Norwich City Council welcomes feedback from residents.
Handling complaints effectively allows us to address issues, learn from them and prevent future occurrences.
The Housing Ombudsman is responsible for investigating complaints about social housing providers.
In April 2024, the Housing Ombudsman introduced a new complaint handling code to ensure complaints are addressed fairly, effectively and promptly.
The report includes our self-assessment against the Housing Ombudsman complaint handling code, as well as providing information on the complaints we received during 2023-24, some examples of service improvements we have made as a result of learning from complaints and an overview of our Housing Ombudsman cases.
- Complaint handling code self-assessment – August 2024
- Complaints performance and service improvement report 2023-24
Governing body comment on the annual report complaint performance
The following comment is recorded in the Cabinet Meeting minutes from 17 July 2024
The Cabinet Member for Housing presented the report, which covered two reports that the Council was required to publish in line with new requirements. The Tenant Satisfaction Measures were a new regulatory requirement under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act and the Complaints Performance and Service Improvement Report was a statutory requirement under the Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code. Norwich City Council had published both results by the deadline of 30 June 2024, but due to the General Election and the associated rules around the pre-election period had not been able to provide a response from Cabinet. The requirements for both had been provided late, which had made it challenging to produce and publish the reports.
She highlighted that a lot of work was ongoing to understand the results within both reports as it provided information that would help guide an improvement plan for services. In comparison to other local authorities that had a similar level of housing stock a number had not published their results on time or only published part of their results.
The report highlighted the improvements that had been made regarding dealing with compliance of health and safety checks in Council homes and tenants’ perception of the safety of Norwich City Council homes but highlighted other areas for improvement, which included handling of complaints. The reports would be published on an annual basis. Cabinet: 17 July 2024 A number of areas were already on an improvement pathway. The Council, when it had published the report, was compliant in 63 out of 72 areas and following the meeting would become compliant in another two areas bringing the compliance rate to 90%. The data measured provided a better understanding of tenants’ experiences; how to address areas for improvement and aided the Council’s transparency as a landlord.
