done to resolve a perceived problem. We recognise that this, or other distressing circumstances, can cause a resident to act out of character.
However, if a resident because of their actions and behaviour, or nature and frequency of their contacts with us, hinders theirs, or other people’s interactions with us, or delays our ability to investigate the complaint, we’ll consider such behaviour to be unreasonable.